Lady in Training (I'm No Princess Book 2)

by Elizabeth Stevens

  Chapter Eight

  It was plastered all over the newspaper and I was fuming.

  Forget Lady in Waiting. Gallyr Has a Lady Left Wanting.

  Four years ago when the seventh Duke of Genovich’s eldest daughter, Lady Malmont, arrived in our fair country, speculation was rife that she was home to wed one of Gallyr’s fine royal sons. Yet there has been no sign of the now almost twenty-year-old’s attachment to either of the king’s three sons, despite the clear means and their fathers’ close friendship.

  What is considered by many to be a considerable failing on Lady Malmont’s part is now believed to be remedied by her younger sister, Lady Tatiana Penrose. The far less refined eighteen-year-old arrived in the country for the first time less than a month ago and already she is romantically linked to His Royal Highness King Reginald’s youngest son, Prince Dominic.

  Used as a pleasing distraction from questions of the civil unrest brewing in the south of the country, Lady Tatiana spoke at a press conference early last week and all-but confirmed their attachment. Even without her confirmation, it is easy to see that the two are very much in love.

  Not only was the prince her escort for her presentation ball, but the two have been spotted out for a romantic day sightseeing in Genovich, attended the premier of the 2018 season of the Royal Gallyrian Ballet’s Nutcracker with her father, and it is believed that the prince’s lengthy sabbatical from military service is due to the couple’s newfound romance.

  Royal watchdogs are sure that Lady Tatiana has done in mere weeks what her older sister was unable to accomplish in four years. The question now remains whether the crown prince will be the only one announcing his engagement on Valentine’s Day? Or will Duke Genovich’s wilder daughter succeed in taming the heart of her wild-hearted counterpart once and for all?

  I threw the newspaper on the table and slumped back in my chair. “It’s complete bull–”

  “Tati,” Dad chastised.

  “None of it’s true. And worse is they’re blaming Lia for… What? Not seducing a prince? I thought we weren’t here to marry a prince?”

  “And I thought I’d told you the press was going to say you were anyway?”

  I huffed, picking up the paper again. “Very much in love? Pfft. Not likely.” Then something else hit me. “Wait. Distraction? I was a distraction?”

  Dad looked slightly guilty for a moment.

  “Why does it say I was a distraction?”

  Dad slid me a look like he thought I wasn’t going to be watching, then looked away quickly. “You haven’t seen it?”

  I shrugged. “No.” I had honestly refused to watch the video of my press conference and I hadn’t read anything that discussed whatever had been said before I made a blundering fool of myself. “Was I supposed to? Was I meant to study my plays to improve, Coach?”

  He sighed. “No. There was just some–”

  “Excuse me, Your Grace,” Hendricks said and I jumped, once again totally surprised by the way that man moved about so totally silently. “The car has entered the grounds.”

  The car? Wait for it… Mum!

  I jumped up excitedly and I wouldn’t have said that Hendricks turned a frown on me, but I think he was thinking it at me. Dad smiled and he followed me out to the front step where I bounced up and down as we waited for the car to arrive. Lia joined us after a while, giving what seemed like a somewhat terse smile, but I was too excited about seeing Mum to really stop and think about it.

  The car pulled up and Mum jumped out as soon as it was stopped and rushed up the steps to pull us all into a huge hug.

  “There you are!” she cried happily and I realised in that moment just how much I’d missed the scent that was inherently Mum. I didn’t know what it was, but it made me feel warm and gooey inside.

  “How was your trip, Annie?” Dad asked as they embraced separately.

  “Less glamorous than yours, Max,” she replied with a wink at me before she pulled Lia into a hug. “Why are we all out here freezing our arses off? Don’t you fancy people have receiving rooms for this sort of thing?”

  “What?” Dad scoffed as Mum let go of Lia to hug me. “You think Anya was going to sit inside and wait for you in the warm?”

  Mum kissed my hair as she let go and beamed at all of us. “Well I’m here now. Take me inside and for the love of God warm me up. This place is freezing.”

  “But beautiful!” I said to Mum and she laughed.

  “Yes! God, driving in from the airport. Max, those pictures don’t do it justice. The whole country is so idyllic I’d be forgiven for thinking it was made up.”

  Dad laughed and Mum put her arm around Lia as we all trooped inside, followed by Hendricks – who didn’t look quite so dire as I turned my huge grin to him – and Mrs Illyc and the others who’d met Mum outside as well.

  “This must be Miss Forsythe,” I heard the recognisable voice and looked up to see Nico heading nonchalantly across the entrance hall and we met up with him.

  “I am. And if I’m not mistaken, you’re Prince Dominic,” Mum replied with a smile.

  Nico inclined his head. “Please call me Nico, Miss Forsythe.”

  “Then you may call me Annie, Nico.”

  Mum – knowing all about these things from Dad – held out her hand. Nico took it obligingly and pressed a kiss to it. Still holding her hand, he lifted only his gaze to give her a smouldering smile.

  “I see now where your daughters get their beauty,” he said, with all the smooth suaveness he owned.

  I barely contained a laugh as Nico caught my eye with a mischievous twinkle and Mum chuckled.

  Meanwhile Dad muttered at Nico in Gallyrian and I got enough of it to understand Dad was telling Nico to back off women who were too old for him, and enough again to know that Nico asked Dad if he was calling Mum old.

  I snorted again and Dad looked at me, pride evident on his face. “Don’t tell your mother.”

  “Don’t tell her mother what, Max?” Mum asked.

  “Don’t tell her mother that I may have inadvertently called her old,” Dad admitted and even Lia cracked a smile.

  For a moment it felt like we were a family again, back before Dad had left. Although we hadn’t had a real life prince standing with us back then, just one of Lia’s dolls.

  “Old, Maxwell?” Mum teased. “I’ll show you old. Who complained at the Offspring concert because it was too loud?”

  “Annie,” Dad pleaded.

  “This guy,” Mum said as she pointed at Dad and looked around at all of us. “It was barely fourteen years ago and he was standing there complaining it was too loud.”

  “To be fair,” Dad said, “it was too loud.”

  “It was a concert, Max. It was supposed to be loud!”

  They shared a smile and I had to be thankful that my parents were friends. I knew plenty of people with separated parents who got along well enough, but they wouldn’t have shared Christmas together. I suddenly wondered what would happen if Rex managed to convince Dad to get married. Who would she be? Would I like her? Would she let us still have Christmas with Mum?

  “Come, Nico. Tell me all about your fair country,” Mum said, breaking me from my thoughts and I looked up to see Nico leading her away.

  I shook off the weird mood I’d suddenly found myself in and hurried after everyone.

  “Now, Nico,” Mum said. “Tell me all about this military service thing you’re doing.”

  As I walked into the sitting room behind them, Mum was taking off her coat and making herself at home as Nico explained the ins and outs of Gallyrian military service obligations.

  Mrs Illyc followed us in with one of the maids who was carrying a tray of tea things.

  “Your Grace?” Mrs Illyc said softly as she went up to him.

  “Ah, thank you.” Dad looked at me. “Coffee, kiddo?”

  I nodded. “Please.”

  “Annie will have tea, same as Lia’s, but I
’m not sure about Prince Dominic.”

  Nico looked over at the sound of his name, in the midst of laughing at something Mum had said. “Tea please, Uncle Max.”

  Dad nodded and looked to Mrs Illyc as though that was the secret command to get started.

  “You know,” I said to Dad and he leant towards me as he grinned at Mum.

  “What, kiddo?”

  “We’re being overrun with tea drinkers.”

  Dad laughed. “At least Nico likes coffee.”

  “Ah, so he’s just chosen to be on the other team today.”

  “What’s this about teams?” Mum asked.

  “Anya was just saying that us coffee drinkers have been overtaken by the tea drinkers and I reminded her that’s because Nico chose the side of tea today,” Dad said and Mum turned a smile on Nico.

  “Ah. A temporary alliance then?”

  Nico chuckled. “Of course.”

  “He’s just sucking up,” I said and Nico gave me a wink.

  Mum laughed. “A man who knows the way to a woman’s heart is through her caffeine intake. Watch out, this boy’ll go far.”

  Lia tried to cover a laugh and ended up with an undignified snort. “Mum!” she chastised. “You can’t call a prince ‘this boy’.”

  “On the contrary, Lia. Your mother can call me whatever she likes.”

  Mum’s smile was one of surprise and amusement. “He is exactly like I thought he’d be,” she said, looking at Dad.

  Dad frowned at Nico, but was only teasing. “Worse. He’s unfortunately still young enough to think he knows everything.”

  “And yet old enough to know with age comes experience,” Nico said and I was pretty sure he was also teasing.

  “Oh my,” Mum giggled as she pretended to fan herself. “Am I going to need to watch myself around you, Nico?”

  Nico gave her a smooth smoulder. “Only if you want to.”

  Dad muttered at Nico in Gallyrian too fast for me to catch as usual, but whatever he’d said only earnt him a cheeky smirk from Nico and Dad shook his head and gave me a shrug.

  We all sat down to tea and chatted for hours. Mum was quite taken by Nico – seriously and jokingly. And I honestly didn’t blame her. He had the ability to be serious and sensible when the situation absolutely called for it, but he was also quick to laugh and funny. It also didn’t hurt that he was clever enough that his wit was perfectly able to keep up with Mum’s.

  And as the afternoon progressed, both Lia and Dad relaxed significantly. Gone was almost all trace of what I’d come to see as the stuffy duke, he was back to the usual guy I knew from Australia. Lia was smiling and laughing and joked with everyone even when Nico made a comment about how she seemed less shy than usual.

  But that was just Mum. She brought out the best in everyone she met. That was not to say the woman couldn’t be a task master when she wanted. She just also had this free and easy nature to her than people couldn’t help but enjoy.

  Before dinner, Mum went up to her room – the one in our hallway – to freshen up and Lia and I lounged around on her bed like we used to, chatting and bickering good-naturedly.

  Then the five of us ate dinner together and sat up long into the night talking. I felt like I learnt more about Mum and Dad and Nico in that one day than I had in the whole time I’d known any of them.

  Especially my parents as they reminisced about their early relationship, how Mum met him in Gallyr and he followed her home to Adelaide like a stray puppy. They told stories they never would have told us before and it was both exciting and terrifying to learn about my parents as the people they were, not just the mum and dad who raised me.

  Chapter Nine

  “Dad, talk to me,” I said.

  He sighed heavily. “Why do you have to be so much easier to deal with when you know the whole story? With Lia, I can tell her to trust me and she does. You only trust me when I give you reason to. It’s rude.”

  I smiled. “Sorry. Not sorry.”

  His smile was resigned. “You know that Lia was not assigned to Neil when she first arrived. Yes?” he asked and I nodded. Dad leant back in his chair and he looked old and tired. “There were some threats against her–”

  “What?” I shot forward in my chair and felt my adrenaline pumping in serious fight mode.

  He waved a hand at me and I tried not to retrospectively worry then. “Not physically. As far as we knew she was never in any real physical danger. But the threats had been made and Rex especially didn’t want to risk it. So Neil was assigned and it hopefully acts as a decent deterrent.”

  “And I got Nikolai because…?”

  “Because the threats were made against you both.”

  Who’d want to threaten me? “Why?”

  “As a means of getting to Rex through me.”

  I frowned. “In what way?”

  Dad looked at me seriously. “If you were to kidnap the child of the king’s advisor, a man who had also been his close friend for their whole lives, you’d probably think you had a very convincing argument to encourage the king to do whatever you wanted.”

  That sounded serious. “Really?”

  Dad nodded, sombre. “That was the gist of the threat. With Lia at uni, they seemed to think they’d have more opportunities against her.”

  “So that’s why only in Albia? Why I barely even see Nikolai here?”

  “Are you saying you miss Nikolai’s shadow?” Dad asked wryly.

  I smirked. “No. I wouldn’t suggest such a thing. I was just wondering if the security here was better or something.”

  Dad scoffed. “Better than the royal palace? No. Not better. More like we’re far enough away to be annoying and a smaller group of people that it would be harder to blend in with. Rex has lived in that palace almost is whole life and he still wouldn’t know every staff member by sight, as much as he’d like to.”

  I nodded. “Okay. So hence we get guards basically twenty-four-seven in Albia.”

  Dad’s head waggle was rather noncommittal. “Allowing for them to sleep, yes. There are patrols at night and staff are discouraged from moving about hallways between certain hours which means that anyone who is wandering around is more likely to not belong. It’s difficult. The more guards and shifts we give someone like you and Lia, the more people will have cause to think you’re important enough to target on numerous levels. But on the other hand, we don’t want to risk you being hurt.”

  I nodded slowly, thinking I understood to a degree. “I guess that makes sense. We are, after all, nothing all that special. But more guards will make us look more special and that will make us be more special?” I wrinkled my nose, hoping that made sense.

  “Even so.”

  I breathed out. “Disney don’t show you all this stuff in the movies.”

  Dad laughed. “No, kiddo. They don’t.”

  “It’s a wonder Lia adjusted so well,” I said sarcastically.

  Dad shrugged, a warm smile on his face. “Lia’s excellent at the society stuff. She doesn’t rebel or argue against her father assigning her a bodyguard, or the fact she has to dress appropriately or behave herself.”

  “Whereas I’m the total opposite!” I gasped teasingly.

  Dad’s smile grew somewhat serious. “You’re not as…” He paused.

  “Innocent?”

  That smile flared back again. “Not the word I was looking for. But it will do. Lia’s not fragile, but you’re more pessimistic than her. You don’t dwell too much on the bad things and make them worse. And she often…”

  “How’s that eloquence going for you?”

  “Shut up,” he muttered. “You know what I mean.”

  “I do.”

  And I did. Lia was all things nice and kind and happy. It wasn’t like she couldn’t handle the bad things. But it had become habit to shield her from them as much as possible. I was the one Dad could talk to about the serious things. I was the one who wanted to know a
bout the bad as well as the good. Lia didn’t look for the bad, she didn’t like to see it. She was one of those people who always saw the best in people and, while I sometimes envied her, I couldn’t have done it. She had a naiveté to her that no one in the family wanted to take away if we didn’t have to.

  “So you understand that you can’t tell her any of this?”

  I nodded. “I know. I’ll keep her protected. Her emotions anyway, I’d suck at the physical guard stuff.”

  Dad shook his head with a huff of a laugh. “Speaking of emotional protection…”

  I sighed. “What?”

  “Nico.”

  My sigh was more exasperated that time. “Seriously?”

  “I know you’re smarter than this. But you two have looked very close recently and I just wanted to check you’re still smarter than this.”

  I rolled my eyes. “We’re friends, Dad. Is that a crime?”

  “No. But what I might do to him if you let him hurt you will be.”

  I snorted, knowing exactly what Dad said when he said that. “Thanks. But I like to think he’d be the one hurting on the other side of any encounter we might have.”

  “And you’re sure Nico knows that you’re just friends?”

  I nodded. “He’s hot, sure. But he’s totally not my type. For starters, he’s a prince. I want nothing to do with that.” I scoffed, “Who the hell would.”

  “Your sister for one.” Dad looked somewhat pained and I lost all sarcasm and joking.

  “Yeah okay.” I fidgeted with my hands in my lap. “Look… I didn’t know that this was all going to get so… I didn’t know that the media was going to shame her for not dating a prince, Dad.”

  He nodded. “I know that and, deep down, Lia knows it, too. It’s just hard for her. I don’t know if she actually wants to be with…any of them or if she just hoped to do more with her life. But she knows, kiddo. She knows you love her and she knows that you don’t think less of her or feel superior or even want any of the same things she does. But…”

  “She still feels it.”

  “Lia is very aware of what people think of her and she wants them to think well of her. She’s spent her whole life in Gallyr trying to show people she’s good and kind and loves the country as much as them. She could ignore the rumours before because there was no basis for them–”