The Royal Runaway

by Lindsay Emory

  Which meant we were north of the city.

  Close to my father’s house. Which was the last place I had seen Christian, at the ball celebrating our wedding two nights before we were supposed to say “I do.”

  eleven

  “STRIP.”

  “Excuse me?”

  Nick reached for my still-sodden sweater. “Take it off or I’ll take it off for you.”

  My hurried step backward took me out of his reach, but could not protect me from his order. He was looking at me like he meant his threat. “Do you have any chips, trackers, anything like that on you?”

  I shook my head and noticed my hands were trembling with cold as I lifted my sweater. Even though it was late summer, the Comtesse had been freezing and Drieden was too far north for the sun to have completely dried me off as we’d puttered up the river. Nick looked critically at the sweater I’d just handed him, and then he tossed it into the fire he’d lit as soon as we’d arrived at this house.

  “Hey!” I cried out, but my favorite blue cashmere sweater was already in flames.

  Nick curled his fingers up at me. “Come on, off with the rest. The water would have probably fried any trackers, but we can’t be sure.”

  “How could I possibly have any trackers on me? And just what am I supposed to wear?” I was shivering in my jeans and undershirt, with goose bumps covering my bare arms, but I was certain that being in the nude, roaring fire aside, would result in me being even colder.

  “And whose house is this?” I demanded as Nick disappeared into a nearby closet and clothes flew back at me: a black T-shirt, men’s large. Black ski pants, also men’s large.

  “For Christ’s sake.” Nick stalked back to me and reached for the belt loop on my jeans. “Can’t you do as you’re told?”

  The absurdity of that question stunned me into mute immobility, but when he unbuttoned my jeans I snapped back into reality. “I’ll take it from here,” I informed him as I worked the wet denim over my hips.

  “The woman will freeze to death for the sake of her pride,” he muttered to himself.

  “Pride?” I choked, hopping on one foot, then the other as I tried to pull the pants off my ankles. This was the least proud moment of my life. “How about you’re a stranger and you’ve just demanded that I undress in front of you?”

  “To keep you alive, Princess.” He nodded at my white undershirt, so thin and damp he must have been able to see that no trackers were sewn into the seams.

  “No,” I said, using my hands to cover my chest. “I don’t have anything on me.” I slid one of my hands to cover my bikini briefs. “And why am I the only one who has to strip? Why are my clothes in the fire and you get to keep yours?”

  One of his eyebrows rose. “You’d like me to strip?”

  “Yes. I mean, no.”

  This caused the slightest of smirks to appear on his stern face. Right before he reached for my arm, pulling it toward him and running a practiced finger over my skin.

  “Are you serious? You think I have some . . . implant under my skin?”

  “They do it to dogs. They could do it to princesses.” He dropped my arm then, but when he reached for the other one, I clasped his broad forearm with my hand.

  The man was checking for devices under my skin. He was most definitely not a reporter.

  “Who are you, really?” I demanded.

  He dropped my arm. “Get dressed.”

  I looked at my clothes in the fire, already nothing more than a charred pile of fibers. Oh how I wished I could rebel against that command, but even with the fire, I was still thoroughly chilled. I scooped up the men’s clothing Nick had tossed at me, and since it seemed clean enough, I quickly pulled the black shirt over my head.

  “You will answer me.” My voice had a more imperious tone than a shivering woman shimmying into borrowed pants should be able to muster, but I’d had a lifetime of practice at imperial behavior.

  Once I was thoroughly drowning in a very unflattering ensemble of clothing that was five times too big for me, we faced each other.

  “Forgive me,” he started. “I failed to introduce myself properly at our first meeting. I am Nicholas Fraser-Campbell.”

  I shivered. Maybe I was still cold. Maybe it was the thrill of hearing his true name with all that cool, calm, deadly authority.

  “And who do you work for?” I asked.

  His chin lifted slowly and he watched me with keen eyes.

  “Who do you work for?” I repeated. “I know you’re not a reporter. You’re much too thorough in escaping from museums for that.”

  He hesitated for a half second. “I work for the British government.”

  “But not in an official capacity, surely.”

  “Official enough.”

  “But you have a death certificate!”

  His mouth turned up slightly. “My agency considered that a recruiting bonus.” He paused. “I’m an intelligence officer.”

  “You’re a spy,” I concluded, part annoyed, part in awe. “Like James Bond.”

  Nick made a face that clearly communicated what he thought of tuxedo-wearing martini aficionados.

  The truth of this situation settled in and I had to laugh. My life was seriously fucked up. I was left at the altar by my fiancé, only for his brother—a British-freaking-spy, no less—to take his place. “So the British government sent you here to find out why my fiancé left me.” I threw my hands up in the air. “Why not? I couldn’t figure it out, so why not ask some foreign spies to look into it?” I started to laugh hysterically. I couldn’t help it. This had to be a joke.

  Nick’s brows drew together. Perhaps it was because of my crazy cackling. Maybe I was finally, irrefutably, losing my mind.

  “This operation is not about your wedding.”

  He was so serious. And so was the word operation.

  And then I remembered another serious word that Nick had used back at the museum: kidnapping.

  My stomach clenched as things started to hit home. “Where is Christian?”

  Nick shot me a warning look and went to peer out the windows before shuttering them.

  If he wasn’t going to talk, I was. “You said he was kidnapped. So he’s not at his estate in Scotland?” The day after the wedding, Big Gran’s secretary had told me that Christian had gone home. The media had reported that he was ensconced behind the gates of Brisbane Castle, the family seat, and had been publicly shamed into hiding after his cowardly escape from Drieden.

  “Of course not—that’s the first place you’d look,” I responded to my own inquiry in a matter-of-fact way. “So was he kidnapped before or after the wedding march? Or is this all just a story Christian has concocted to save face?”

  He threw his hands up in the air in frustration. “You ask so many questions you’re going to drive me insane.”

  He thought he was going to go insane? I gripped the back of the nearest chair as I felt my heart race. Four months had gone by and I still had no answers as to why I had been the unwilling victim in the largest royal scandal in centuries. “Please tell me something,” I finally said, my voice hoarse. “What has happened? Why are you here?”

  Nick’s expression softened. “After the . . .” He faltered. “The wedding day, there were inquiries made by the Driedish government as to the whereabouts of your fiancé. When it was determined that he had not reentered the United Kingdom, there was a review.”

  Inquiries. Reviews. It all sounded so sterile. So institutional. So mundane.

  “And what did the review say?” I had never hoped so hard for a mundane answer.

  Nick’s eyebrows jerked together. “Around the same time, there was a separate inquiry into some secret financial records that had wound up at Christian’s law firm. Papers that some British analysts believed implicated the Crown in some way.”

  My head swam. “Why would Christian’s law firm have documents regarding the British monarchy?”

  His expression turned careful again. “Not the B
ritish monarchy. The Driedish monarchy.”

  • • •

  I DECIDED NOW WOULD BE a good time to sit. My brain worked better when it wasn’t trying so hard not to faint.

  Finally, I found my voice again. “I have more questions.”

  Nick had gone back to looking out the window, but he glanced over his shoulder. “No doubt.”

  “Whose house is this?”

  “John Lock, the lockmaster.”

  “You’re making fun of me.”

  “I would never.”

  “Whose clothes are these?”

  “A colleague of mine uses this house sometimes. They look like they’re his size.”

  “Another James Bond?”

  Nick’s jaw worked. “His name is Cornelius. Max Cornelius.”

  “Does your agency believe that there’s a connection between Christian’s disappearance and the Driedish Crown?” I asked quickly, hoping to catch Nick off guard. It worked for a moment before he collected his cool.

  “That’s what I’m here to find out.”

  My eyes felt hot; my cheeks flushed. I had woken up this morning ready to confront Nick over his true identity. But this had become something I wasn’t sure I could handle.

  “You can leave, you know.” Nick’s statement broke the silence.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’re free to go back. I’m not stopping you. I expect it will take ten hours for Driedish police and royal security to find this house. You’re welcome to stay until they surround it with a few dozen men pointing SG 540s at the door in case a bad guy pokes his head out first.”

  “Was it Tamar and Hugh shooting at us?” I asked.

  He continued as if I hadn’t spoken. “Your other option is to walk out that door, find a telephone, and call whatever secret number the royal security office gave you. You’ll be picked up in ten minutes.”

  The fact that he knew all these details about Driedish police and royal security procedures was interesting, and it added even more questions to the ones I already had about the kind of man I was dealing with. “You’d let me walk out of here?”

  “I wouldn’t hold you against your will.”

  “Let me rephrase the question.” I stood again. I was feeling stronger. “Is it safe for me to go back after Tamar and Hugh shot at us at the museum? After they know that you’re Christian’s brother?”

  Nick fell into a nearby chair and rubbed a hand over his face, like it was a burden to explain perfectly obvious things to me. It was rude. And impolite. I was a member of the royal family, and I deserved some answers. Which is what I said.

  “No.”

  “No what?” It wasn’t clear which question he was refusing to answer.

  His fists clenched and unclenched, as if he were fighting—and losing—some kind of inner battle. “I’m trying to answer. But I don’t know. On the one hand, you’re their princess. The likelihood of your security guards shooting at you again should be low.”

  “But they’ve already done it once.”

  “To be fair, perhaps they were only shooting at me.”

  “Well, which was it?”

  He pushed out of his chair like he was frustrated by something and said with a snarl, “When someone has a gun pointed at me, I don’t stop and ask them for a cup of tea to discuss their motivation.” The space between our bodies seemed to shrink. “I do what I was trained to do. I react according to the situation. Attack when necessary. Protect the asset.”

  There was my answer. In the intensity of his gaze, in his frustrated words.

  He had protected me. Because I was in danger. From my own guards, from whatever forces had stopped Christian from showing up to the altar at the cathedral.

  “I’m not going back to the palace,” I informed him.

  “Think long and hard about that.”

  “I don’t know if I can trust the people who are supposed to protect me, but you did.”

  He let out a sigh. “You’re more trouble than getting shot at, you know that?”

  “You’re the one who brought me here,” I slung back.

  “And I’m wishing to God I hadn’t.”

  I allowed myself the faintest of smiles as he stalked out of the room. Finally, someone who didn’t kiss my asset.

  twelve

  IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY, MY ancestor King Leopold III funded the building of a system of canals throughout the lowlands of Drieden to further the reach of the capital’s shipbuilding industry and nautical trade.

  Today the canals are mostly used for domestic tourism. It’s a tradition for Driedish families to rent houseboats and share them with friends and neighbors to cruise up and down the canals, enjoying the slim window of summer our little country enjoys.

  The house that Nick had brought us to was a narrow chimney of stone, about one room wide and three stories high. Situated at the first canal lock, it had probably been built for the lockmaster to collect tolls and supervise the lock machinery. At some point, someone had modernized the bathroom and windows and added an extra room along the shoreline, but other than that, it was as much the same as it had been in the seventeenth century, with wide oak-plank floors and a smoky coal haze that had never quite filtered out of the rooms.

  It was also a very strategic house, I realized, as I watched the early morning activity around the lock. Perched three stories above the riverbank, I could see the boats arriving, full of Driedish families, sleepy mothers clutching their coffees and trying to keep anxious children away from the rails of the deck.

  I heard Nick’s entrance into the room. Three-hundred-year-old floors did not keep secrets quietly. “You didn’t sleep,” he said.

  “No,” I said simply, not offering that I hadn’t slept much since Christian left. Or that I couldn’t sleep, worried as I was about Nick slipping out into the night.

  “There’s breakfast on the table.” I gestured toward what I had found in the cupboards in the tiny kitchen. Nick opened the paper wrapping of the traditional dried sausage. “You can have the rest. I’ve had enough.”

  “Last chance to leave.”

  I had thought about my situation a lot during the night. Of course I had. What was the best option for me? For Christian?

  Beyond a general statement that had been released to the media, no one had reported hearing or seeing my former fiancé since he’d left me at the altar.

  The narrative had been easy enough to believe. Christian Fraser-Campbell was publicly ashamed, driven to hide his face because he had been the fucktard to jilt the storybook princess, thereby depriving the world of their fairy-tale romance. I had believed it, too. The tale had been a healing balm for my red-hot humiliation.

  But in the silence of the night in this funny little house in my too-big borrowed clothes, alternative narratives had begun to take shape and substance.

  Christian had not been seen for four months. Although I had no evidence that he had been kidnapped, as Nick alleged, I also had no evidence that he was free.

  I didn’t know where Christian was, but I had to find out. Duty had been instilled in me from the time I was old enough to put my hand on my heart during the national anthem. Duty required that I assure his general safety, at the very least, before I kicked him in the balls.

  “As I said last night, I’ll be going with you,” I answered Nick politely.

  He exhaled roughly. “Wrong answer.”

  “You know a lot of things. About my city, about escape routes out of the museum, about the capabilities of palace security forces. But one thing you don’t know right now is where Christian is, and you’ll never be able to piece together his last weeks in Drieden without me or the people who work for me. Which is why I will be accompanying you as you search for clues to his disappearance.” I smirked at his horrified expression. “After all, who better than me to tell you everything you want to know about Christian’s life here in Drieden?”

  His scowl deepened. Probably because I had just laid out a perfect case.

>   “And one more thing. I am a royal princess of Drieden and you are on my soil, conducting this investigation only because I am allowing it. You will tell me any new information you come up with, and you will consult with me in all things. Are we clear?”

  Nick answered me with a raised eyebrow. Good enough.

  As he grumpily helped himself to the rest of the sausage, I couldn’t help but wonder about the questions that I had not been able to answer in the middle of the night. What had happened to Nicholas Fraser-Campbell? Why had he not returned to his family after serving in Afghanistan? And why show up now? Just to find Christian?

  And perhaps the most important question of all: Did I trust Nick Fraser-Campbell?

  Inexplicably, the answer was yes. Mostly.

  He had blackmailed me, tricked me, and taunted me. I realized now that it wasn’t because of me. It was because of the brother whom he had come back to find.

  And he had never hurt me. Not really. There had been threats, and a few glares, but I had the distinct impression that I meant something to him. My heart tugged a little. There was a strange attraction between us, and so far, I hadn’t felt unsafe with him. Now that I knew he was a British agent of some sort, I felt more confident having him on my side. After all, Queen Victoria had ensured her children married into every European royal family, so I had some important connections in London.

  But I was also realistic. He was a man with a death certificate already filled out. He might have nothing to lose. Or everything to lose.

  God help me, I wanted to find out which it was.

  He was magnetic and mysterious, quite possibly dangerous, but even trundling after him in clothes that didn’t fit, I felt more alive than I had in months. Maybe years.

  When it was time to leave, I followed him down into the cellar of the house, where we had entered the evening before, that led to the river. We passed the short dock where the night before, Nick had set loose the inflatable boat we’d used during our escape, and walked along the dirt path that flanked the canal, under the low-limbed trees heavy with late summer leaves. There were no security cameras under here and no one to report our passage, as the neighbors at this early hour were either sleeping or on a boat, ready to sail up the canal.