by Leslie North
Royal Treatment
Royals of Danovar Book Two
Leslie North
Contents
Royals of Danovar
Blurb
Mailing List
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
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Epilogue
End of Royal Treatment
Thank you!
About Leslie
Sneak Peek: Royal Order
More Books by this Author
Royals of Danovar
Royal Service
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Royal Treatment
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Royal Order
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales, is entirely coincidental.
RELAY PUBLISHING EDITION, MAY 2018
Copyright © 2018 Relay Publishing Ltd.
All rights reserved. Published in the United Kingdom by Relay Publishing. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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Book cover design by LJ Anderson of Mayhem Cover Creations
www.relaypub.com
Blurb
The Danover Royal family can’t weather another scandal following Phillip’s notorious wedding. Now, Eric “the spare” is tasked with going full on proper royal to rectify his party boy image. He can start by curing cancer -- or at least working on funding a new scientific breakthrough for breast cancer. But when he finds that the scientist behind the new treatment is sexier than all the sinning he’s done in recent years his ‘good boy’ image change hits a major roadblock.
Anna Fernstone has happily avoided one royal wedding only to end up engaged financially with the second in line. What are the odds? Surely it wasn’t normal for a single scientist to have to ward off everyone in line for the throne. But when Eric proves to know a thing or two about the female breast, Anna is too taken to stop him. With their livelihoods on the line, do they risk a once in a lifetime romance even if it has the potential to ruin the reputations they’ve worked so hard to build? In the end they’ll have to choose what means more: what the world thinks or what they think of each other.
Mailing List
Thank you for purchasing “Royal Treatment”
(Royals Of Danovar Book Two)
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Get SIX full-length novellas by USA Today best-selling author Leslie North for FREE! Over 548 pages of best-selling romance with a combined 1091 FIVE STAR REVIEWS!
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1
Prince Eric Augustus Calumn Magnus Bishop whistled under his breath as he broke into the medical laboratory’s front office.
Broke into was a strong term. It conjured up images of padlocks and guard dogs and handcuffs—and not the comfortable padded ones that had been involved in some of Eric’s more adventurous liaisons, either. But he wasn’t actually breaking into this room, he assured himself. More like accessing without permission, using keys he’d borrowed from the lab’s front desk while the receptionist had been too busy fluttering her eyelashes at him to notice.
He twirled the key ring around his finger, opened the door, and strode into Dr. Anna Fernstone’s office with a wide grin. It wasn’t like the good doctor had left him any other option. If he tried to set up another appointment with her, she’d probably just cancel it at the last second or duck out early claiming she’d eaten bad shrimp again. She’d practically forced him to take these extreme measures. He had no clue why. He was trying to fund her research, not kick her out of his country. Although technically Danovar was his brother King Phillip’s country, not his. Thank God.
He flicked the lights on, sat in her chair, put his feet up on her desk—careful not to wrinkle any papers or get dirt on the beautiful cherry wood surface—and waited.
And waited.
And waited some more.
By the time an hour had passed, Eric was getting fidgety. He’d already doodled on her calendar, folded a few of her sticky notes into origami animals—a massive failure by any measure, but entertaining anyway—and tried to nap, also without success. Wasn’t she normally here by eight o’clock sharp? He took his notebook out of his pocket and flipped to the pages dedicated to Anna. Yep, he’d written it right there after they’d first met at his brother’s Summer House Party a few months ago: gorgeous but uptight, and punctual as the Grim Reaper. Had the receptionist tipped her off that Eric was looking for her?
He stood up with a frustrated sigh. He’d thought offering to fund her breast cancer research would be a slam dunk. Dozens of labs across the country were chomping at the bit for the prestige, publicity, and of course money that came with royal approval. But Anna kept stonewalling him, and the clock was ticking. Eric needed her to sign on the dotted line if he was going to get his very first bill through Parliament.
He shuddered as he buttoned his suit jacket back up. If anyone had asked him a few months ago whether he would be willing to make headlines for anything other than going on a bender and accidentally proposing to the very married Duchess of Canterborrough (who’d nearly said yes, he was certain of it), he’d have laughed them out of the room. But things had changed, and now that his big brother had scandalized the country with his tradition-flaunting American wedding, the royal family could no longer afford for Prince Eric to be the nation’s favorite playboy. Instead, he’d been tasked with cleaning up his family’s image, a job for which he was arguably the world’s worst possible candidate. Still, he thought he’d risen to the challenge nicely. He was sponsoring a new healthcare bill, one that would revolutionize several outdated and cluttered Danovian laws. But if he didn’t get good press for it soon, the public would ignore it or even turn against it, and he’d be laughed out of Parliament.
Which was where Anna came in. Or where she was supposed to have come in. He would fund her research, the press would laud him for it, and he’d get the chance to tout his new bill on front pages across the nation. He would be able to explain what a win/win situation it was if she would sit down with him for longer than five minutes.
He tugged at his collar, which suddenly felt too tight. It had seemed like a good idea to dress up for this meeting—he knew he looked good in a suit, plus Anna seemed like she might appreciate the effort—but now the damn thing was trying to asphyxiate him. Either that, or the thought of failing at his first serious venture into politics was making it hard to breathe.
A voice echoed in the hall. Making a snap decision, Eric strode toward the door. He’d find out where Anna was, or failing that, locate a strong cup of coffee. How did Anna manage to get up and be productive this early every morning? Although now that he thought about it he supposed she was the type to be in bed, herbal tea consumed and flannel pajamas on, by nine p.m. sharp. Which might account for why he had a pounding headache and she was curing cancer.
He opened the door and popped his head out. “Hi there!” he called to the lab assistant who’d just walked past the office.
The man, who was wearing black scrubs and hot pink Nikes, turned and then did a double-take
. “Your Highness,” he said, an appreciative note in his voice as he gave Eric a slower up-and-down perusal. The man bowed, and if Eric wasn’t mistaken he whistled a quick catcall under his breath before he came back upright. “What can I help you with, sire?”
Eric smiled and put his hands in his pockets. If the assistant had read pretty much any Danovian tabloid in the last decade he’d have to know the prince was straight, but he looked like the type of guy who’d appreciate a little harmless flirting even so. “I’m interested in the work this lab is doing and happened to be in the area,” he replied. “You look like just the man to give me the full tour.”
The assistant quirked an eyebrow at the open door behind Eric. “You happened in the area…of my boss’s office? Which was supposed to be locked?”
Eric leaned against the doorframe and shrugged, pulling the borrowed keys out of his pocket and tossing them casually in the air. “It would seem so. What can I say? I’m a bad boy.”
Unable to hold a straight face at that ridiculous line, the assistant snorted.
“Come on,” Eric coaxed. “I’ve got all kinds of juicy stories about the private lives of Danovian nobility. How about I tell you one, and you show me around?”
He needed to get into the back, the part of the lab that was restricted to the scientists and their assistants. If Anna wasn’t in her office she was probably back there, and his borrowed key ring could only get him so far—the restricted area was set on fingerprint locks.
The assistant hesitated. “I was on my way to do some calibrations on the new MRI machine,” he said.
Eric tossed him the key ring as a show of good faith, then loosened his tie. “Perfect!” he said. “I’ve always wanted to try out one of those things, see what all the fuss is about. I have to take my shirt off, right?”
The assistant grinned. “Oh yes,” he said, “you absolutely do.”
Thirty minutes later Eric was shirtless as promised, lying flat on his back and waiting for the tubelike machine to start up around him. There was one already on in the room across from his, and he could hear it thumping loudly even through the wall. “Is mine going to be that loud?” he called, but the assistant didn’t answer. He was already in the other room, fiddling with the controls. He’d told Eric to lie as still as possible while he got the MRI ready to go, but had only mentioned that Eric should expect “light tapping,” not what sounded like a herd of elephants line-dancing on his neighbor’s roof.
The intercom beeped. “Hold still please, Your Highness.”
Eric sighed and tried to stop fidgeting. As part of the process of drafting his healthcare bill, he’d interviewed quite a few patients to get a better idea of what they went through, and many of them had mentioned their fear of this machine even as they expressed eagerness to get its results. He could certainly understand the former. It was a good thing he was too sleepy to be claustrophobic, because this thing was narrow as hell. Maybe he could do a PSA or something to make them seem less scary.
Through the intercom, he heard a door open. “Morning, Anderson,” said a woman’s voice. There was a brief pause, then: “Holy Moses, you’ve got a live one for me today, huh? I could wash my panties on those abs.”
Eric smothered a smirk. The assistant must’ve accidentally left the intercom on. He had no idea who was speaking, but she sounded brash and also kind of cute in a dorky way. Who even said Holy Moses?
The man laughed. “I know, right? He’s all yours, Dr. Fernstone.”
Eric pulled his head up so fast he nearly hit it on the top of the machine, then remembered he was supposed to be lying still. Over the intercom, the door closed, meaning Anna was now alone in the control room. He’d finally found her. And she could hardly duck out of this meeting, not with him stuck in one of her very expensive machines.
“Hello!” he called.
She didn’t answer. And now that he thought about it, the assistant hadn’t answered his question about the thumping earlier either.
Great. He’d finally found the woman he needed to charm into accepting his funds, and the intercom was stuck on its one-way setting. On top of that, he was now awake enough to get well and truly claustrophobic.
Well, if she wouldn’t respond to shouting, he’d just have to get a little more inventive.
2
Anna took another gulp of her double-shot mocha as Anderson left the room. Her normal tea-and-flannel-pjs routine had failed her yet again last night, and she was running on about four hours of sleep. It was all Prince Eric’s fault. The royal family’s prodigal son had never taken anything seriously in his life as far as she could tell, but he’d suddenly done an abrupt about-face and was now chasing her down for meetings on a daily basis. The whole thing was making her anxious. She was half convinced he was doing it on purpose, too—dangling his funding in front of her like it was a cat toy that she was supposed to jump at without question, then punishing her with his incessantly cheerful emails and phone calls and in-person ambushes when she dared to turn him down.
She made a face, popping the lid off her coffee to lick the whipped cream off the top. The problem was, his funding would help her research. It would be so easy to let him set up a meeting, to accept the money, to not need to spend hours of her precious work time writing applications for more grants. If only her stepsister wasn’t the new Queen of Danovar, Anna would happily accept any funding the prince wanted to throw her way. But as things stood, she couldn’t accept the funds without all of her colleagues thinking she’d cheated by using her royal connections to further her research. And if there was anything Anna couldn’t stand, it was people thinking less of her work. She’d spent far too much effort to get approval to use this research facility and complete her study to let Prince Eric’s money taint it.
But at least she had the gorgeous specimen in the MRI to distract her. And testing a new patient would be the perfect excuse to continue avoiding Prince Eric, who the receptionist had mentioned was looking for her again. Anna was a little surprised this volunteer was a man, since her research was on the topic of breast cancer—but the disease affected men too, and it was exciting to have a more varied sample of patients from which to draw her results. If she could support her dissertation’s theory by showing initial proof of a drug capable of isolating and destroying a common type of breast cancer, she’d be able to take her pick of rich benefactors wanting to fund her research for the whole rest of her career.
She pressed the intercom button. “Okay, sir, I’m about to turn on the MRI. Let me know if you have any questions before we get started.” She let go of the button, but it stayed a glowing red. She frowned and pressed it a few more times. Weird. She’d have to get Anderson to check it later.
A furious banging interrupted her thoughts, making her jump and spill her precious coffee all over her lab coat. She yelped, then squinted at her monitors. The patient was banging his fist on the side of the lab’s very expensive, brand new MRI machine. Why the hell hadn’t Anderson strapped the patient down?
She set what was left of her coffee on the counter, allowing herself a half-second to mourn the whipped cream that she was now wearing, and hurried for the door—then paused. The banging had a strangely familiar rhythm to it. Was that…the Danovian national anthem?
She frowned, yanked open the door, and darted into the MRI room. “Stop it!” she shouted. “Do you even know how much that machine cost?” She smacked a button, and the gurney slid out. As it did, she caught a glimpse of a tattoo on the patient’s chest: a gorgeous griffin, its wings spread wide across the man’s even more gorgeous pecs.
Wait a second. She knew that griffin. From the front pages of every Danovian tabloid a few months back, when Prince Eric had showed off his new tattoo to the press.
“Hell’s bells,” she cursed, tempted to give the gurney a good kick and then run away before her arch-nemesis emerged from the machine. But she was too late. The man she’d been avoiding for weeks sat up and grinned at her, that ridiculously sexy grin
that crinkled the corners of his crystal blue eyes, and the best she could manage in the face of it was a mild glower. Good Lord, those abs really should be illegal. Though now that she was getting a close-up look, she had to say that his forearms might be even better.
Come on, Fernstone, get it together. Who gets turned on by forearms?
She shook herself and dug deep for her righteous anger, using it as a shield. She crossed her arms and sharpened her glower. “What are you doing? Do you know how much money you would’ve wasted if I’d turned that thing on? I barely have enough grants to get this study done as it is! How hard did you hit it? You could’ve damaged it, plus you made me dump my coffee all over myself.” She peeled her lab coat off, muttering.
Eric took a moment to respond, following her motions as she took off the coat, then his grin cranked back up to full wattage. “I’ll buy you a new one,” he said with a shrug.
“Oh no you won’t, there’s no way I’m going anywhere with you, not even to the nearest coffee shop.” He’d find some way to stretch the time, to use it to wheedle her into considering his offer. And she would not consider his offer.