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

out for him – the wedding, the likely alliance of the Burgenland bankers and the Danubian oligarchs, his own alliance with Francesca to stop it.
    “Somehow,” he finished. “But I don’t know how. What do I do? Can we get evidence of their crimes, get them in front of, I don’t know, The Hague for human rights abuses or—”
    “No, no. That’s not going to work.” Karl poured himself more coffee, looking younger already. “Nikolas, do you remember our first conversation?”
    “Of course.” He laughed, grinning and getting a smile out of Karl for the first time.
    “What did I tell you was the one thing they need most from you?”
    “My name, my ancestry, my claim to the old throne. Without me, they’re just… bandits.”
    “Yes. They need you more than you need them. They can’t just depose you. You’d have to be guilty of ‘treason,’ but how can a king be treasonous when he’s an absolute monarch? Your will is law. And the people love you.”
    “No, they don’t. They love him, the guy in the tabloids.”
    “Why?”
    “Because he fucks supermodels and jets around the world and…”
    Karl cut him off. “You underestimate them. You’re handsome and charming and sexy and entertaining, of course. But you’re also one of them, up from dirt, up from the streets. They know you are. And they see you thumb your nose at power, even if so far it’s only been as a ‘bad boy.’ The gengzters, they can take away all this,” he waved at the opulent surroundings. “They can cut off your allowance and your pleasures, but they can’t take that away. Are you prepared to give up those pleasures, to live hard, to fight?”
    Nikolas thought of the photo, the dead women in the container. “Yes.”
    Karl’s bright eyes drilled into Niko’s. “They will follow you, Nikolas, if you will only be the man to be followed.”
    “You’re talking about a revolution.”
    “Yes. A Velvet Revolution, an Orange Revolution, people in the streets, peacefully but in massive numbers. Enough of them to overturn the government.”
    Nikolas didn’t need to think about it.
    “Okay. Tell me what I need to do.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN – A ROYAL PICNIC
     
    The one advantage Francesca and Nikolas had in their plotting was the ease with which they could meet. After all, both sides were eager to see them together, right?
    Of course, Burgenland’s Palace and Niko’s bosses wanted them to meet in public, somewhere they could be handled, managed and spied on.
    But the Palace was delighted when Francesca suddenly expressed an interest in a topic as innocuous as national parks. It just so happened that Nationalpark Neusiedler See had a sister park across the border in Danubia, the Fertő-Hanság National Park, and of course what could be more romantic than a lakeside picnic between a king and a princess?
    “This was too easy,” Francesca said, her spirits still low from the loss of her friends at the Palace. Klaus and Amelia, were they really “retired,” or had they too been packed off somewhere? She felt… despair. That was the only way to put it.
    She desultorily picked at a roast chicken as they sat at a portable picnic table by the lake. It wasn’t the most attractive spot, she thought. The ground around here was flat, treeless, marshy, the spring sky low and spattered with clouds that hadn’t yet decided whether to be gray or black. Hardly the spot that any handler would choose for their “Alpine romance,” but then again, that made it all the easier to dissuade the Palace from sending photographers.
    “Not at all,” Nikolas said, eagerly tearing into his chicken. “None of them know what we’re up to yet. Surprise and stealth are our allies.”
    “Did you learn that lesson on the streets of Szombathely?”
    Nikolas laughed, his head falling back. Francesca tried to ignore the heat that rose in her when she looked at his neck, his taut muscles, his healthy skin.
    “Yes, princess, I did. Better to hit a man from