Driedeners loved her.
PRINCESS THEODORA BREAKS GROUND ON HISTORICAL MONUMENT.
Yawn. That was right up Thea’s alley, though. She always paid more attention to Driedish history than the rest of us did. My sister Sophie barely knew how to spell her own name. My brother, Henry, liked the bits about wars and battles but tuned out the rest.
Me? I learned what I needed to learn to navigate life in the palace. Make everyone happy. Negotiate and collaborate. Be perfect.
After finishing the Driedish papers, I breathed a sigh of relief. There were no imminent threats to my way of life. At least, for today.
One more newspaper had to be reviewed. I had saved it for last.
I found what I was looking for on the second page of The Times. The latest in a series of reports revealing a massive corruption scandal in race car driving under the byline of Clémence Diederich.
All right, fine. Clémence Diederich was me. It was my pseudonym.
I know, I could drag this secret out and play coy with it, but really, I am quite proud of the work I do.
My journalism career—for want of a better word—began years ago. I had made friends with an American reporter through some charity work. One thing led to another and I started quietly explaining (off the record, of course) some of the finer points of Driedish divorce law to him. Then, I wrote a small piece about the opening of a cultural exhibit in New York, and maybe a few more that I wish I hadn’t, under the name Cordelia Lancaster.
To cut a long story short, once I was free of my royal shackles and just a commoner married to a race car driver, and I saw first hand what was going on behind the scenes in Stavros’s profession, I contacted my friend about a tell-all.
Now, my series had been published in The Times over the past four months. This was the last article.
And then what?
It was the question I kept ignoring.
There wasn’t much investigatory journalism I could do while hiding in the attic of a remote Italian villa.
And I couldn’t go out in public yet. What sorts of stories could a disinherited royal princess report on, anyway? I didn’t want to talk tea parties and etiquette or film-festival fashion.
I wanted to write about interesting things. Important things.
From bitter experience, I knew that no one really wanted me to be interesting. Or important.
They would want either bland and banal or shocking and fabulous.
It was my bad luck to be somewhere in the middle.
I gathered up the papers, intending then to check the reservation website for the villa to ensure that no guests had made a last-minute booking. Since it was February, tourism was at a low, but one never knew if a couple of frugal Americans had taken advantage of a low fare and decided to visit Lake Como in the coldest month of the year.
But before I could get the website up, I heard the baritone again on the streets below and it made me stop in my tracks.
How long had it been since I had felt anything like this stirring in my chest? Since my husband’s death? Since his kisses first took my breath away? Since our wedding day?
I had been numb for so long. The day that Stavros died, I screamed, trembled, felt my heart break.
We hadn’t had the perfect marriage, but then, I wasn’t a perfect wife. Our notoriety, my fame, my impulsive yes, had led directly to his death.
For a fleeting moment when Stavros proposed I thought I was loved for myself, for the woman I was. But then I learned the truth. I was not a perfect wife, or daughter, or sister. Not fit for a crown, not fit for anything, really. So I shut down and locked the door to the past.
I was living the life I had now out of necessity. I was nothing but an anonymous Italian woman in a small tourist village. No one looked twice at the dark-haired Lina, who kept herself to herself and didn’t cause any trouble. I lived behind high walls and stayed invisible. Like a ghost.
It had to be like this. Distance and anonymity meant safety. For everyone. For me.
Songs like that, though. Flowing through my window like a cool, peaty stream, made me want to feel again, like I used to.
I marched across the kitchen and slammed the window down.
There would be no more feeling. No chances taken.
Until it was safe.
Chapter Three
Signore Rossi hated the way I made coffee, but I gave him a cup anyway. “Bah. Australian coffee,” he said as he made a face.
I should explain that. When I met Elena and her father, they commented on my accent. Instead of giving them a reasonable explanation, such as I was Italian but grew up in Drieden, I told them that I was Italian but had grown up in Australia.
It should probably be a point of pride that I don’t lie adroitly.
So Signore Rossi and Elena blamed all my idiosyncrasies on my Australian childhood. I had no family nearby, because they all still lived in Australia. My Italian was a bit formal—because Australians were like that. Now, my coffee-brewing technique was Australian.
I hoped a real Australian never rented the guest apartment. They would be very confused about the misconceptions that awaited them.
As we did every time I visited, Signore Rossi and I settled around the television. Signore Rossi was almost completely blind, but he stared at the screen as it played the news all day and, in the evenings, he enjoyed soap operas and talent competitions.
The international news station was on, so I watched and he listened to reports about a drought in India and a hurricane in Mexico. There was a woman turning one hundred and twelve in Osaka (it was all the fish the Japanese ate, Signore Rossi observed, and the cigarettes) and a boy who had been miraculously rescued after spending fifteen days in a boat off the coast of Florida. “He’s lucky it’s warm there,” Signore Rossi said. I pulled a cashmere scarf tighter around my shoulders and agreed wholeheartedly.
After a commercial break featuring Italian coffee pods endorsed by the soccer superstar Mastropieto, the news anchor returned and read the next report, about the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “Among this year’s influential attendees are President Salovic, noted economist Madeleine Berger, biotech billionaire Karl Sylvain von Falkenburg and, for the first time, advocating the education of girls in the engineering and science fields, Her Royal Highness Princess Theodora of Drieden.”
I froze as a photo of my family shot up on the screen. Why they couldn’t have used a beautiful formal portrait of my sister, I don’t know. But there she was, at one of the Driedish national holidays, with the rest of us, on the steps of the city hall. She stood on my grandmother the Queen’s left, my father on the right.
And there I was, shoulder to shoulder with Thea.
It had been taken two or three years ago, I guessed. My hair had been blonder, and my blue eyes, the same as my sister’s and my father’s, were not hidden behind dramatic oversize sunglasses. I remembered those giant amethyst earrings, a gorgeous deep purple that had looked so well with that fresh green dress but had nearly made my ears bleed from the weight.
Signore Rossi. I jerked, remembering where I was. That I was not reliving that day with my family, waving at the crowds, but I was here, hiding, in a cold Italian apartment with a blind man.
He was blind…wasn’t he?
It was a crazy suspicion but still I searched his face, his blank eyes staring at the screen. If he saw anything, or was able to recognize my face through his hazy vision, he showed no sign of it.
The television reporter was still talking about Thea. What was she saying?
“The princess achieved worldwide notoriety last year when her royal wedding was canceled at the last moment. But in the last few months, she has stepped out and resumed her work as an activist in the arts, science and education. Her appearance in Davos signals a new commitment to bring those causes to the world stage.”
/> They moved on to another story. I looked down at my frigid hands in my lap. They were shaking slightly. Too close a call? Or something else? Maybe seeing my family—myself—on television was too intimate. I should probably stick to newspapers. Static black-and-white newsprint seemed safer, somehow.
Signore Rossi had said something. “I’m sorry, I missed that,” I said to him.
He lifted a chin at the television. “That royal wedding. The one that was called off. Did you hear about that?”
I closed my eyes. If Signore Rossi only knew. I had been the one to go into Thea’s dressing room to tell her that her fiancé, Christian Fraser-Campbell, had gone missing. That he had left her at the altar in front of the millions across the globe waiting to watch a romantic spectacle. It had killed me, to watch her confusion, her humiliation, and know there was nothing I could do about it.
“I did hear about it,” I said carefully.
“I wonder who had to pay for it all. A royal wedding can’t be cheap.”
“What is money, to those people?” I asked rhetorically. Truth was, I doubted Thea had any idea what her wedding had cost. It wasn’t like royal princesses were shown the bills for occasions such as that. Hundreds of government and palace staffers had orchestrated the event—and then methodically taken it all down, piece by depressing piece.
Signore Rossi grunted. “Still, you have to sympathize with those young people.”
“Which young people?”
“That princess and her groom. Clearly, they were caught up in a passionate love affair and it burned out. Poof. It’s probably better that they found out they weren’t suited before the wedding. So many first loves think they’ll last for ever.”
Strange. I had never heard an outsider give their opinion of my sister and Christian’s failed relationship. I had still been in the palace bubble in the aftermath, and no one had been allowed to speak his name. And after my elopement, no one brought up Thea and Christian to me; they only gushed about how romantic my elopement with Stavros was.
Of course, I knew people would have ideas about Thea, about me, about Big Gran and my parents and the institution of the monarchy in general. But after a lifetime of being a princess one learned to just…filter them all out.
But here was a man—an elderly Italian man in a remote village—who had the most curious and incorrect preconception about my sister’s love life.
I had to correct him.
“I don’t think it was a first-love situation,” I said.
“No? Aren’t big, grand weddings for first loves?”
“Not for people like that, I don’t think.”
Signore Rossi’s eyes crinkled at the edges. “I wouldn’t have taken you for a cynic, Lina. We Italians are passionate, and Australians also seem to be fairly gregarious folk.”
“I’m not a cynic,” I said, surprised at the defensiveness in my voice.
“That’s right. You told me you eloped with your husband. No cynic would do that with their first love.”
“He wasn’t—” I broke off. Recovered. “I don’t believe I had a first love.”
Signore Rossi chuckled. “Of course you had a first love. Everyone has a first love.”
“Love? I don’t know about that,” I replied drolly. “Maybe the first man I lost my head over.”
“There you are. First love.” Signore Rossi spread his arms dramatically. “Losing your head, it’s the same experience.”
I stood, instinctively heading for the window. Of course, this apartment was on the ground floor so the view of the lake wasn’t the same. But I saw sky and clouds and open space. I took a deep breath. “Yes, maybe it is,” I replied, mostly to placate the old man, not because I agreed with him.
“Well, tell me about him,” Signore Rossi urged. “Was he young and awkward? Or someone your parents did not approve of?”
A flash of a face in my memory made my stomach tighten. Embarrassment—I identified the emotion. Extreme and total embarrassment.
“No. Yes.” I shook my head and remembered that Signore Rossi couldn’t see me. “I mean, no, he was not young and awkward. And my parents never knew about my…feelings,” I ended inadequately.
“A short affair, then.”
“It never even got to that point, I’m afraid.” I raised my arms. “He rejected me when I approached him.”
Signore Rossi’s gray brows shot up in surprise. “No! He was not a real man, then?”
I closed my eyes tightly and remembered that day. A tall, broad-shouldered man with eyes that watched my every move, luring me into a false feeling of intimacy. “He was a real man,” I said. “That was the problem. I was just a girl. Young, foolish, with no experience with the opposite sex. And he was full of himself and a complete egomaniac.” For months I thought we had flirted, sparring verbally. I had considered myself so witty, so adorable, such a cosmopolitan match for his dry, sexy comebacks.
“How old were you?”
“Nineteen.”
Signore Rossi made another sound of disbelief. “Nineteen? Were you raised in a religious family?”
“It was Australia,” I explained.
“Ah. Australia,” Signore Rossi nodded. “Yes, I see.”
The door had been unlocked, and now memories were coming back, almost tangible. I could smell the hay in the barn. Feel the sweat under my jodhpurs, the clinch of my riding boots. The way my pulse danced when I was alone with him. The anticipation of matching him, move for move. “I was so carefully guarded…in Australia. And he was older. He…worked for my father’s company.”
“Hm… Many fathers wouldn’t mind their daughters marrying a man with employment in their own business. A steady job means he’s a good worker.”
I smiled. “Perhaps. But like I said, it never got that far. I had carried a torch for him for months and, when I finally approached him, my feelings were not reciprocated.”
Not reciprocated. What polite language. It completely glossed over the truth of the event. How Hugh Konnor had looked shocked, then repulsed. How he stepped away from me. Held his hands out, even, as if to shield himself from the teenage princess about to jump his bones.
How he left me in the barn.
How he was reassigned to my mother’s detail the very next day, presumably after storming to the security offices and demanding a transfer.
“I was humiliated.” I finished, surprised that those words came out of my mouth. I had never admitted as much to anyone. A young Princess Caroline of Drieden had never dreamed that she would be rejected by a commoner. But speaking to Signore Rossi was almost as good as a confessional booth. He would never tell anyone, and if he did… I dismissed that thought. Ten years had passed since that excruciating encounter in the palace stables. Ten years since Hugh Konnor had been within restraining-order distance from me. Even the past few years, when he’d been assigned to my older sister, he always conveniently had the day off when I was back at the palace.
Not that I noticed. Or asked.
As if he could read my mind, Signore Rossi asked, “Do you still think of him?”
“No.” That sounded abrupt, so I tried to soften it. “It’s been years. I had a husband,” I said, as if an impulsive set of marriage vows wiped clean one’s memory of all prior infatuations.
“And you no longer live in Australia,” Signore Rossi said, with a little wave at the building around us.
“No,” I agreed, with a small laugh. “Australia is very far away.”
A comfortable silence settled between us. All the things I had said to Signore Rossi were true. It had been a decade since Hugh Konnor rejected my heart. My body. I had eloped, was now a widow. There was no reason to hold any feelings for the man now.
“But still…” Signore Rossi mused, staring off into the middle distance, at shadows only he could see. “First loves can haunt us for many years.�
��
I opened my mouth to disagree. To say emphatically that my first love was ancient history.
But the spinning nerves in my belly begged to disagree.
Chapter Four
I saw the ghost two days later.
Or, what might have been a ghost. There was no other explanation for seeing a dead man, was there?
Ten months ago, the previous April, my sister’s fiancé, Christian Fraser-Campbell, had left her at the altar, which promptly traumatized the whole nation of Drieden. Here they’d been, happily anticipating a royal wedding, with all the romance and drama, and then…all the tea towels had been for naught.
Months later it was reported that Christian had taken his own life. I tried calling Thea, using the only number I knew (and the only one that wouldn’t go through thirty secretaries), but there was no answer and I didn’t try again. Perhaps she didn’t want to hear from me. Perhaps it was my cowardice, or my misplaced guilt that this was the one thing I couldn’t help her with.
Either way, given that I was in the middle of my own marital drama, I was not entirely sure of all the details surrounding Christian’s death. The newspapers were certain, however, that he was dead. Which made seeing his ghost in Varenna that much more shocking.
I remembered vaguely that he’d had a sibling. Perhaps this was another relation of some sort. Another Scottish duke or earl on holiday.
In February. In Italy.
Or perhaps I was missing home. Missing family. It happened more often than I cared to admit, and today there had been a story in the Driedish newspaper that only my siblings would appreciate. The groundbreaking of the historical monument that Thea had presided over had dug up bones. Archeologists were shouting that the monument’s location was near the spot where one of our ancestors, the one who had founded the House of Laurent, had died in a battle.
This was why reading the Driedish newspaper was not healthy for me. I wanted to gossip about the discovery with Thea, Henry—even Sophie. No one laughed at the antics of our family tree like my twin brother Henry. No one took them as seriously as Princess Thea, heir to the throne.
The Royal Bodyguard Page 2