The Royal Runaway

Later, I would look back on this moment and wonder why I hadn’t simply popped the sleeping pill and crawled back into my gilded four-poster bed, the same one that my grandmother and great-grandmother had slept in before their ascendancies to the throne.

I’ll never know what made me change into street clothes, pull my hair into a bun, and slip on running shoes. But that’s exactly what I did.

I knew the covert ways out of the palace like the back of my hand. Part of it was due to a natural gift for observation and investigation; part of it was thanks to my formal education. It had been impressed on me by my tutors, secretaries, and Big Gran herself that a good princess should learn everything about her country.

That included secret ways out of the palace. This wasn’t the first time I’d slipped out undetected. That had been when I was a teenager, a university student. There were things I’d wanted to do, places I’d wanted to go, people I’d wanted to see without my official security detail getting involved. For years, it hadn’t been a problem. Drieden is a small country and the monarchy can still be informal if it wishes. My uncle John, the Duke of Falender, works as a banker in the financial district. My brother serves in the armed forces. Until my engagement, I produced documentary films. With a discreet and small security presence, my family has been able to keep up the pretense that we’re normal folk who just happen to live in that big old house on the hill.

With my recent notoriety, though, and my resulting cloistering in the palace and assorted hideaways, I hadn’t been outside royal boundaries in over three months.

And sometimes a girl just needed a change of scenery.

My feet flew over the carpet, down the southwest stairwell, across the landing, into the upper gallery through a service entrance, then down another set of stairs that led into the herb garden, which was next to the kitchens with their loading dock and abandoned at this time of night.

Just like that, I was outside in a small courtyard. There was a guardhouse at the bottom of the cobblestone drive, but I pulled up the hood of my jacket and hopped into a nearby white Fiat with plates that matched the keys I had snagged from the loading dock bay.

The gates opened swiftly (as they should for an official palace vehicle) and I drove two hundred meters and . . .

I had no idea where I was going.

To the lights?

Why?

Because the lights were pretty?

Was I insane?

Probably. Now I was talking to myself. Just like Prince Karl the Holy when he believed a trout told him to invade France.

My foot pressed the gas pedal, indicating that I was, in fact, insane. Sleep deprivation had sucked all the common sense out of my head.

But I kept driving. Instinct and a memory pulled me forward.

There had been a night, two years ago, right after I had started dating Christian. I had gotten a call from him; he had flown to Drieden to surprise me. “Come see me,” he had urged. He had given me the name of a bar where I was to meet him in an hour. And like tonight, I had managed to slip out of the palace completely undetected.

Romantic, right?

Without being aware of my destination, I now suddenly found myself parked outside that same bar. It seemed just as I remembered it. A cocktail lounge in the theater district, its raucous crowd was decidedly different from the posh, upper-crust circle Christian usually ran with. As soon as I walked into the disorienting mix of shadow and neon, I remembered that I hadn’t brought any money or identification. Another sign of my deteriorating mental state. Still, I took a seat at a table covered with chipped red paint. After all, the point of this excursion wasn’t to drink. If I’d wanted to get drunk, the palace had vast cellars full of very expensive spirits at my disposal. If I’d wanted to lose myself, I would have just taken the damn sleeping pill.

The point of this trip was . . .

I had no idea.

Now I closed my eyes.

I saw Christian, as he was the night I met him here. His longish blond hair curled around his collar. His skin still tan from the ski season. Was this what I wanted? To see Christian again? Was that why I came here?

“Excuse me. Is this seat taken?”

A deep voice. A Scottish accent. Christian