ROYAL ROMANCE

by Victoria Hart

  A Royal Renewal

  The Royals of Heledia

  Victoria Hart

  Copyright © 2017 by Victoria Hart

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  ISBN: 978-1976426636

  Printed in the Unites States

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Afterword

  Also by Victoria Hart

  Chapter 1

  I was born three minutes before my brother Benjamin. It wasn’t important when we were little, but I knew that when I turned sixteen, I would be presented at court as the heir presumptive to my aunt. Yes, I was a kid growing up in America, but I was also heir to the throne of a country called Heledia.

  My father had abdicated. He’d been a king once, but he gave it up so he could marry my mother – and for the good of Heledia – because he felt that my aunt was better suited to rule. Kingship just wasn’t in him. And like my father, my aunt had also followed her heart. She was married, but with no heirs.

  She and her husband were very much in love, but there were no children – and that put me in place to be the next one to wear the crown and call myself queen of Heledia.

  “You’re only three minutes older, Cassandra,” my brother would huff when I would tease him about being younger. The older we got, the more important those three minutes would become, and later he’d be really glad I was born before him.

  “You’re like your father,” our mother would say to him, and he would beam. She meant he had Dad’s happy nature, his easy way of living and loving the people around him.

  We ate dinner together every night; our mother made sure of it. She insisted that the key to a happy family home and mental sanity was eating together as often as possible. She said we were lucky, that most people didn’t get the chance to do this because of their circumstances: jobs, separations, obligations. So we should enjoy it while we could.

  We lived in Washington, D.C., far from the place where Dad grew up, but still important enough that we were used to seeing the men in black suits with buds in their ears. I thought they were secret agents for years, somehow having a mission that involved our living room and kitchen, and possibly our playground, since they accompanied us there, as well.

  “They’re our bodyguards,” my brother finally realized aloud one day. “Because Daddy was a prince…and that makes me and you one too.”

  Our parents hadn’t hidden our royal ancestry from us, but as little kids we hadn’t given it much thought. It hadn’t seemed particularly important until the day we first went to school and two of the men in black suits came too – none of the other children had an escort like that. People all around us were watching and whispering to each other and we felt like we were on display. My face went hot.

  “Why are they looking at us?” I hissed to my brother.

  “Because you’re a princess,” he said. “And I’m a prince.”

  “But I just want to start first grade.”

  “We’re gonna. But they’re gonna look at us do it.”

  I hated that walk into school more than I’ve hated many things in my life. I was so embarrassed. Thankfully, the security guys stayed outside, and once we were in the doors it was easier. The other kids were still curious – they still whispered – but they were much less interested than their parents were.

  I was smart; I always had been. It was no good for making friends, but focusing on schoolwork made it very easy to ignore the way I felt – left out, different than everyone else. I paid attention to the things that made me feel good, like going to Heledia and being queen one day. It wasn’t a good coping mechanism, to feel superior to others as a way to feel better about myself. But I was little, and didn’t understand that’s what I was doing.

  “Why do you eat alone every day?” Anna asked. That was the first time I ever noticed her, but she would become my best friend, because she had the courage to talk to me when I didn’t want to talk to anyone. I was always grateful to her for that.

  “Because I can,” I said. Outside the cafeteria doors, I could see one of the security people hovering not far away. He was part of the reason people avoided me - nobody liked the look of him. He looked mean, and it seemed like he was always somewhere close to me.

  “Can I sit with you?” Anna asked. In her hands was a lunch her parents made at home for her because they had time to. My parents did not. They worked in the Capitol. Later in life I would realize the importance of their jobs.

  Lobbyists. My mother couldn’t be a senator like my grandfather, because she was a princess of another country and they said that was a conflict of interest. My father wasn’t qualified to hold many jobs besides being a king, and anyway he was born in another country. So they did what they could by talking to other people, to convince them to do things and make choices that would make the world a better place.

  So I got lunch from the school with money they gave me. It wasn’t bad, especially compared to the food from the public schools I saw on TV. My mother said we had better food than she had while she was in school. So I didn’t mind buying lunches, except Anna had notes from her parents in each lunchbox, every day. It was a new note every time, and always something nice. I was a little jealous.

  That first day, she sat down at my lunch table before I could tell her yes or no. I didn’t really mind.

  “What’s your name?” she asked, pulling out a perfectly cut peanut butter and jelly sandwich with the crusts removed.

  “Cassandra,” I said.

  “Do you have a nickname? I don’t, because my name is so short already – Anna – but I wish I had a nickname,” she said, taking a massive bite of her sandwich. She chewed with her mouth open, and didn’t care at all.

  “Cassie, sometimes,” I said.

  “Sometimes?”

  “Not everyone calls me that.”

  “Can I?”

  “Sure.”

  And that was that. When you’re a kid it’s so easy to make friends. You form lifelong friendships from the simplest things. You could both like the same color, and suddenly you’re soulmates forever. Maybe one of you had the Ken doll while the other had the Barbie, and later you look back and see you’ve formed a bond that won’t break for anything.

  That’s how things started for Anna and I. We were friends because she happened to come and talk to me, and that was that. We sat together at lunch for the rest of our time in first grade and into second and on and on it went.

  But not everything in life could be solved as easy as that. And that was something I learned the hard way, as a young kid moving up into the world of adulthood. My family legacy was riding on my shoulders.

  “It’s graduation; I’m not getting a Nobel Prize,” I said. Next to me, Benjamin was also in his gown, enduring the huge fuss our parents were making.

  “Can’t a dad be proud?” my father asked, snapping another picture on the camera we got him for Christmas. It took a whole month to teach him how to use it properly. Now I was regretting teaching him.

  “He can, but we’re going to be late if he keeps being this proud,” Benjamin muttered. Our mother gave him a chastising look.

  “One more, then we’ll go,�
�� she said. “It’s always so hard to get good pictures where there’s a hundred of you wearing the same gown.”

  “That’s why they do this neat thing where they call our names out individually and give us all a moment to get our diplomas.”

  “Don’t be sarcastic with your mother, Cassandra.”

  I huffed and was left scowling in the last picture my father took, but we were finally released. We headed to the car. My brother and I clamored into the back row while my mother and father sat in the bucket seats in the middle row. Two guards sat up front, one of them driving. Some people arrived at the school with a throng of relatives; we arrived in a black armored vehicle.

  “Your aunt sent her congratulations,” my father said.

  “I know. It was a press release,” I said, rolling my eyes. I felt my father turn around to give me another glare. My family situation wasn’t always frustrating but on days like today, when I would stand out like a sore thumb, it was especially aggravating.

  “She means well,” Dad said. “There are certain things she has to do.”

  A card or a phone call wouldn’t hurt. But I got it. We were a public family. We were more than a public family – we were a royal family. We had generations upon generations of world leaders that stretched back to a time when people assumed God Himself had placed the crown on our heads. My aunt still thought that. Belief in the divine right to rule might not be the reason the general population dropped on their knees in the presence of a monarch, but Aunt Sonia believed in it, and that was part of what made her who she was.

  I admired her. I knew the story. My aunt had trained her entire life to play second fiddle to my father, but she was passionate about it. She knew more about the country and how to rule it than he ever could. So it had been hard on everyone when he decided to abdicate, but really it had worked out for the best.

  But that didn’t mean I didn’t wish we were normal, sometimes. Most high school graduates got letters in the mail with a twenty-dollar bill from their relatives. Benjamin and I got press releases and a short segment on Fox News. I would have preferred to have more privacy. But some families were struggling just to get by, and others were without families or loved ones at all. So I decided not to complain too much.

  Graduation was a big day for a lot of people and I wasn’t immune to that. I was going off to college after this. I would study political sciences and earn a certificate in business, because that was the prescribed course of study for a young ruler-to-be. I didn’t care what I was majoring in, as long as I got to go. I had room for electives and there were a few weird classes I’d signed up for that my parents didn’t need to know about (namely, a class on vampires and another on superhero movies).

  Benjamin was going to college for similar things but he was going to have a lot more freedom. While I was being sent to university in Heledia itself, he was off to California to party his way through beaches and frat parties. I gave it a week before he was in the tabloids, earning himself the title of party prince. My father had had it once, though he said that was the result of an emotional bender and that he didn’t usually act the way the tabloids had caught him doing, then.

  All that didn’t matter right now. All that mattered was that this was a night to be proud of more than a decade of hard work that felt like even longer with the late nights and breakdowns on the eve of standardized tests and finals.

  The ceremony was a typical high school graduation. We were lined up in alphabetical order by last name and paired off with a corresponding person of the opposite gender. I’d known since freshman year that I’d be paired with Kurt from homeroom because we always had lockers positioned next to each other and always sat side by side in each iteration of homeroom every year, no matter how the class size changed from new students or dropouts.

  I hooked my arm into the crook of his elbow. By this point the school had been desensitized to the idea of two royal kids walking their halls, going to their prom, picking seats in their cafeteria. They got over that after the first week of freshman year, when news trucks were outside trying to spot us. The school board ordered some kind of restraining order to keep them a certain distance from the school grounds. So when I took Kurt’s arm he smiled at me, stifling a yawn. He was just waiting to graduate so he could go get drunk at Dan Stine’s pool party (that his parents were going to turn a blind eye to because everyone was 18 now).

  They played the usual song, so familiar to me from watching years and years of TV where the exact same scene played out that, so even though was finally for me, I felt like I’d been here before. I wanted to graduate; I wanted to get out of the town I’d grown up in and begin to explore the world in a way that didn’t involve going on a vacation with my parents.

  But the problem was, my life was going to be planned out for me. I was going to a college I had not chosen. I had applied to other schools, as safety nets, but the plan was always the College of Heledia. It was top-rated, it had good academics. It was no Ivy League or Oxford but my aunt felt it was important that the heir live for some time in the place she would one day rule. Heledia would be my permanent home one day. I was going to have to come to terms with that.

  The other thing about going to college there was that I was so close to my aunt it would be easy for her to keep an eye on me – her, and the council of advisors that I’d never met but I knew were just waiting to dole out orders and regulations for me. I was not my own person. I was a part of a grand design. So, despite how freeing high school graduation was supposed to be, all it did was remind me of these facts. In many ways, I was losing, not gaining, my freedom. I was a puppet.

  I watched our principal give a speech before handing the mic off to the mayor of D.C. to deliver the keynote speech. Not surprisingly, he encouraged us to follow our dreams and reach for the stars.

  I had all sorts of dreams but they weren’t for me to follow. All the same, I put on a smile when my hand closed around my diploma.

  Chapter 2

  The summer before my trip to Heledia was spent as well as I could spend it. This was my last few months of freedom. For many students out there, the opposite was true. Their summer after high school graduation was bogged down with working as many hours as they could to save up for college, while finding ways to bounce between graduation parties and exploring the place they grew up in before moving off to wherever it was they were going to college.

  But for me, it was the last bit of freedom before everything was decided for me.

  “You’re taking this way too seriously,” Ben said one morning when I came back from a run and he was waiting next to the coffee maker, listening for the beep that meant it was ready.

  “Unlike you, people have expectations for me.”

  “Wow, that really hurts. Get me where I’m weak, you know?”

  I rolled my eyes and he smirked as he turned to the coffee maker. He poured himself a mug full and walked away to set up camp in the living room for the rest of the day. That was his way of taking advantage of the summer: drink coffee until noon, and then switch to soda and eat junk food while watching whatever was on daytime TV or wearing out his expensive Xbox. That was how he enjoyed the freedom of that summer.

  Then again, for him college was what it was for everyone else. He would be watched, but it would be more for entertainment than anything else. He wasn’t required to do anything particular with the rest of his life. I was going to be a family disappointment if I didn’t get at least an A- in every class I took. So I watched with envy as he cared about nothing and sipped on coffee while eating a two-day-old donut.

  I walked upstairs, ready to peel my sticky running clothes off and take a long, hot shower. I had plans for the day. I was going to sightsee around D.C. I’d lived here my entire life – I’d been to the monuments and the museums, but I wanted to experience it as a tourist. I would pretend I didn’t have the knowledge I had. I’d let myself get lost in the world I’d lived in for so long. So that’s what I did. I took a shower, got dressed,
and told my brother I was going out.

  “Are you taking Darren with you?” he asked.

  Darren was the security guard who had watched me since I was twelve years old. I tried to convince him to retire now that I had graduated, but he insisted on seeing the whole thing through. He said he wanted to follow me to college and see me become the person I was meant to be. And I couldn’t bring myself to fire him so he was still here, six years later and counting.

  “No,” I said. “He doesn’t know.”

  My brother leaned up from the couch and turned to face me. “He’s going to be pissed about that. And so will Dad.”

  “I grew up in this town; I think I can handle being out and about by myself.”

  “Yeah, but can other people handle seeing you out and about by yourself?”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  It turns out, I wasn’t as fine as I was hoping I’d be.

  I took the metro for the first time by myself. I had looked up how to purchase a pass on the internet before I got to the tunnel so I looked a little bit more like I knew what I was doing. But I also wanted to look like a tourist. People ignored tourists and I wanted to be as discreet as possible, hidden in plain sight.

  The mechanism wasn’t all that difficult to work and it was a bit fun, being allowed to be frustrated with something so mundane. It felt normal to be annoyed at a machine, like the person who shook the vending machine until it gave up the goods that were stuck.

  I had my pass and moved through the turnstiles into the tunnels below. I’d heard people talking about how the trains were notoriously late, and the waits could be long. I had no personal experience – we never took the metro. We took armored black cars around town and private planes for anywhere else in the country or the world. I’d heard the D.C. metro was among the best maintained and most beautiful subway systems in the world. I wished it was just a little grimier.