A Great Prince: A Royal Bad Boy Romance Read Online Free Page A

now.”
    “Prince Leopold is a dunce,” she blurted at the thought of her twelve-year-old stepbrother.
    Minister Krupp gasped. “Highness!”
    “He is,” she said angrily. “He’s a spoiled brat who’ll make Joffrey Baratheon look like Good King Wenceslas. He doesn’t care one whit for the people of this country and…”
    “Highness! This is entirely inappropriate and I must say…”
    Blah blah blah , Francesca thought, turning away to look out the window of the hotel room, watching the snow fall gently on the streets.
    And her heart skipped a beat. Outside the hotel, a “translator” on each arm, was King Nikolas, getting into a limousine — presumably to go off somewhere and have one hell of a good time.
    Obviously, she thought enviously, there was nobody to lecture him on appropriate behavior.
     
    Once upon a time, a child’s laughter had rung out everywhere in Schloss Esterházy, the home of Burgenland’s royal family. In the Empiresaal, the great banqueting hall, Francesca had hidden under the linen tablecloths – but not very well, for the sound of her mother’s voice, teasing her, had always made her giggle and reveal herself.
    In the Haydensaal, the Palace’s great Baroque-era performance hall, she had sat at the grand piano, plinking out random notes while her mother, an audience of one in the front row, applauded vigorously. They had run laughing through the Schlosspark, scattering the birds, a security detail always on the lookout for danger, but mostly for photographers, hoping to get a candid shot of the queen.
    For she was more than garden-variety royalty. Queen Valerie was also Hollywood royalty, a jolt of fresh blood injected into an old, decayed line. She had given up her career at the age of twenty-seven, at the peak of her box office power.
    “Your career in Hollywood is pretty much over at thirty, anyway,” she’d said with the tart frankness that made the media love her. A frankness that would not serve her well in the Palace.
    The Palace. Here in Burgenland it wasn’t just the stultifying bureaucracy it was in England. Here, it was the servant of the real rulers of the country – the bankers, the billionaire tax refugees, the corporations registered in this delightful tax haven, like Lichtenstein but with more culture, and with even less regulation.
    And it was the Palace’s job to keep Queen Valerie from… doing things. Things like calling attention to the hard lives of the “guest workers,” the Poles and Russians and Filipinos who worked as maids and butlers and drivers for pennies, their passports held hostage, their families dependent on the money they remitted home.
    But she did anyway. What land mines and AIDS were to Princess Diana, “guest workers” around the world, from Burgenland to Dubai, had been Valerie’s crusade.
    So they hated her, the Old Guard – the bureaucracy, the aristocracy, the bankers, everyone but the people. And the king.
    Franz Joseph had been an unbelievably handsome man. “Like the young Ramon Novarro,” Valerie had sighed to a friend back in America, on a cell phone call one day. “That’s the difference between me and Grace Kelly. I would never have married an ugly man, not for all the crowns in the world.” Francesca knew her mother had said that, because her phone had been hacked by a British tabloid, and the conversation had been splashed across the globe.
    In her childhood, the worst sound in the world was a discreet cough. She could see the light and laughter leave her mother’s face when they heard it – the sound of one of the Palace handlers declaring an end to their playtime. They would leave off their games in the park and walk back to the Schloss.
    Sometimes Queen Valerie would look up at it as they walked into its shadow and grip her daughter’s hand a little tighter, as if to fortify herself, and remind herself where her real duty lay.
    The Palace would descend on the two of them like crows, angrily flapping their