by Emma Lea
Meeting Prince Charming
A Bookish Book Club Novel
Emma Lea
Copyright © 2018 by Emma Lea Writer
All rights reserved. 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.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Cover design by Michelle Birrell
Book design and production by Michelle Birrell
Cover photograph licensed by Adobe Stock
Created with Vellum
Contents
Other books by Emma Lea
About this Book
Author’s Note
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
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Epilogue
A Sneak Peek at the next Book
Chapter 1
Acknowledgments
The Young Royals
About the Author
Thanks
Other books by Emma Lea
Other books by Emma Lea
This is Emma Lea’s complete book library at time of publication, but more books are coming out all the time. Find out every time Emma releases a book by going to her website (www.emmaleaauthor.com) and signing up for her Newsletter.
SWEET ROMANCES
These are romantic tales without the bedroom scenes and the swearing, but that doesn’t mean they’re boring!
The Young Royals
A Royal Engagement
Lord Darkly
A Royal Entanglement
A Royal Entrapment
A Royal Expectation
A Royal Elopement
A Royal Embarrassment
A Very Royal Christmas
A Royal Enticement
Bookish Book Club Novellas
Meeting Prince Charming
Meeting the Wizard of Oz
Meeting Santa Claus
SWEET & SEXY ROMANCES
In my Sweet & Sexy Romances I turn up the heat with a little bit of sexy. No swearing, or very minimal swearing, and brief, tasteful and not too graphic bedroom scenes.
Love, Money & Shoes Series
Walk of Shame
Standalone Novels
Amnesia
HOT & SEXY ROMANCES
Hot & Spicy Romances turn the heat way up. They contain swearing and sexy scenes and the characters get hot under the collar.
Recommended for 18+ readers
TGIF Series
Girl Friday
Black Friday
Good Friday
Twelve Days
Twelve Days of Christmas - Her Side of the Story
Twelve Days of Christmas - His Side of the Story
Collins Bay Series
Last Call
The Christmas Stand-Off
Standalone Novels
Learning to Breathe
Romantic Suspense
Hide & Seek
TOO HOT TO HANDLE ROMANCES
These are definitely 18+ reads and contain graphic sex scenes and high level swearing – not for the faint of heart
The Young Billionaires
The Billionaire Stepbrother
The Billionaire Daddy
The Billionaire Muse
The Billionaire Replacement
The Billionaire Trap
Christmas with the Billionaire
Music & Lyrics
Rock Star
Songbird
Strings
Sticks
Symphony
The Playbook Series
In Like Flynn
Manscaping
Serendipity Trilogy
The Wrong Girl
The Right Girl (coming soon)
The Only Girl (coming soon)
About this Book
Georgie Danners is a nerd and proud of it. She is also the proud owner of Bookish, a bookshop/cafe in the small Northern Tablelands town of Oxley Crossing. She loves all things books and movies and computer games and has a soft spot in her heart for one of Australia’s greatest exports, Connor Faulkes, aka Prince Charming.
Connor Faulkes, movie star, is happy to spend the next six weeks with his Gran while she recuperates from a fall that resulted in a broken leg. It would give him an opportunity to have some down time before the filming on his next movie starts and he might even be able to squeeze in some rock climbing if he’s really lucky. What he did not expect was to run into, literally run into, a quirky woman who captures his heart with her adorable dorkiness and cute smile.
But can the Prince Charming of the RomCom world really find the girl of his dreams in a shy, socially awkward bookshop owner who would rather live life vicariously through the characters between the pages she reads? Or is this budding romance destined to be a box office fail?
Author’s Note
Meeting Prince Charming takes place in a fictional town in the Northern Tablelands of New South Wales in Australia. The Northern Tablelands, also known as the New England Tablelands, are situated on a plateau in the Great Dividing Range and are the largest highland area in Australia with an elevation of 1,000 metres and more above sea level. Oxley Crossing takes its name from John Oxley, an Australian explorer who passed through the area in 1818.
Australia happens to be in the Southern Hemisphere, and as such, the seasons may be different to what you’re used to. Summer in Australia is at Christmas (December to February), the new school year begins in February and finishes in December and the final year of high school is Grade 12. Tertiary education is usually University or TAFE (Technical And Further Education) or other vocational training.
Boxing Day is celebrated on December 26 and started as the traditional day for servants and tradesmen to receive their ‘Christmas Box’ from their bosses or employers. It is a public (or bank) holiday and has become synonymous with big retail stores sales.
Other fun facts about Australia:
- We use the metric system for measurement (millimetres, centimetres, metres and kilometres)
- We use Celsius for temperature (30℃ is equal to 86℉)
- we use dollars and cents for currency
- Yes, we have some of the most dangerous creatures on earth living in our country
- No, we don’t have koalas, kangaroos and wombats as pets
- we like our beer cold (and our wine too)
This book contains Australian spelling and you may even stumble across a few colloquial slang words - a quick Google search should be able to provide a meaning if you’re unsure.
I wrote this book for me :) But I dedicate it to all those other women out there who like to escape into romance novels and dream about Prince Charming too.
1
Georgie Danners pulled her car to a stop by the kerb and turned off the engine. She stared out the passenger window at the house a
nd then looked down at her phone to double-check the address. She had known Dawn for ages; she was a regular customer at Bookish and a loyal member of the Bookish Book Club, but this was the first time Georgie had ever been to her house. It was a beautiful Federation style house, with red brick and tile, white mullioned windows and white trim. The house was not unusual for the town of Oxley Crossing, as the abundance of well-maintained Federation homes kept the town on the tourist maps. What was surprising was that this particular house was also rumoured to be the house in which Conner Faulkes had grown up. Connor Faulkes, the movie star. Connor Faulkes, the leading man, the love interest, the romantic lead. Connor Faulkes, aka Prince Charming.
Georgie hadn’t grown up in Oxley Crossing, so she didn’t know if the rumours were true and Dawn had definitely not mentioned anything. As desperately as Georgie wanted to know everything about the actor (who she sometimes pretended was her own leading man), she knew it would be rude to ask so she kept her mouth shut. Now she was sitting in front of the house that had played out in her fantasies, wondering just what its secrets were and whether she would be lucky enough to learn any of them.
“Don’t be an idiot,” Georgie said to herself with a shake of her head.
She gathered together her iPad, her copy of ‘A Royal Engagement’, her over-large and over-flowing handbag, and the Tupperware container of freshly made muffins and bumped her hip against the door of her car to close it. Juggling everything else in her arms, she beeped her car locked and walked up the paved path. She admired the immaculately trimmed hedges and clearly delineated garden beds with their sharply trimmed edges, freshly laid mulch and not a single weed to mar the landscaping. There were three tiled steps that lead to the tiled front porch and the imposing door with a striking red Waratah beautifully represented in lead-light.
Not for the first time, Georgie wondered what she was doing here. The Bookish Book Club was normally held at Bookish, her bookshop/cafe, but somehow she had been convinced to move it to Dawn’s house while she was recuperating. The other ladies hadn’t minded and initially, neither had Georgie. That was until this morning when she realised she wouldn’t be in the familiar surroundings of her cozy little shop. Georgie was not the adventurous type and much preferred to enjoy the wonders of the world through the pages of a book rather than in actual real life. She lived her life between her apartment in the attic above her shop, her shop, and the local grocery store. And she liked it that way.
But here she was, completely out of her comfort zone, on the steps of a relative stranger’s home, bound by a commitment that she wished she’d been brave enough to refuse. That’s what it came down to, really. She’d been too afraid to say no, which had forced her to do something she was even more afraid of doing. Oh why hadn’t she called Dawn and told her she was sick? But that would mean using the phone, cold calling someone she’d only ever spoken to in her shop, and that was just as far out of her comfort zone as coming here was. Her irrational fear of the telephone - well, it was more about speaking on the phone, she was just fine with text messages - meant that coming here for the Book Club was the lesser of two evils.
Gah! She was making herself crazy the longer she stood in front of the door over analysing why she was here. So, girding her loins, she took a deep breath and… well, knocked. She couldn’t see a door bell anywhere and she didn’t have a free hand with which to knock. She used her head - literally, not figuratively - she knocked on the door. Just as she was going in for the third knock - because you always knock in threes - the door opened and instead of her head hitting the wooden door, she hit something else. Something warm and firm and distinctly male.
The shock of it caused her to stumble into him, colliding with all that maleness. She dropped everything that she had been holding in her arms in attempts to break her fall. Unprepared for her assault on his person, the man - who she still didn’t know - overbalanced and the two of them landed in a heap on the gleaming wooden floor in the foyer. Her glasses slipped off her nose and skidded away, her handbag spewing its contents around them, her iPad made a suspicious cracking sound as it hit the floor and her brand new copy of ‘A Royal Engagement’ went skidding down the hall. Her fall was cushioned by that male body as she landed on top of him, eliciting a deep and breathless ‘oof!’ from him.
Mortification was the only emotion she felt as she lay there, unmoving, and hoping for the world to end. This was way beyond embarrassment. On a scale of one to ten, with one being mild blushing and ten being ground-opening-up-embarrassment, this was about forty-seven.
“Are you injured?” a deep, rich and familiar voice asked.
No, no, no. This could not get any worse, except yes, actually, it could.
“Miss?”
She opened her mouth to speak, but no words came out. No. Words. She couldn’t think of a single word as she lay sprawled over the top of a body that she had a sneaking suspicion was insured in the millions. Would he sue her for reckless endangerment? How much was that going to cost her? She had no idea and a quick mental calculation of what was in her bank balance was enough for her to know that there was no way she could pay whatever the damages were.
“Connor? What was that noise?”
“It’s all right Gran,” he called back, his voice rumbling through his chest and into Georgie’s.
The sound of Dawn’s voice prompted Georgie into action and she jumped up and backed away from the man on the floor without making eye contact. She was sure she must be blushing a bright, vibrant red from the top of her blonde pigtails to the tips of her pink Converse. She cursed her English skin that seemed to telegraph her every emotion without her permission. She squinted at the floor trying to see the bright pink of her frames, but everything was a hazy, fuzzy mess. She squatted down and started feeling around the floor, hoping to find her glasses before she stepped on them, and her hand landed on something warm and thick and definitely not her glasses.
“I don’t think that’s what you’re looking for,” he said as he lifted her hand from his thigh and put her glasses in it, “But these might be.”
She slid her glasses on, the world becoming clear again, and looked directly into the blue eyes of the man she had only ever seen on movie screens, in magazines, and on her computer screen. Connor Faulkes. Prince Charming.
“T-t-thank you,” she managed to stutter before standing up quickly and nearly losing her balance again. She began to gather her things without looking at him, all the time praying that she would wake up and that this would be nothing but a bad dream.
“Let me help—”
“NO!” She took a breath, “I mean, no thank you,” she said, still not making eye contact. “It’s fine, I’ve got it.”
Georgie managed to gather her things together and finally stood upright, desperate to get away from the man who she’d had a very teenage-like crush on since she’d first seen him in ‘The Lavender Keeper,’ his first movie and also her favourite.
“I’m Connor,” he said, “Dawn’s grandson.”
“Oh, hi. I’m Georgie,” she still couldn’t look at him because she knew if she did she would lose her hard-won capacity to speak. “Um, sorry about, well, that.”
‘Very good, Georgie,’ she thought to herself, ‘way to impress him with your sparkling conversational skills.’
He chuckled and the deliciousness of it skittered over her and she had to fight the desire to swoon. She was being utterly ridiculous and part of her was decidedly peeved at the way she had become a simpering mess around a man who was just a man. The other part of her reminded her that she was pretty much like this around all men. Well, all men except for her LAN party friends who she didn’t think of as, well, men. Huh. That was rather mean of her. They were men, of course, just not the type of men that made her speechless and clumsy.
“I take it you’re here for the Book Club?” he asked and she just nodded. “You’re not hurt are you?”
“Just my pride,” she said and then bit her lip to make sure
nothing else inappropriate came out of her mouth. Her cheeks burned and she wished fervently for this awkward situation to be over.
He chuckled again and the reached to take the Tupperware container of mercifully undamaged muffins. “Let me take these to the kitchen and I’ll show you where Gran is.”
He walked away, down the hall and she followed at a safe distance, definitely not looking at what a fine figure he cut from behind.
“Here we are,” he said to her, stopping at the entrance to a large, sunny room. “Look who I found, Gran.”
“Oh Georgie, dear,” Dawn said from her seat on a recliner, her broken leg elevated and encased in a bright purple plaster cast.
Georgie crossed the room to drop a quick kiss on her cheek. Okay, so they weren’t exactly strangers. Dawn had become a great friend and Georgie was saddened to see her laid up. The woman was always so vibrant and active and Georgie constantly forgot that she was in her seventies. She only hoped she looked that good when she reached Dawn’s age.
