Which is what I was pondering when she flipped through the journal again and tore out a page. She folded it into a small square and stuffed it into an envelope. Then she scribbled something on the outside and handed it to me. It read, “Open on your 30th birthday.”
The believer in me clutched the paper tightly. The woman I’d become itched to throw it away in the nearest garbage bin.
I folded the envelope into my pocket and followed Sybil back into the kitchen, where Nick was pouring coffee. I didn’t ask him where he’d been, mostly because I didn’t want to explain what I’d seen in the study.
Death. Magic. And Love. Only the first seemed a plausible outcome today.
nineteen
THE DRIEDISH STAYED UP UNTIL midnight on this late-summer day every year to celebrate the Queen’s birthday. There was a joyous atmosphere on the decks of the crafts around us. Music blared, children laughed, and whiffs of grilled sausages and marijuana surrounded us.
After breakfast, Sybil had driven us back to the village where we’d left the houseboat docked. Now we were back on the river just in time for a national holiday. Even though the last rays of the summer sun skittered across the sky in hazy pink streaks, the night had turned cold enough for me to wrap up in a woolen blanket I had found below deck. Footsteps signaled Nick’s approach. I recognized them now, living in these close quarters. Secure, yet soft. He slid down to take a seat next to me and his heat was welcome in the midnight dusk.
I reached out of my blanket cocoon and poured him a glass of the red wine I had already begun to enjoy. “Here. You must drink on the Queen’s birthday.”
“To Queen Aurelia,” he said before drinking.
I couldn’t help but laugh. “It’s not Aurelia’s birthday.”
He frowned at me. “But it’s the Queen’s birthday,” he said, confused, the way I imagined most non-Driedish people would be about this most Driedish of holidays.
“Here in Drieden we celebrate Queen Elsa-Marie’s birthday.” I lifted my glass, recalling the toast I had learned at a very young age when I’d been served only water mixed with a bit of wine. “To Elsa-Marie and the homeland!”
“You’ll have to educate an ignorant Scot . . .”
“Yes, yes,” I said as I patted the ignorant Scot on his warm, firm arm. “Queen Elsa-Marie was Leopold the Fourth’s wife. She was from Austria, off of that Holy Roman Empire branch of the family tree. Unfortunately, she and Leopold were crowned just as the French Revolution was starting.” I waved my hand. “It caused a bit of a stir in Drieden, given the close proximity and relations between Elsa-Marie and Marie-Antoinette, not to mention Louis and Leopold.”
“Good buddies, were they?”
“Actually, there’s a letter between them where Leopold is scathing about the over-the-top construction costs of Versailles. The Driedish are a practical folk, as you know.”
Nick raised an eyebrow, but I went on. “Anyway, Elsa-Marie was determined to keep her crown and her head, since she’d just gotten the crown and liked her head very much. She was not having any of that French Revolution nonsense. So she learned from Marie-Antoinette’s mistakes and decided to be the most benevolent, the most charitable, the most beloved queen that Drieden ever had.”
“And she obviously succeeded, if people are still celebrating her birthday.”
“It helps that she gave the people three days off from work every year to do so.”
Nick lifted his glass. “To Elsa-Marie and the homeland.” We drank to that together.
“It’s better than cheap whiskey,” I announced, remembering the first time we’d drunk together. Nick looked thoughtful and opened his mouth to say something, but right at that moment the sky exploded above us. Fireworks in green and yellow, the colors of the Driedish flag, shot into the atmosphere, followed by red and blue and clear, sparkling white.
I’d never much cared for fireworks before. If I was watching them, it usually meant that I was at a political function, standing in uncomfortable starched clothes and careful about my posture and expression. I’d be smiling with restrained appreciation or clapping politely, but my feet were normally aching and I’d be dying to get home to relax and/or escape from some annoying family member.
These were fireworks I could finally enjoy. There, on the deck of a stolen boat, I leaned my head back against the hull, drank wine, and enjoyed the warmth and companionship of the most intriguing man I’d ever known. I felt like celebrating, I felt at home, and I felt like me.
“I’m in so much trouble!” I laughed as I heard someone on a nearby boat playing the Driedish national anthem on a radio.
“Why?” Nick looked down at me, and I realized that at some point I had rested my head on his shoulder. I didn’t move it.
“Because I’m missing the celebration. I should be at Gran’s side tonight.” I chuckled again as I thought about the inevitable tabloid speculation about my absence and realized I didn’t care anymore. “I should have done this years ago,” I murmured in the space between explosions.
“What?”
“Run away. Run from it all.”
For the first time, I had a taste of sympathy toward the man who might have run away from our wedding. I was still angry with him for the way he did it—not explaining, not saying good-bye, not saying . . . anything.
But if Christian had felt a sliver of what I’d felt over the years—being locked in, locked away, locked up—maybe he’d decided to take the chance and get as far away as he could from the prison known as the House of Laurent.
After all, given the alternatives I knew now, the fates of his Boson Chapelle colleagues . . . I hoped Christian had run away.
How many times had I slipped away from the palace? Those nibbles of freedom where I had tasted what it was like to be a normal person for a few hours had kept me sane through the years. And now I was on a crazy trip with a once-presumed dead man. How could I blame Christian for doing the exact same thing that I wished I had done?
Given it all up.
Ignored duty.
But it was duty that had called me on this journey. It was duty that still made me say, I’m going to do everything I can to find you. Even though he didn’t deserve it. Even though he’d embarrassed me in front of the entire world.
I felt something warm cover my chilled fingers. Nick. He was holding my hand.
“If I find your brother, I’m going to punch him,” I said through gritted teeth.
“You’re fairly violent for a princess.”
I sighed. “I know. It’s my only flaw.”
Nick squeezed my fingers.
“What’s it like?” he asked suddenly.
“Having flaws? It’s rather annoying for princesses, to be honest.”
He squeezed again. “Being at your gran’s side on a night like tonight.”
It was the last thing I’d expected. A personal question. A real question.
I wanted to give a serious answer, but the habit of not talking about my family was strong. “Well, as you know, my grandmother is also a monarch.”
“So I’ve gathered.”
“There’s a lot of standing straight and tall. Waving for long periods of time. And it helps if one has a good pain tolerance.”
He frowned at me. “This sounds barbaric.”
“Biting one’s tongue all the time can become rather gruesome.”
“Too bad you’re not any good at staying silent.”
“Are you suggesting I have yet another flaw?”
His eyes sparkled under the fireworks. “No, Princess. It so happens that I rather like that mouth of yours.”
My cheeks warmed. I brushed my thumb against the back of his hand, contemplating making a move. On Nick. Here on the deck. Outside. In the middle of a crowd of boats on the Queen’s birthday.
“If I were with Gran tonight, I couldn’t be with you,” I whispered. “Not like this.”
“No boy toys allowed?”
“Family only,” I confirmed. “For ye
ars, we would all gather for the Queen’s birthday. It was my parents and siblings and cousins. And Uncle John’s family and Aunt Beatrice’s. But no one who wasn’t connected by blood or marriage.”
“Sounds crowded.”
“I suppose the system rewards fecundity.”
“Careful now.”
I startled, gripped his arm, and looked around as if we were about to be boarded. “What?”
Nick chuckled. “I only meant using that word. With that mouth,” his lids dropped low as he stared at my lips, “I might forget who your family is.”
An unforeseen weight dropped into my stomach. “You say that like my family is a bad thing.”
“Aren’t most?”
“Well, I haven’t pretended to die to avoid mine.”
He gave me his wry Nick smile. “You can’t tell me you haven’t been tempted.”
I looked down at our hands still intertwined. Thought of my impossible mother, my distant father, my messy siblings. My scary grandmother.
I sighed and settled back against the boat hull. “I’m here, aren’t I?” I said. Nick lifted my hand and kissed it as though he understood my meaning perfectly—even if I wasn’t quite sure of it myself.
We stayed silent for a long time, watching the grand finale of the fireworks and then the return of the night as the world around us went inside, turned off their lights, and slept.
At this point in the summer, the sky never truly went black. It turned a velvety, lit-from-within, hazy purple. It seemed appropriate for two people like us. We weren’t midday or midnight. We were dawn, dusk, and midsummer. Caught in the middle of time and space, ever so fleeting. Blink and you’d never see us—the runaway princess and the dead spy.
If we could have stayed in this in-between Neverland, I think we both could have been happy. But the sounds of a marimba ringtone came from below deck.
“What. In the hell. Is that,” Nick growled, and I shivered. Not because he sounded scary.
But because . . .
“That’s my secret cell phone.”
twenty
NICK WAS FURIOUS. “WHERE DID you get this?” he demanded as his knuckles turned white from the grip he had on the cheap phone.
“At Ceillis House,” I told him calmly. There was no need to be so brutish about it. “It’s just my old phone.”
“Did you turn it on?”
“No, it was dead. I was charging—” I broke off when he ripped the back off the cheap cell phone and tore a small card out of it. “No! Don’t!” I launched myself into him before he could do anything irreversible.
I just wanted to knock the phone out of his hand, but I smacked my open palm against his hard shoulder instead when he turned quickly away from me. The man had superhuman reflexes, but he couldn’t see behind him when I planted my boot firmly in the back of his knee. He buckled for a moment but seemed to catch his balance, so I followed up with another kick to his ass.
Nick toppled forward, his arms outstretched to catch himself, and I jumped on his back as he fell to the floor. He outweighed me by quite a bit and he could have easily tossed me off, but he froze when I said in his ear, “Christian called.”
By some miracle, or maybe because he was that good, Nick still had the phone and chip in his hand. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“He’s the only one who has that phone’s number. He’s calling us.” He’s calling me.
I felt some of the tension go out of his back and shoulders, but not all. “Tell me everything, as quickly as you can.”
After scrambling off Nick’s back, I sketched out the details. “Christian bought us secret cell phones right before the engagement was announced so no one could trace our movements or our calls. He bought them in Amsterdam on holiday. No one knows about them but us. This is mine. I gave it back to him at Ceillis House the night of the ball because we weren’t going to need them anymore once we were married, but I found it in his room when we were there. It was dead, but I thought I might use it to call my sister, so I found a charger in the galley and . . .” I made a useless gesture. “What are the odds? Christian could be calling me! We have to call back!”
Nick had stayed on the floor, sitting with his forearms on his knees, staring at the phone while I’d explained. Strangely, he didn’t seem as excited about the fact that his missing brother had found a telephone to call me. “No one knows about these?”
“No.”
Nick didn’t seem convinced. “And just how do you keep a cell phone secret from your staff?”
I thought about it for a moment. “I mean, they might have been around when I used it.” Nick looked skeptical. “But they never asked about it and I never discussed it with them. They don’t have the right to interfere with—”
That pushed him over the edge. “If you don’t think your security personnel didn’t know all about this, then you’re a bigger idiot than I thought. Cell phones can be traced; they can be tracked; they can be hacked. Using this device was a huge breach of security.”
“It never left my possession!”
Nick got up with grim resolve on his face. “It needs to be destroyed.”
“But he just called! We need to call back and see where he is!” Apparently he didn’t understand that we had a vital clue. A literal lifeline. He couldn’t destroy it.
“And what if it’s not Christian who’s using the phone?”
That made me stop in my tracks.
“Who knew about his secret phone?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know,” I finally said, not really understanding why this was relevant. “His security detail, maybe.”
“His friends? The people he worked with at the law firm?”
“Maybe,” I allowed. “But what does that have to do with anything?”
“The probability that Christian has left you a detailed message that will not only clue us in to his location but also leave you emotionally fulfilled is very small. Which means it doesn’t outweigh the probability that someone in your palace, or other unknown agents, will trace this phone as soon as we turn it on again to find you.”
“I don’t care!” I cried, angry that he was trying to use probability of all things. Nothing about my life at this point was probable. There was no statistician in the world who could have predicted that Princess Theodora of Drieden would be abandoned by her possibly kidnapped fiancé four months ago, and there was no one who could have calculated the chance that Christian would call my secret phone once I’d retrieved it from Ceillis House. “That’s a chance we have to take.”
Nick was unmoved. He crossed his arms and stared, waiting for my next outburst, which I was happy to provide.
“And another thing! How dare you minimize me and infer that this is about my ‘emotional fulfillment.’ ”
“Isn’t it? You were going to marry him.”
“I’m so tired of you throwing that in my face,” I said, disgusted, “when what you’re really mad about is that I didn’t meet you first.”
It was meant as a petty slap. But the stunned look on Nick’s face was almost as if I had really slapped him, open palm and stinging.
“I’m sorry,” I rasped, but I really wasn’t. Now I knew something true. Maybe Nick had developed certain feelings for me, as I had for him.
And we were both dealing with the specter of Christian between us. One of us duty-bound to a brother, the other to an ex-fiancé—this road was unmarked and treacherous territory for both of us.
Nick didn’t deny my accusation. He ignored it, though. “I’m going to take this and turn it on several miles from here. I’ll listen to the message and come back when it’s safe.”
“I’m not scared of being found.”
“Then you’re an idiot. My brother disappeared; you can disappear, too.”
“I’m a princess.”
“And you haven’t been seen in public for nearly a week. Think how easy it could be to tell the world you’ve given it up.”
I saw t
he tabloid stories in my head and knew he was partially right. The “Princess Theodora in Seclusion” headlines could go on for a long time. Hell, the newspapers could say I’d been sent to a convent in the Andes and people would believe it.
Nevertheless, it still felt like a defeat when I asked him, “How long will you be gone?”
twenty-one
AN HOUR AFTER SUNRISE, I heard steps on the deck and crawled up as fast as I could. I had to know if Nick had discovered anything. Was it Christian on the phone? What had he said? Could we find out if he was okay, where he was?
But it wasn’t Nick on the boat.
“Tamar?” First relief flooded through me. Then an alarm sounded between my ears. The last time I’d seen Tamar, she’d disobeyed me and had shot bullets in my direction.
And now she was standing here, her brown curls softly stirred by the breeze. There were no mixed feelings on her face, only joy. “Your Highness!” She lowered her head. “I’m so glad I’ve finally found you.”
As someone who didn’t want to be found, I wasn’t sure how to answer that, and a million other questions sprang to my mind. Why had she come? How had she found me?
Was I safe?
As if to answer that question, I heard another familiar voice. “Looks like we have a visitor.”
Nick was at the end of the gangplank, his hands shoved in his jacket pockets, a halfway pleasant expression on his face. Since Nick didn’t do pleasant, I was quite certain there was a gun in one—or both—of his pockets. Pointing straight at Tamar.
That thought was confirmed when he said, a moment later, “Why don’t we go down below and have breakfast? I’m sure Thea has prepared something delicious.”
“There’s some cheese,” I said.
“See?” Nick said gamely.
With a careful glance between Nick and me, Tamar moved down the stairs, her arms loose by her side, and I prayed she’d keep them there. I had no doubt that Nick would enjoy taking his revenge on one of the people who had shot at him in the museum, and I really didn’t want that to happen.
The Royal Runaway Page 12