After the wedding, as Emma and Adrian rode off in the royal carriage to the palace, Caroline and Darcy decided to walk the short distance to the palace along the cordoned-off roadway.
“You’re okay if our wedding isn’t quite as dramatic as this?” he asked, his hand holding tightly to hers. “You won’t be a princess, but you will be a lady. Lady Caroline Weltenham, and all that goes with that.”
“Lady Weltenham sounds just perfect. As for that other stuff—are you kidding?” She nudged him. “Too much work. Just promise me two things. A tiara. And the Seychelles honeymoon. Anything else is icing on the cake.”
“Your wish,” Darcy said, leaning over to kiss his fiancée, “is my command.”
~*~
About the Author
Jenny Gardiner is the author of the #1 Kindle Bestseller SLIM TO NONE; the award-winning novel SLEEPING WITH WARD CLEAVER; BITE ME: A parrot, a family, and a whole lot of flesh wounds; Amazon.UK bestseller ANYWHERE BUT HERE, and WHERE THE HEART IS, and is a contributor to the humorous dog anthology, I'M NOT THE BIGGEST BITCH IN THIS RELATIONSHIP. She published ACCIDENTALLY ON PURPOSE and COMPROMISING POSITIONS under the pen name Erin Delany. Her work has been found in Ladies Home Journal, the Washington Post and on NPR’s Day to Day. She likes to say she honed her fiction writing skills while working as a publicist for a US Senator. Other jobs have included: an orthodontic assistant (learning quite readily that she was not cut out for a career in polyester), a waitress (probably her highest-paying job), a TV reporter, a pre-obituary writer, and a photographer (claim to fame: being hired to shoot Prince Charles—with a camera, silly!). She lives in Virginia with her husband, three kids, two dogs, one cat, one rabbit, and a gregarious parrot. In her free time she studies Italian, dreams of traveling to exotic locales, and feels very guilty for rarely attempting to clean the house.
Visit Jenny at her website and sign up for her newsletter: http://www.jennygardiner.net , her blog, http://www.jennygardiner.net/blog/ ,or find her on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/jennygardinerbooks, and Twitter http://twitter.com/jennygardiner
Stay tuned for more stories from Monaforte, with book three of the IT’S REIGNING MEN series, HEIR TODAY, GONE TOMORROW, coming June 29, 2015: Here’s a sneak peek:
Read on for a sample of Book three of the It’s Reigning Men series:
Bad to the Throne
Chapter One
One year ago, Las Vegas
ANDI McDonough presumed she'd seen it all working as a cocktail waitress at the amazingly cool swimming pool-slash-lagoon at the hippest Vegas hotel on the Strip. Like the very, very (did she mention very?) old, very wealthy film star who enjoyed an impromptu and extremely public poolside lap dance with a celebrated porn star — in his wheel chair. He damn near keeled over from a heart attack, and Andi damn near keeled over from a laugh attack at the preposterousness of the situation.
Or the time the famous bodybuilder-slash-actor pooped his pants while floating in the lazy river and they had to close the entire five-acre pool for the day to disinfect it (meaning no tips for her, which was no laughing matter).
But never did she think she'd bear witness to such a stunning specimen of manhood as when the famous spare-to-the-heir prince from Moldavia or Monaforte—one of those blips on a map no one knows much about—decided to strip down to his birthday suit while celebrating his own birthday and reveal to her and at least two hundred other pool-goers that his superior royal genes clearly had worked their magic with what until then had remained tucked awfully nicely into his royal jeans (that is before he'd decided to let it all hang out).
Yowza, she thought, is that a cricket bat he's packing (a little nod to his country's sporting pastime), or is he just happy to be stark naked with a bevy of slutty gold diggers with particularly smokin' bodies?
She hated those women.
Beyotches, she grumbled under her breath.
She certainly wasn't allowed to peel off her own too-scanty cocktail waitress uniform and join them. Not that she would, mind you. Her body couldn't hold a candle to those women's medically-fabricated ones. Some could argue that Andi was toting a little spare herself in the back end, but she preferred to see it as a just bit "fluffy". Semantics? Maybe. But it only mattered when she was stripped down to nothing, and under no circumstances would she ever do such a thing in a Vegas hotel swimming pool. It was hard enough to take that plunge in front of a man who theoretically wouldn't be judging her for her shortcomings.
Not that she'd had much experience with that lately either: with working full time while attending school at night to earn her masters degree in social work, there wasn't time for a relationship in her life, let alone a casual fling. But damn, what a casual fling it would be with the likes of him, with his scruffy dark hair, green eyes and that trademark sexy five o'clock shadow he was known for. And of course there was that little (er, make that big) matter of that package he was sporting...
Alas, Andi guessed the hook-ups would have to be left to the slutty gold diggers, because she'd be fired in a heartbeat for making a move on him, even if she was so inclined, which she wasn't. She had too much self-respect to behave like a shameless skank just to have a roll in the hay with a, well, let's admit it, an insanely hot, supposedly eligible man.
Now granted, she couldn't — and wouldn’t — go near the man, let alone advertise her availability (she wasn't! She was far too busy for that stuff!). But she could maybe discreetly pull out her phone and take a teeny, weeny (excuse the pun) picture or two. Just for memory's sake. Not like she'd sell it to the tabloids. Though damn, if only that would pay for the rest of her schooling... It was a real shame she had too much integrity to attempt that anyway. But she felt kind of sorry for him —the guy was just having fun. And it must be hard to simply let it all hang out (literally) when you're someone famous like him, to be able to just blow off steam and act like a stupid young man.
After all, it seemed to be the mandate of young men to act stupid, right? She'd seen enough of them here celebrating bachelor parties and birthdays and doing embarrassingly idiotic things to expect nothing less from the whole lot of them. "What happens in Vegas stayed in Vegas," they usually managed to blurt out just before vomiting or urinating into the fountain at the Bellagio or mistakenly wandering off with a tranny hooker at three in the morning. Indeed.
Andi wiped some spilled beer from her hand and tucked a strand of long blonde hair behind her ear before pulling a phone from her hip pocket (where she had to hide it because she couldn’t dare have a phone lumping out of the butt pocket of her very tight shorts). At least her skimpy apron hid her clandestine phone a little bit.
Angling from the hip, no ability to see if she was landing the money shot or not, she discreetly popped off a handful of frames, then tucked her phone back into her pocket and returned to attempting to do her waitressing job. But everyone in the pool area was completely focused on that prince-guy, which meant no one was bothering to order more drinks. What was his name? William maybe? Ha! She could only imagine tomorrow's headlines:
William Exposes his Willy!
Then she remembered— it wasn’t William after all. His name was Alexander something, she recalled, Zander was the nickname. She remembered because it seemed such a strange nickname. Oh well.
God, it would be glorious to be able to pawn off her "exposé" images and pocket some desperately needed cash. But she couldn't do it. Besides, there were likely a few hundred peter pictures of the guy already popping up right now on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. It would be viral within the hour. The days of making money off of something like this were over. Now it was just about bragging rights to have witnessed the event with your own eyes. Besides, the guy was asking for it, whatever exposure (aside from the obvious) he was going to land for this.
She was just pondering how to avoid tripping over the ogling crowd in order to attempt to deliver a few drink orders when her manager accosted her.
"Hand over your electronic order pad, McDonough,
" he said with his hand out, a grimace smeared across his surly face. "And while you're at it, give me your drinks tray and your apron."
Andi stared at him as if he'd just asked her to pony up her firstborn child. "I’m sorry?"
"The phone," he said, pointing to her hip. "I saw you taking pictures of him. And that is a clear-cut violation of company policy. It's essential that staff respect the privacy of our customers at all times."
"Privacy?" she shouted a little above the clamoring din of the rowdy crowd, all clapping to the beat of Salt-N-Pepa’s Push It that the prince and three women were quasi-grinding to while pounding shots of Gran Patron tequila in the shallow end. "Do you see him?" she said, pointing at his unclad body nearby. "This isn't exactly the pinnacle of privacy! I was just taking a picture to show my mom when I get back from work today. She was feeling depressed and I knew she'd get a laugh out of it."
Her mother had been licking her wounds after her third husband left her for a much younger woman only a few months ago, and Andi was all about getting her mother's mind off her misery, like it was her civic duty or something.
"Laugh or not, rules are rules," he said. "After you’ve changed out of your uniform you need to turn that in, plus your company locker key. And you'll not get a referral on your resume, either. Now, go." He pointed with a stern look toward the main hotel, her only way out, one she would apparently have to exit with tail tucked neatly between her legs. She knew it wasn't worth arguing. Despite this not being the world's most gratifying job, she knew well that women were lined up behind her to usurp her spot.
Andi did as she was told—which is how she operated, usually—and as she climbed into her fifiteen-year old rusted-out clunker of a Ford Fiesta and drove away from the best-paying job (thanks to tips) she could've found in this town shy of stripping for a living, she couldn't help but wonder how snapping a few innocent pics of the spare prince's family jewels could lead her to a financial situation in which she'd never be able to afford any jewels. As it was, it was going to be near impossible to come up with tuition money without this job. And in this town word got around fast enough she'd be blackballed from any of the higher-end waitressing jobs that could compensate for the lost income.
Jewels schmewels. They might have been old Zander's crowning glory, but they now represented her financial demise.
Huh, she thought. If I had to do it over again, maybe I'd have kicked him in those jewels. Better yet kicked her boss in them. At least then she’d had gotten some satisfaction.
Despite the dire outcome, she and her mother got a few good laughs at her surprisingly spot-on shots of Zander starkers.
That and a whole lot more money would pay her tuition bill that was coming due.
Chapter Two
One year later, Rome, Italy
ANDI was so ready for a bath. Too bad one wasn't on the horizon, for the next, oh, ever, it seemed. Which, all things considered, was okay. Finding a shower of some sort would have to do, but cleaning up was definitely in order. She'd been on a succession of planes, trains and automobiles and what seemed like a hundred other modes of transportation (camels, anyone?) for the past several weeks, after having worked her way from Central Africa northward, through Morocco, into Spain, France and then Italy.
She felt like she was carrying the scent of a herd of camels on her, along with many day's worth of grit and grim, and was in no shape to sit too close to another human being until she reacquainted herself with a bar of soap. Her train was set to arrive in Rome's Termini station in a matter of minutes, so she laced up her beat-up hiking boots, stood up, tugged down her travel-grizzled t-shirt and pulled out her backpack from the luggage rack above. Afraid she'd drop the thing on top of some little old nonna’s head, she took great care to lower it gingerly onto the aisle in front of her to prepare to hoist it onto her back.
She slid her arms through the solid straps of the once bright-blue backpack, now dingy gray with desert dust and the stains of travel, snapped the waist and chest bands on, and lined up to exit the train once it stopped. A few minutes later, she was on the platform, trying to navigate her way out of the station through a clot of travelers and commuters. On the overhead speaker, a garbled voice was announcing various arrivals and departures from binario uno, due and so forth. Andi was busy pulling up information on her phone about where her Couchsurfing sofa du jour was located when she noticed a scuffle unfolding up ahead. As she hastened forward, she noticed a group of teenaged boys harassing a stooped over, elderly gypsy woman who was begging for money. It seemed no one had patience for gypsies anywhere she traveled, and this was no exception. As the woman pleaded in unintelligible Italian for a donation, one of the boys grabbed her tin cup and took off running.
Andi always had a soft spot for the downtrodden—after all, she hadn't been pursuing a master's degree in social work because she aspired to be a high-powered hedge fund manager—so she took off running in hot pursuit of the boy with the tin cup. She wasn't going to judge why that woman needed money so desperately she'd grovel for help in a frenzied train station, and she damn sure wasn't going to let some smart-aleck teenaged slackers steal the woman’s earnings, meager as they likely were.
She raced alongside a busy track amidst commuters scurrying to board departing trains in pursuit of the boy, who was laughing not far in front of her. Her pack weighed her down, and she knew it wouldn't afford much leeway with her center of gravity. Just as she pushed and shoved her way through a particularly thick throng of people, an opening unexpectedly gave way, throwing her off her trajectory just enough that her pack wanted to go left while her body wanted to go right. Instead she toppled headlong, landing face-forward ungracefully with a painful thud, in the midst of a circle of people who seemed to be fawning over someone.
Andi rolled over like an upended turtle, dusted street crud from her cheek, looked up and cringed. Because it wasn't someone. It was him. The naked prince. Decidedly not naked this time around. But gorgeous nevertheless in a slim-fitting charcoal gray suit with a hot pink dress shirt. And with an audience of sycophants pawing and clawing for his autograph while he stood there staring down at her as if she'd introduced the plague to the whole lot of them.
"Scusi, signorina," he said to her with a laugh. "If you wanted my autograph so badly, there are more conventional ways to ask for it."
Andi just glared. "It's no laughing matter," she said, standing up and wiping her grimy hands on the thighs of her pants. "If you wanted to be helpful, you'd have stopped those boys who stole that woman's money."
She pointed back toward the crusty old woman in the long red wool skirt whose hair was pulled back in a handkerchief and who had finally hobbled her way toward the group.
"Her?" Zander said with a bit of a sneer in his voice, pointing at the old woman. "Are you serious? Those people are out to get your money. It's a racket. If you know what's good for you, you'll mind your step and not bother trying to help out bandits."
Which made Andi see red ten shades redder than red. Crimson, at the very least. Maybe even verging on purple. "Why, you, you, you arrogant—" she could barely choke the words out. The nerve of these rich elite, thinking they're so superior and know everyone and everything. Living their cushy lives, never having to worry where their next meal would come from. First he gets her fired (well, indirectly), and now thanks to him she can't retrieve this woman's meager take of Euros for the day?
Andi could relate to that woman more now than ever. Having lost her job as a result of Willy's (make that Zander's) willy and unable to find a replacement gig, she finally had to abandon her dreams of finishing up her degree. Mired in a bog of depression, she moped around her house for a month until her mother threw down the gauntlet.
"You need to leave," she said, facing her daughter, her hands on her shoulders. "I'm saying this in the most loving of ways, Andrea. But you can't be here any more. You need to do something with yourself. Go. Live your life. So you aren't in graduate school right now. You'll do it some
day. But don't rot away here with me. Go off and have an adventure. You have a little bit of your savings left, money that would have gone toward your schooling. And I've got a coffee can full of mad money I've been saving for a rainy day. Consider it yours. Buy yourself a backpack and a plane ticket and figure out the rest as you go."
At first Andi was insulted that her mother was giving her the boot. But once she really understood that her mom simply was giving her the shove out of the nest she needed, she embraced the idea and ran with it. She'd traveled through the Congo working in refugee camps. She wandered across deserts in North Africa, experienced breathtaking burnished red sunrises on the Sahara. She witnessed the most stunning vistas, treasured some of the world's most amazing wildlife, trekked through pristine wilderness, and cried over devastating man-made tragedies laced throughout her adventures. Finally, she was living. And loving every minute of it. Which maybe brought home other peoples' suffering even more to her, because she'd experienced such highs and lows in nearly a year of trekking the world, often not quite sure how she'd get to the next place but for the largesse of kind and generous friends she'd made along the way.
"No thanks to you that woman will likely go hungry tonight," Andi said, glaring at Zander. "But you just enjoy your life of grandeur and don't worry how your actions impact the rest of us. You never have."
~*~
As Andi stormed off, Zander stood there, scratching his head in confusion at the woman, who acted as if she'd known him, even though that was downright impossible.
"What the bloody hell was that?" he asked his good friend Lorenzo, with whom he was visiting Rome. "That woman was absolutely mad."
His friend shook his head, then shrugged. "You should know by now that you can't figure them out, so why bother?"
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