Seabirds call out to me as I hit the stony pavement and hitch my backpack over my shoulder. I cut between two cars, through a small hedgerow where an iron gate provides exit, and along a steep stone staircase that meanders down the butte.
At the bottom is the stone wall that circles the palace. A steel door is set into the thick wall with an electronic key code. It’s a direct port to the rocky shoreline below where another path cuts south to a small, protected harbor with a dock and boats.
Several steel doors sit along the perimeter of the wall, and all have different key codes. Those codes are kept secret—only me and my parents, as well as the head of security, have access to them.
I glance over my shoulder up the stone staircase carved into the side of the hill and search the parking lot that borders the staff entrance. I don’t know why I look. No one saw me come out here, and if they had, they’d be calling my name to stop. But no one is looking for me. It’s assumed I’m in my suite. It’s also assumed I’m a dutiful and prudent woman who understands that I shouldn’t go unattended outside the compound walls, and no one would ever think me daring enough to do so.
Still, there’s a measure of relief I’ve made it this far without so much as a hiccup, and I don’t hesitate moving through the door to the other side of the wall.
Rather than take the path that cuts right and leads to the dock, I turn left and meander along the trail that’s bordered by tall grasses. It eventually leads to a low-hanging cliff overlooking the Coral Sea, and it’s there that I find Marius waiting for me.
Six foot two inches of golden skin and rippling muscles, sun-kissed brown hair, and sparkling green eyes, Marius Lafayette is God’s gift to women, and he knows it. Whenever we’re out and about—on the rare occasions I get to go out and about—women actually stumble over their own feet looking at him. He notices it, too, and it only adds to his cocky swagger.
“About time,” he grouses as I walk up. He’s wearing a pair of board shorts and a white tank top. His hair is mussed, and it’s clear he rolled straight out of bed without running a brush through it.
I slide my backpack off a shoulder, reach in for the muffins rolled in linen, and toss them to him. He scrambles to catch the food as the muffins come free, but in addition to being ridiculously gorgeous, he’s incredibly athletic and graceful. Like a juggler managing four balls, he brings them all under control, catching two muffins in each hand.
I make my way across the thick carpet of green grass that flows right to the cliff’s edge. I nab one of the muffins from his hand and plop down. Marius follows suit, and we stretch our legs toward the sea.
It’s quiet—except for the seabirds and the waves crashing at the cliff base—and we eat silently as we soak it all in. This isn’t the first time we’ve met here, and it won’t be the last. Marius and I have been sneaking out for years to meet up.
When we finish our breakfast, I lean over and nudge my shoulder against his. “Do me a solid and come to afternoon tea?”
His head turns my way, eyebrows drawn inward and reticence in his tone. “Why?”
“Because Mum is trying to set me up with Boyce Delmonde, and he and his mother are coming to tea,” I mutter as I brush crumbs off my fingertips. That muffin went down way too fast.
“What’s in it for me?” he drawls, expression serious, ready to wheel and deal.
I sigh and lie back on the grass, tucking my hands behind my head to stare at the pristine blue sky. “Nothing. Your family is uber rich. There’s nothing I can give you that you don’t already have.”
“True.” He chuckles and reclines next to me. “But I suppose I could do you a solid and attend. I’ll even kiss you in front of them. That should send them running.”
I snicker as I remind him, “And it would only put you on my parents’ radar again. Besides… I kissed you once, and it did nothing for me.”
“Ouch,” he mutters.
But it’s true. Marius and I have been friends since we were eight, when his parents moved to the island. Bretaria had already started growing into a known mecca of finance, funded by the island’s thick layer of rubies. Many banks moved here given our lack of taxes and regulations, and along with that came Marius’s family, the Lafayettes. His father was a successful financial advisor in Paris, and his mother the heiress to a couture fashion line. They’re not in the billion-dollar bracket as the Winterbournes are, but they are in the multi-multimillion dollars, and that makes Marius a suitable contender—in my parents’ eyes—for me to wed and produce pretty little royal babies.
The only problem is that Marius and I are only friends. The best of friends, but friends nonetheless. When you’re a royal, your play options are limited, and the Lafayette family became good friends with mine. Thus Marius and I became good friends as we essentially grew up together.
When we were fifteen, we tried kissing and found that neither of us liked it. At first, Marius thought I was gay since I didn’t like kissing him—conceited oaf that he is—but we both realized it was because we were friends, almost like brother and sister, and it just seemed weird to be anything but.
At any rate, romantic love is not in the stars for us, but an enduring friendship most certainly is. We’ve about got our parents convinced to leave us alone and stop dropping not-so-subtle hints about a romantic relationship, but God… if Marius kissed me at tea today to send Boyce Delmonde packing, it would start them up again.
“Speaking of kissing,” I say, changing the subject, “how did your date go with what’s her name?”
“You mean Emelia?” he asks, a fondness in his tone.
“I guess,” I reply with uncertainty. He told me he’d made a connection at work and they were going to do dinner.
“Dinner went great,” he replies, and I don’t have to take my eyes off the sky to hear the mischief in his voice. “I didn’t give her a kiss good-night, but I banged her in her office the next day.”
My head whips to the left, and I lean up to stare at him, aghast. “Are you crazy? You can’t have sex with people in your dad’s office. That’s like … unprofessional or something.”
“She was begging for it,” he replies smugly, without even looking my way. “And besides, it’s my office too.”
That is true. While I graduated from university in Switzerland with a degree in humanities—totally useless for my trajectory but something I found to be incredibly fulfilling—Marius followed in his father’s footsteps and majored in economics and got his MBA immediately following. He joined his father’s firm as a full partner upon receipt of his master’s.
“You’re gross,” I say.
“You’re jealous,” he teases.
And he’s not far off the mark. Since graduating, I’ve been pretty much secluded back here in Bretaria. I’m not jobless, by any means—I’ve been working with my father to learn the family business of mining—but more importantly, I’m learning how to take over the role of sovereign as that event is inevitable.
In college, I was able to spread my wings. It was my first true taste of freedom, and while I always had a security detail, they were discreet and melted into the background. It let me be a college kid who could drink, smoke weed, and have meaningless hookups, although frankly, pretty sure the people assigned to protect me knew I did all those things.