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

behind, than give him time to turn around and hit you first.”
    She sighed. “Maybe we should just marry and move on. I need to save Sonia, my father is powerless, I should just…”
    Nikolas stopped eating and looked at her. “They really knew how to get to you, didn’t they?”
    She nodded. “Sonia was…”
    She shocked herself by bursting into tears. Tears of exhaustion, she knew, as much as of loss. How could she fight, she was just a silly girl who had no power.
    Nikolas wiped his hands on his pants, then reached over and took her hand.
    Her eyes flew open. His hand was so big, so… un-aristocratic. As hard as armor, thick and rough, a working man’s hands, built from hard labor. And so warm.
    What surprised her more than anything was how gently he held her little hand in his meaty one. How soft and tender his eyes could be, when that wicked glint left them.
    “Princess, are you telling me you’re not the Ice Maiden after all? I thought you were invincible steel.”
    She laughed through her tears. “No, I’m not. I’m so tired. I’m alone in all this and I…”
    “No,” he said firmly. “You’re not. We’re in this together.” Suddenly he blushed and withdrew his hand.
    He sighed. “Look. The bankers in Burgenland, the oligarchs in Danubia, they’re all tangled up. If we marry, they can strengthen their ties, they can make the border more porous, and all the Eastern European crime syndicates can get women, drugs, etc. into Western Europe through Burgenland and then Austria. I know we’re not going to marry, that there’s nothing between us, but… we have our parts to play, in sync.”
    Francesca felt a strange sorrow at those words. Why? Of course they weren’t going to marry, of course that was the whole purpose of all this.
    “No,” she said coolly, “I don’t want to marry you, either. I’m content to be like Elizabeth I.”
    It was the old Niko who grinned, winking. “Married to England?”
    Her eyes widened. “You know that history.”
    “I’ve had a good teacher lately.”
    She looked at him curiously.
    Nikolas paused. “Do you know Karl Lengyel?”
    “The dissident? Your enemy?”
    She was surprised by the wry grin on his face. “Not my enemy, no. I met Karl the night they came to give me the throne. I wanted him on my council, I had him on my council, but… he wouldn’t stay. Not with all of István’s cronies on it, lining their pockets.” He frowned. “I tried. I tried to do this right, when I started, but I didn’t try hard enough. Maybe I’m not a good enough person.”
    “I… I had no idea.”
    He shrugged. “No matter. I had a moment, I let the moment go, and… here we are.”
    She sighed. “But no matter what we do, that rotten little Leopold will be on the throne.”
    “Maybe not. What if we can show the collusion, the guilt? What do governments run on, Francesca?”
    She was surprised by his tone, the look on his face. She’d thought him — admit it — an idiot, possibly illiterate. “Money, influence, connections…”
    “No. The consent of the governed. If your stepmother, her banking family, is found to be colluding with gangsters, what would that do to the succession?”
    “I… I don’t know. There’s the Landtag , our legislature, but it’s like the House of Lords, it’s not an elected body.” The wheels in her mind began to turn. “But they could overturn the succession. It’s been done before, not for a long time, it’s not like the king is an Elector, but…”
    Nikolas smiled. “Now you’re talking.”
    She nodded. “So what can we do?”
    “Gather evidence. You have friends, princess. Your people love you. Your loyal servants, the ones the queen has banished… I bet they’ve kept a lot of Palace secrets over the years. We get as much evidence of collusion as we can and we go public, in a very big and loud way.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Revolution. We can be like Juan Carlos I in Spain.” He winked. “Another lesson