Not Your Cinderella: a Royal Wedding Romance (Royal Weddings Book 1)

by Kate Johnson

  And finally, for those of you awaiting the patter of little royal feet, Their Royal Highnesses The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge were this week very pleased to announce the arrival of twins: a pair of kittens called Alexander and Angelica. The Palace confirmed that they won’t be added to the line of royal succession…

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks must go to:

  The Naughty Kitchen, as ever, for cheerleading, advice, beta-reading and wine. For saying, “Sure, you can write a Royal Wedding book, edit it, format and publish it in four months. Easy,” and looking at eleventy-million cover ideas. Alison May, Annie O’Neil, Immi Howson, Janet Gover, Rhoda Baxter and Ruth Long, you rock.

  Jan Jones, also for cheerleading, beta-reading and suggesting wedding selfies.

  The friends and family who endured me turning into Random Facts Girl: Royal Family Edition (aye but it won us that pub quiz, didn’t it?)

  The RNA Cambridge Chapter, especially Lucy Sheerman, for fact-checking a few things for me.

  Harry & Meghan, who announced their engagement and reminded me of a book I once started about a younger brother of the heir to the throne...

  Author’s Note

  The branch of the royal family in this book is, obviously, fictional (please read on for a family tree). It’s a guess at what might have happened if Edward VIII had married someone his family and government approved of, and therefore hadn’t been required to abdicate in favour of his brother, so setting in motion the royal family we know today. Jamie’s grandmother would be the first cousin of our Queen Elizabeth (the great aunt he mentions in St George’s Chapel). Freda Dudley Ward was one of Edward’s girlfriends before he met Wallis Simpson, so the supposition isn’t that outrageous. Maybe.

  The Cambridge college Jamie attends, Lady Mathilda, is likewise fictional, but aspects of it, like its location and the Master’s Garden are based on Corpus Christi, on Free School Lane. The Prince’s Arms is not based on a real pub, but its location is roughly that of the Eagle or the Bath House on Bene’t Street. The Watson & Crick and Franklin plaques are in the middle room of the Eagle; there’s a beer called DNA in their honour.

  The Corn Exchange is a brilliant live venue. I don’t believe Crowded House were playing there in January 2018, but I’ve seen Neil Finn live there more than once. I hope he forgives the dialogue I’ve put into his mouth. The Royal Albert Hall concert Jamie describes was real, however, and the events surrounding it more or less as he tells them. That was the incident with the unplugged version of Fall At Your Feet. For real.

  Harlow isn’t quite as bleak as I made it out to be. Mostly. Sorry, Harlow. But those emergency-services blue flashing Christmas lights really do my head in.

  The sharper-eyed amongst you might notice Jamie and Edward’s coats of arms are based upon a certain pair of real-life princes. The Prince of Wales has a very different coat of arms (until he becomes King, upon which he inherits the Royal Standard of the monach and his son takes up the PoW arms), but the Queen’s other children and grandchildren bear some version of the Royal Standard.

  Heraldry, like royalty, is an arcane world with very precise rules that can also be changed on the spot. And yes, the man in charge of it really is called Garter King of Arms.

  Those of you who’ve visited Chatsworth will probably find Lady Olivia’s family estate of Allendale to be strikingly familiar. The Hunting Tower is certainly a real place and you can actually rent it for a week.

  Royal brides have a very strong tradition of wearing all white (set by Queen Victoria), with a white bouquet. Clodagh might not have been allowed to get away with the ensemble she chooses in real life... ah but then she’s not your usual royal bride, is she?

  Here’s a weird note to leave you on, however: I first made notes on this book in 2006, a full 11 years before I actually decided to write it. The fictional royal family was mapped out at that stage, and the oldest son of the Prince of Wales had two children, called George and Charlotte (I changed their names for obvious reasons!), with a third unnamed child on the way. I’d intended it to be a boy called James. We’ll see...

  Kate, February 2018

  Royal Family Tree

  

  Also Available

  All books: http://author.to/KateJohnsonAuthor

  Max Seventeen: Paranormal Romantic Novel of the Year 2017. Sci-fi action romance http://mybook.to/Max17

  Max Seventeen: Firebrand. Sci-fi sequel http://mybook.to/Max17Firebrand

  The Sophie Green Mysteries: chick-lit mystery http://mybook.to/ISpy

  The Untied Kingdom: alternate history romance http://mybook.to/UntiedKingdom

  Impossible Things: fantasy romance http://mybook.to/ImpossibleThings

  For more information please visit www.KateJohnson.co.uk

  Keep scrolling for an excerpt from Not Your Prince Charming, book two in the Royal Weddings series, available Summer 2018…

  Excerpt from Not Your Prince Charming

  book two of the Royal Weddings series

  Prologue

  “Can you swim?”

  The man in black hissed the question at Eliza, who was far too terrified by the fearsome knife he brandished to lie. She nodded.

  “Well? Can you swim well?”

  She nearly laughed at that, but since she had duct tape over her mouth she could only nod again.

  The knife came closer, a foot or so of machete blade, glinting evilly in the low light. She sobbed behind her gag as he grabbed her wrist and then, bewilderingly, sawed through the cable ties cuffing her to the pipe.

  “When I say,” he told her in a low voice, muffled by the scarf he wore over his lower face, “follow me to the back of the boat. Jump over the side. Not the back, the side, do you understand?”

  She tore off the duct tape, which hurt, and opened her mouth to speak, but he clapped a hand over it.

  “Quiet! If they get the tiniest hint you’re not tied up in here we’re both dead.”

  Eyes huge, she nodded again. He removed his hand, then bent down and tied something to her ankle. “So we don’t get separated,” he explained, which wasn’t much comfort.

  He climbed the short ladder to the deck hatch. After a moment, he motioned her to follow into the rainy darkness, and she didn’t exactly have a lot of choice.

  Eliza crept after him, not really believing she could trust him but also not having any other options. Her kidnapper handed her out onto the deck, then pointed to the side of the boat and made a jumping motion.

  Eliza took one look at the endless blackness surrounding the small boat and shook her head rapidly.

  “Jump or die here,” he snarled, and gave her a shove.

  As one of the other men approached, calling something in Spanish, Eliza suddenly found her courage and made a run for the side of the boat. She was on her feet, crouching to dive before she heard the shout, too far to turn back, but she heard a smack and a crash and didn’t know who had hit who.

  Her body made the decision for her, and she slid smoothly into the black water without much of a splash, winnowing like a fish underwater before she risked coming up for air.

  The boat was already a few hundred metres away, and her rescuer was nowhere to be seen.

  Chapter One

  Royalgossip.com: We didn’t know Princess Elizabeth was this hot!

  On vacation in the Caribbean with her friend Melissa Featherstonehaugh, the British Princess (14th in line to the throne) was seen island-hopping in a series of skimpy bikinis. Elizabeth is better known for being seen in cute dresses and really weird hats (checck out our gallery of royal guests at Prince Jamie’s wedding), so we had no idea she was hiding this knockout body under them all! According to one schoolfriend, the princess used to swim at college, which might account for her bangin’ bod. Her security team better be working hard!

  Eliza set her iPhone in the dock and cranked up the volume. Wilson hated reggae music, so it was guaranteed to keep her away from the balcony. She angled her recliner to face away fr
om the hotel room, made a show of stretching out on it, and waited ten agonising minutes before she took the waterproof bag from her cute beach tote and began transferring the contents over.

  She waited until Wilson had made her half-hourly check on her, waving cheerily with a cocktail glass in hand, then casually slipped into her private infinity pool.

  The view from up here was spectacular. Below her were countless other suites and pools, but hers was the highest and best and she could see right across the bay, lit up like a fairy paradise in the darkness. The Caribbean was beautiful in the daytime, but it was darkness she needed to make her escape.

  Casually, she slid the waterproof bag from the lounger and slipped the strap around her waist. It bobbed on the surface, and Eliza pushed it in front of her so her bodyguard wouldn’t see. She leaned against the ledge of the infinity pool, as if admiring the view, for ages.

  Then, when she’d decided it was dark enough and she’d waited long enough, she swung herself onto the ledge and over it in a few very quick and well-practised moves.

  How’s that for ‘not a ladylike career’? she thought savagely as she hung from her fingertips before dropping as quickly and quietly as she could into the pool below. Then again, into the main swimming pool, where she got herself to the edge nearest the hotel in record time, snagged a towel and was through the bar and the lobby, adrenaline buzzing, right on time.

  “Ma’am, you can’t take that towel--” began a member of staff in his immaculate livery.

  “Yes, of course, here you go,” she said, handing it over and skipping away, around the corner where Melissa was waiting with the car.

  “OMG you did it!” squealed Mel.

  “Of course I did. I’ve been jumping in and out of pools since before I could walk.” Eliza leapt into the car and they were away.

  She shimmied into her clothes as Mel drove, her bikini still damp, funelled some cash and a lipbalm into the neon plastic tube on a cord around her neck, and laughed at the warm Caribbean wind as it dried her hair.

  “Retro rave here we come!” she cried.

  The party was on a private island, and Melissa’s contact was waiting at the docks for them with a speedboat. “It’s so James Bond,” Mel giggled as she poured them a glass of champagne and the hills of the big island vanished into the darkness. “Are you sure Wilson didn’t see you?”

  “Course not. If she had, I wouldn’t be here.”

  She felt kind of guilty for escaping her bodyguard like that. Wilson would probably get into trouble. But Eliza was so bloody bored of being watched all the time, everywhere she went. How was she ever supposed to meet a guy if her human guard dogs kept scaring them all off?

  Mel gave her some glow bands to stack above the armfuls of woven friendship bracelets she’d amassed on the island. On her first day here, she’d been photographed wearing one, so now everywhere she went people presented them to her.

  The private dock was lit up with Chinese lanterns and the sound of music thudded across the water. Reflections danced in bright colours, and Mel turned to her and grinned.

  “This is going to be so awesome. Just what I need to forget that ratbag cousin of yours!”

  Eliza made a sympathetic face, but secretly she thought her friend was really milking it. The way Mel made it out, her heart had been broken by the love of her life abandoning her to marry someone he’d known for five minutes, when the truth was she’d slept with Jamie once two years ago and he’d been trying to get her out of his hair ever since.

  “And maybe you’ll finally meet someone too!” Mel added belatedly. “About time you did.”

  Eliza gave her a smile she knew didn’t reach her eyes. You try meeting someone when everything you do is watched by bodyguards and paparazzi.

  They were led up the stairs from the dock by Day-glo arrows, into a terrace heaving with people drinking and dancing. Beyond it, Eliza could see more levels of partying, some under cover, some open to the stars. At a neon mixing desk stood a DJ she was supposed to have heard of, posing like mad as he mixed tunes she vageuly remembered from her childhood.

  “Isn’t this the most?” Mel gushed, threading her way through partygoers to the bar, where she was handed a couple of test tubes of something that glowed green. “Bottoms up!”

  Not Your Prince Charming will be available in print and ebook Summer 2018

  Excerpt from Max Seventeen

  Paranormal Romantic Novel of the Year 2017

  Max was running.

  The day was hot and bright, because days were always hot and bright on this crappy planet at the arse-end of the universe. Cheaply terraformed, barely able to support the dreg ends of life, farted at by the sun on a regular basis. Nobody lived here if they didn’t have to.

  At this moment, Max was sincerely considering how much ‘have to’ there was about living on Zeta Secunda, a planet so shitty it didn’t even have a proper name. There was a spaceport a few clicks away, but spaceports required ID and security, and Max was fresh out of both. Well. Fresh out might be a stretch. Probably that last ID had ended up in the same place as that last decent pair of boots: inside those fecking sand-beasts. Ten feet long, and that was just the jaw. Max had been lucky to get out alive.

  For a given value of luck, anyway. That bunch of culchies were still mad at Max for something. Hard to figure out what. Might’ve been the card sharping. Might’ve been the fake money. Might’ve been that fella left with his pants hanging out the window.

  Either way, Max was running.

  Sand fountained up ahead, and a whine whistled past. Grand, so they’d found their guns. At least here in the badlands they were the cheap old kind with bullets, which required aiming and accuracy, neither of which this lot seemed to have. Quite probably they were hungover. Possibly also still drunk. Not that Max could judge, brain still throbbing with last night’s poteen.

  Max was running on empty.

  “I see you, kid!”

  Max ignored that, and leapt over some low rocks to the sand below. Ahead, there was nothing but more rocks and more sand. So much more sand.

  “Ain’t nowhere to hide!”

  Yeah, obvs. Sand, rocks, more sand. Max was dark with dirt and sun and vaguely sand coloured, but not nearly enough. There was nowhere to go, no shelter, no respite. Sooner or later they’d catch up.

  Another smash. Another whine. Closer this time.

  Max stumbled, foot rolling on a stone, knee thudding into the sand. Hell of a day to have fallen out the window with no clothes on.

  The sun was fierce punishing. The desultory government advisories for Zeta Secunda included not going outside without solar protection. They meant proper pharma grade sunscreen. They didn’t mention the fucking sand. Max didn’t even have a shirt.

  “Run, punk, run!” Those yahoos were getting closer. Some terrible little land buggies, or maybe horses. They used both around here, and it wasn’t as if the wind was giving away any clues. No bugger was rich enough for a heavy-air vehicle. The HAVs and the HAV-nots, Max thought hysterically, stumbling on.

  Smash, whine. Closer together. Sound and sand hitting at the same time.

  Shit, not this time, don’t let me die like this! I’ve got no fucking pants on!

  The ground shook with the vehicles, pounded with the hooves of the horses. Closer, closer. Max kept on running. The sand gave way, shelving and sliding. Burned like the lava it once had been, grinding and grating, raw against raw skin. Max slid, the sand like waves made out of grit, desperate not to scream.

  Sand fountained, the herald of impeding doom, and Max scrambled to bleeding feet, limping on over unforgiving dunes. The shadows closed in.

  Max kept on running.

  The engines of the Dauntless hummed smoothly, at a frequency that seemed perfectly calculated to grate on Riley’s nerves.

  Just four more years, then you can quit this fascist popsicle stand.

  Fantasies of ripping out that Service chip they’d implanted and hurling it at the captain mad
e up quite a lot of Riley’s downtime.

  “Sir?”

  The captain gave no indication she’d heard.

  “Sir, it’s about Pherick. Pherick Green, the coolant engineer? It’s just, he’s been gone three standard weeks now, and—”

  The captain tapped something on her tablet and didn’t look up. “Green is on personal leave.”

  “Yes, sir, I know. But we’re not allowed personal leave longer than—”

  “The Service is capable of making exceptions,” said the captain coolly.

  Really? thought Riley. In whose favour? Eleven bloody years I’ve been committed to the Service, and when was the last time I got any leave?

  The dark thought occurred that on Sigma Prime, you could commit murder and still get out of jail in less than eleven years.

  “I understand you are friends,” said the captain, and there was something in the way she said it that made Riley uneasy.

  “We work together.”

  “I see. And Ensign…” she tapped her tablet, “Yakira is not an acceptable substitute?”

  “Ensign Yakira is doing a fine job.”

  “Then what is the problem?”

  The problem? Riley wanted to say. The problem is that Pherick just disappeared one day, barely a few hours after telling me he’d uncovered something really disturbing but he couldn’t tell me what. The problem is that his brother Jameson went AWOL on an away mission three months ago and he’s not even supposed to be part of away missions. The problem is I think something very strange is going on here and I’m kind of scared that if I start asking questions about it, I’ll be the next one to disappear.