The Royal Bodyguard

by Lindsay Emory

  Love.

  “Take care of yourself,” I told my sister. She really did look ill.

  “You’re leaving. And not to the hotel.”

  I nodded. I didn’t want to keep it a secret. “I need to go and take care of a few things.”

  “You’ll be back for the Jubilee, though.” It was more of an order than a question. “And I’ll want you by my side when Gran abdicates. I want us all to present a united front.”

  “I would like nothing better,” I said honestly.

  “And then it will be that much easier for me to slip you back into all the paperwork,” Thea said, making a little check signal as if she were signing a document. “I’m righting Gran’s wrongs,” she said in a very earnest tone. “All of them.”

  I left it at that. Whether I was named a princess again, whether I was given back my HRH, seemed inconsequential at the moment.

  Not when I still had a fire wall to erect around my life—and that of my family.

  My grandmama was waiting for me, which wasn’t a surprise. I’d had to announce my name at the gate, after all: Caroline of Sevine.

  I knew it would get her attention.

  Astrid was standing at her bookshelves and took off her reading glasses as I entered her study.

  “I suppose we need to talk,” she said.

  “Only one of us is talking,” I told her.

  Because she was a smart woman, she kept her lips together.

  “Your actions have been unacceptable. Arranging marriages, manipulating your own granddaughters, sending Christian after me to gather my DNA…”

  Her eyebrows raised. “I don’t know anything about that.”

  “Don’t you dare,” I scoffed. “There are exactly two people in the world who would care enough about the DNA in those bones at Langůs. Two people who would really care if I was a descendant of that Fredrik. And they are both my grandmothers.”

  Several expressions flitted across Grandmama’s face—surprise, calculation, then…humor? “Really. I wouldn’t have done anything with it, even if the test showed that one of the Laurent bastards had illegitimately taken the throne at some point. It would have been worth it just to see Aurelia’s face when I told her that her precious legacy wasn’t quite as untarnished as she believes.”

  “And what about Thea’s face?” I demanded. “Your own granddaughter? What would she look like when she learned that you were the puppet master behind her biggest humiliation and betrayals?”

  Astrid looked shamefaced, which was somewhat satisfying. “I never encouraged Christian to leave Thea. That was a mess he got into all on his own.”

  “But you continued to harbor him, enable him, use him to do your bidding when you wanted information after the bones at Langůs were discovered.”

  “He went rogue,” Astrid stubbornly insisted. “And anything he tells you is a lie.”

  It didn’t matter now. At the end of the day, I had only come to Switzerland to tell my grandmother one thing.

  “There is something I want to make perfectly clear,” I said. “If you or Vox Umbra ever releases any of the information it is keeping on me or anyone I love, or does anything to hurt my people, there will be consequences.”

  Grandmama looked intrigued. “What should I expect? Some retribution from that Konnor fellow you dragged in here?”

  A dull stab of pain blossomed in my gut at the thought of Hugh. “No. My answer will be published in the biggest newspapers around the globe. All of your dirty secrets—Vox Umbra, the spying, the lies. I have a document that will be sent to major news outlets around the globe in the event that you or your fellow colleagues attempt to manipulate the royal family of Drieden again.”

  “Under your pen name? Will it be Clémence Diederich or Cordelia Lancaster or a yet to assumed nom de plume?”

  “No. My revenge will be under the name of Caroline Laurent.”

  Finally, I had done my grandmother proud. She beamed at me and said, “And that is how it should be.”

  I spun on my heel, intending to march out of the convent, having said all that I had come to say, but stopped as my grandmother’s voice rang out.

  “Is that it?” I closed my eyes at the hint of pain in her strong voice. “Am I the next to be disowned?”

  Go.

  Being an outcast hurts; no one knew that more than me. And Astrid deserved my rejection and more for all the trauma she had caused.

  What would a Sevine woman do?

  My fists closed tightly at my sides. A savvy Sevine woman wouldn’t turn her back on another Sevine woman.

  “That depends,” I said finally.

  “On what, exactly?”

  “On how well you make this up to us.”

  With a slow, meaningful nod, Astrid signaled her acceptance of my terms and I left to return to my home.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  One month later…

  The view from the top of the dilapidated cannery was not quite as picturesque as the view from my Varenna veranda, but it was exciting in its own way. I stood on the roof of the old building, looking out at the old docks and industrial buildings of Koras. Of course, there were boarded-up buildings and crumbling brick but, like flowers blooming from the cracks of a sidewalk, there were also brightly painted doors, fresh signs, the indications of busy tradesmen and motivated youngsters.

  The air smelled of diesel and saltwater but also of falafel and fresh bread. Sounds of buzz saws filled the air, trucks honked, a group of schoolchildren played a game of football.

  Koras was alive, and when I heard footsteps behind me on the tar paper and metal roof, I was, too.

  I turned and tried to keep a cool, sexy demeanor even as my heart tried to jackhammer itself out of my chest when I saw Hugh Konnor.

  God, retirement had never looked so good on a man.

  While I was wrapped up in a cashmere cape, due to the fact that it was still cool and crisp in Drieden in April, Hugh was only in a white shirt, his sleeves pushed up to show the black ink on each muscled forearm. He hadn’t grown his beard, but his hair was longer than it had usually been while in service to the palace. The thick auburn waves ruffled with the wind and my fingers twitched with the need to touch him.

  “Hello, Hugh.”

  “Caroline.” My only clue to his feelings was that I noticed his knuckles turned white on the hand that clenched a yellow safety hat.

  “This is quite a coincidence,” I managed to say.

  “It’s not,” he admitted. “There’s a crowd of photographers who are covering the main entrance to this shitty cannery. It was like a neon sign directing me to you.”

  “Shitty? Watch how you describe my newest real-estate investment.”

  “You outbid me,” he growled.

  I couldn’t help the feminine pleasure that swept through me. “I heard you’re starting a private security business.” I knew everything about him, actually, and the empire he had built when he thought no one was watching. My real-estate advisor had pulled up his investments, his corporation holdings. He had the largest real-estate portfolios in this quarter of the city and was creating jobs and safe apartments and raising the security of every person in this district.

  But right now, he was more than all of that.

  So much more.

  Hugh took a step forward. Then another one.

  “You heard about my company, hmm?”

  I nodded quickly. Maybe that had revealed too much. Shown my cards. “I was looking for some advice—from a professional security expert like yourself.”

  That got his interest, as I knew it would. “What’s going on?”

  “Where should I go next?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’ve been trying for a while now to figure out the next phase in my life. After Stavros died, I escaped to Varenna. And
now I need to find a new residence. So tell me, where in the world will I not be found? I’ve narrowed it down to a charming bungalow close to Goa, a small village in Bolivia, or North Dakota.” I checked them off my fingers and, when I was done, I looked back at him. He had moved closer. I could almost touch him now. Smell his lavender soap.

  He looked displeased with me.

  “Do you know somewhere else I should go?” I asked, still going for that wide-eyed insouciance that came so naturally to Felice—or Sophie, for that matter.

  “The edge.”

  “Where is that?”

  His jaw clenched. “The edge of the roof. You’re very close to the edge. Could you please move away from it?”

  “Yes, I see.” I looked down. “But it’s only a four- or five-story drop. I don’t think I’d die. I’d probably only break my legs.”

  “I’m serious, Caroline.”

  “Of course you are. When are you not serious?” I asked fondly because…I was fond of him. Rather desperately, in fact.

  Hugh held out the yellow safety helmet. “Put this on, then.”

  “But right there—that’s when I’m not sure,” I mused. “Was that serious or not serious? Because that yellow plastic does not go with this fabulous cape.” Of course, I was teasing him. Because I decided I needed to see him smile or some other expression which demonstrated that his current feelings were something more than mildly irritated professional curiosity.

  “What are you doing here?” he finally sighed, and there—right there—I thought I saw…something. Something vaguely vulnerable or hopelessly hopeful. A mirror of how I was feeling.

  “Don’t you want to know? Where I’ve decided? I’ve done a lot of thinking in the past month, and I thought, as a private-security person, you’d want to know—”

  He looked pained. “I don’t—”

  “Here. Right here,” I said in a panicked rush. I didn’t want him to hear that he didn’t want to listen to me. He absolutely had to hear this.

  “On top of a cannery in Koras?” Not surprisingly, he was confused. “Be serious.”

  “I was serious when I bought the building.”

  “Caroline—”

  “It’s a good investment. We can develop it together. You do have a construction company, right?”

  “For the last fucking time, step away from the edge of the roof!”

  I stepped away from the edge of the roof, into his personal space. Which was more dangerous—the five-story fall or being within arm’s reach of Hugh—I wasn’t sure.

  The words came tumbling out. I hadn’t planned this, and certainly not on top of a cannery but, if this was my opportunity, I had to grab it. “After Stavros died, I thought there were only two options for me: be like Mother—or Father. Notorious or cloistered. But I’ve come to the conclusion that everyone is wrong about me—including you, by the way. I won’t be limited by just those two paths. I have my own path—”

  “Which one is that?” he grumbled.

  That was good. He was listening.

  “The one where I go after everything I want,” I explained. “Privacy, love, adventure, career.” I laughed into the wind, the excitement of the unknown making me feel a little dizzy. “I don’t know what that’s going to look like yet, but I know that as much as I don’t want to be like Mother, I also don’t want to be like Father.”

  Hugh frowned. “You mean buried in St Julian’s?”

  I shook my head. “My father never stopped loving my mother. And he let everything fall apart, he let her slip through his fingers. Because he wasn’t brave enough to try to walk with her.”

  I reached out, brushing my fingers against the line of buttons on his shirt. He didn’t step back. Instead, his warm rough hand closed around mine.

  “Even though I’m no prince, I like to think I’m as brave as one.” His hazel eyes were warm on me, like an early spring sun, which encouraged me.

  I closed my other hand around his. “If you’re not a prince, I don’t know who is. And you’re absolutely the bravest man I know.”

  Our bodies leaned into each other. This was natural. Unavoidable. Irrevocable. The as-good-as prince and the not-so-much princess. The fearless bodyguard who had made it safe for me to feel again. We needed and deserved each other.

  Hugh’s head lowered. I met him halfway with a kiss that was pure and powerful, without pretense, full of promise. His right arm wrapped around my waist, and I imagined those Koras coordinates tattooed on his skin as an anchor, holding me in the one place where I belonged.

  Right in the middle of my own city.

  The kiss broke; we needed air. He laid his forehead on mine and I worried what he might say. This was typically the moment he said something heartbreakingly beautiful and something just plain heartbreaking.

  “You want to protect me, I know, but please don’t protect me from this,” I said, in the narrow space between us. It was a plea from my heart. “Please just stop trying to protect me from bad decisions.”

  He chuckled. “You’re calling me a bad decision? When you’re the one who just bought this building that might crumble beneath our feet at any second?”

  “You’re right. Then how could you let me go? There are so many other bad decisions I could make. At any time, actually. Who knows what I could do next? I probably need a permanent bodyguard at all times.”

  His brows drew together. “You raise a good point.”

  “I always do,” I assured him.

  “I think there’s only one thing left to do.” For some reason, he looked at the edge of the roof, grabbed my hands, then took one giant step closer to the edge. His eyes were twinkling, but I could also tell they held a secret.

  Huh. It seems I knew him as well as he knew me.

  He took a deep breath. “You’ll just have to marry me.”

  I weaved a little. Hugh slapped the safety hat on my head. “What?” I managed to say.

  “After I get your sister’s permission, of course.”

  “You…want…me?” Yes, I am a very witty woman of the world, you know.

  His face softened. “I’ve wanted you since I first set eyes on you.”

  It was like someone had taken one of Grandmama’s swords, stuck it in my gut and swirled all my insides around. It was a beautiful, dizzying kind of heartbreak.

  “And?” he prompted.

  “What?” I asked, still dazed and dizzy from his proposition.

  “What’s your answer, so that we can get off this deathtrap of a roof?”

  There was no way to express so much yes into a single word. So I wrapped my arms around him and kissed him again as hard and as well as I could until we were both breathless.

  “You were meant to be mine, Caroline Laurent.” He said it with that steady, cocksure confidence I knew so well. “Now I’m taking you to solid ground.” He interlaced my fingers with his and we started walking toward the stairs.

  My legs shook as we descended, knowing that the next step was terrifying, world-changing, death-defying.

  Irreversible.

  He placed his hand on the steel door and gave me one last look. “Are you sure about this?”

  I laughed—a crazy sound. “Me? What about you?”

  His mouth slid to the side and his arm wrapped around my waist. “This part’s easy.”

  “You’re a brave man, Konnor.”

  “That?” He nodded at the scrum of hustling paparazzi that were sure to be on the other side of the door. “That’s nothing we can’t handle.”

  And with that, he pushed open the door and we walked into the glare of a hundred flashbulbs.

  Together.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Late May…

  We were in one of my hidey-holes.

  You didn’t think I had just the one spare house in Varenna, did you
?

  This one I bought years ago, a sun-bleached stone cottage on an olive-tree-lined hill in Aix-en-Provence. Lush lavender bushes encircled the garden and, on clear days, one could see the Mediterranean from the bedroom window.

  The window in front of the bed where Hugh and I had slept for the past three weeks after our small wedding in Scotland, on Nick’s estate. We had wanted a private ceremony, so anywhere in Drieden was out of the question, unfortunately. I still wasn’t sure I had reached the point where people would ignore my second wedding to a millionaire ex-bodyguard and I did not want any negative press to shadow either Gran’s Jubilee celebrations or the announcements about Thea thereafter.

  It also felt like a fitting conclusion to the whole Christian Fraser-Campbell drama. Good defeats evil, love wins, every time, and then your foes get married in your family chapel. There was something vaguely medieval about the idea that Hugh especially enjoyed.

  And then, while we were all in Scotland, there was one last medieval twist. In a cell that was electronically monitored 24/7 on an island in the middle of the North Sea, Christian died of a heart attack.

  Thea ordered an immediate investigation, Nick hit the whiskey hard for a day or so, but I felt it was safe to say that the instigating cause of Christian’s death was likely lost to history, never to be discovered.

  I thought I’d been so quiet, but when I tiptoed back to the bedroom still wearing nothing but his shirt, which I had tossed on, he asked, “Who was that?” Hugh’s voice was drowsy, but I knew he’d been yanked out of sleep as soon as the phone rang. Once a bodyguard on alert, always on alert.

  I hesitated with my answer, which made his next words sharper. “Caroline? Who was on the phone?”

  It wasn’t that I didn’t want to tell him. It was that I wasn’t sure I should.

  Hugh and I had promised each other, no more secrets. I had told him all of mine after we became engaged. Hugh agreed with Sybil’s security assessment—I, along with Cordelia and Clémence, was a blackmail risk. But I decided to wait until after Thea’s ascension to the throne to tell her the truth about my forays into journalism. It would be the biggest moment in her life and I didn’t want my previous mistakes to distract from that.