Free A Great Prince: A Royal Bad Boy Romance by Brad Vance Page B

Prince’?”
    “That you try.”
    He nodded. “Okay. We need more than photos. We need evidence. On your side and mine. I have a few favors I can call in…”

CHAPTER FOURTEEN – JUST A GUEST HERE
     
    Francesca was usually a sound sleeper. Sonia had always taught her that a sound sleep was the sign of a clear conscience. So why now, when she was doing the right thing, did she toss and turn so?
    She tried to tell herself that when she thought about Nikolas, it was as part of their planning. She had to think of what he could do to undermine the forces on her side.
    Then in a flash she recalled his body against hers, his breath in her ear, his tongue, hot and sharp…
    Francesca shook herself. Yes, he was so magnetic, so powerful, he had a physical presence that she could never have. He was a beast and a gengzter but… He reminded her of what she’d read about King Henry VIII in his youth – virile, athletic, taller, stronger, handsomer than any man in England. Or Alexander the Great, of whom men said even his sweat smelled like perfume…
    Nikolas could be a king like that. He just needed someone to help him.
    “No!” she shouted, throwing off the covers. He wasn’t a serious person, he was immature and pleasure-seeking.
    And a great queen behind him could…
    “No, no no,” she emphasized, getting out of bed. She looked at the clock. It was six in the morning, and she’d had only a few scattered minutes of oblivion all night.
    Sonia. Sonia will set me straight. She picked up the phone and called her old governess.
    A crackly recording answered. “The number you have dialed is no longer in service.”
    Francesca sighed. She could have sworn she’d pushed Sonia’s number. She looked at her call history. She had called Sonia’s number.
    She called it again, thinking it must be one of those weird cell phone traffic things.
    “The number you have dialed…”
    She felt cold suddenly. She knew.
    She threw on her nightgown and flew down the hall of the Palace. As always, there were two guards at the doors to the King’s Apartments.
    “Your Highness…” one of them began, but she was past him and through the doors before he could get out another word.
    She ran into the bedroom, where she found the queen alone, propped up in bed with her breakfast on a tray.
    “You,” Francesca hissed, all the years of repressed hate, repressed anger, coming to a head. “Where is she?”
    The queen’s penciled eyebrows rose in mock astonishment. “My dear girl, whatever is the matter?”
    “Where is she?”
    But the tone that had so impressed Nikolas had no effect on Alexandra Therese. She smiled, that awful smile of the insincere.
    “Your old governess? Why, she was taken very ill and had to go home to Moscow.”
    “Moscow! She hasn’t been there since she was a child!”
    The queen shrugged. “All the same. She was never a citizen of Burgenland, did you know that? I just discovered it the other day. And of course she has no family here to take care of her, so we…”
    “You… fucking… bitch.”
    Now she had the queen’s attention, and the widened eyes were genuine.
    “How dare you!”
    “How dare you throw an old woman on the street, how dare you use her as a pawn in your war with me!”
    She heard the door open, and a child’s voice grumbling. “Mama,” Prince Leopold, “what’s all this?”
    Alexandra Therese smiled and opened her arms. “Come here, my boy. Your stepsister will be leaving us soon, to go live in another country, forever.”
    Leopold ran into his mother’s embrace, then turned to look at Francesca. “Good,” he said with a smirk, his eyes glittering, feasting on Francesca’s suffering.
    “Where is my father?”
    “At the breakfast table, I imagine,” the queen said. “Why don’t you go join him?”
     
    More surprises awaited her in the dining room. The servants who puttered around the king were unknown to her. Where were Klaus and Amelia? Were they gone