Free Royal Baby (A British Bad Boy Romance) by Avery Wilde Page A

‘type’ than Prince Andrew himself had proved to be. Drew Ellis wasn’t the sensible, stay-at-home type, he was the bad boy, and that made me the type of silly girl who hooked up with someone because of his rebellious attitude, rather than because he was good husband material. It was a stupid thing to do, and yet when I thought back on it, I couldn’t help thinking that the brief time I’d spent with Drew was more exciting than the time I’d spent with pretty much every other boyfriend I’d ever had. In my search for someone dependable and stable, I’d perhaps gone too far the other way. Did dependable and stable have to mean boring? Could a person not be dependable, stable and dangerously exciting?
    There was that desire for contradiction again…but was it really such a contradiction?
    For a moment there, in a bar in New York, I’d really thought that Drew Ellis might be that elusive contradiction, that he could be sensible and stay-at-home, while at the same time being thrilling and unpredictable. Perhaps it had only ever been a dream, and Drew Ellis was nothing more than a construct in my head, extrapolated from an hour’s casual conversation into my ideal man.
    With a strange shock, I realized that I missed him. This man who’d never really existed but had been a baited hook to get me into the sack had been the closest thing I’d ever met to my dream guy.
    Jeez, wasn’t that just a bit depressing?
    Perhaps that was why I’d taken a vacuum cleaner to the Prince’s hangover on my first morning here, and why I’d done so with such vengeful glee. He’d robbed me of something that had only previously existed as a shining idea in my mind. He’d robbed me of a perfect man, and of a future with that man. He’d robbed me of Drew Ellis. For that, he had to be punished, and it’d been petty as hell, but he totally deserved it.
    I couldn’t help thinking back to a conversation I’d once had with Sarah, not long after we’d met. I’d asked if there’d ever been anyone special in Sarah’s life, assuming that there couldn’t have been, given her man-eating ways. But Sarah had become strangely quiet and answered in a few awkward words: ‘ Yes. He got away. I guess I never really got over that. Hence... .’
    That ‘hence’ said a lot. In the absence of the man she’d loved, any man would do, and that was Sarah’s life. Don’t get me wrong; she loved her life…but that one loss blighted it, and I wondered if that was how I might end up, following the loss of a man who’d never even existed.
    I’d been thinking these things whilst strolling down the servants’ staircase, and I emerged, if my memory of this part of the house served me correctly, near the Long Gallery.
    There it was.
    I beamed—I was actually starting to settle into this thoroughly intimidating place. I was a little early for my meeting with the Queen, but given our meeting yesterday, I knew that the genial monarch wouldn’t mind if I let myself in to look at the paintings for a few minutes before she arrived, so I strolled over to the door and opened it.
    “What do you think you are doing?” Prince Michael had a voice that cut through the air like a diamond through glass.
    “I was just…” My earlier confidence rattled by Michael’s sudden shout, I found myself floundering.
    “You shouldn’t be here. You have a job to do.”
    “I—”
    “Don’t answer back! Don’t you know who I am?”
    “Yes, but I—”
    “You just don’t know when to leave it alone, do you? Now tell me, what are you doing here?”
    “So you do want me to answer?” I asked.
    In hindsight, that was probably not the smartest thing I could’ve said. On the other hand, I’d done nothing wrong. Prince Michael was behaving like a grade-A jerk, and the sight of his face turning red as he sputtered with over-boiling anger was worth whatever consequences might result.
    I guess I’d recovered some of that lost confidence.
    “How dare you speak to me like