The Royal Bodyguard
by Lindsay Emory

Copyright © 2019 by Lindsay Emory. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means. For information regarding subsidiary rights, please contact the Publisher.

Chapter One

When my husband died, a strange calm settled over me.

I saw the past, present and future unfurl, clear as the images of smoke and fire on the television screen in front of me.

My life had always been captured in such detail. My birth was announced with heraldry and pomp. My parents’ marriage disintegrated piece by piece in the columns of newsprint and between commercial breaks.

And now…my husband’s death. Excruciatingly slow. Replay. Replay. Replay.

I had spent the last few hours watching the race on television from a small cottage just yards away from the press and fans and sponsors. Other wives sat in the stands, but Stavros preferred me out of the public eye. One couldn’t blame him—our relationship and elopement had sparked an intense media glare. A Formula One driver winning the hand of Caroline, a royal princess of Drieden? It was a scandal for the ages.

I loved Stavros as soon as I met him, and he moved as quickly as the cars he drove. I let myself go along, recklessly perhaps, giving up my title and my position as third in line to the Driedish crown in exchange for the delicious thrill of being with him.

We married in Monte Carlo, in a small chapel overlooking the sea, right before the Monaco Grand Prix.

Twelve hours later, after he lost the race and he was sulky and accusing me of bringing a bad energy to it, I started to wonder if he was right…

Was I a bad luck charm?

And yet I felt sorry for him. Because he’d lost his race, because our relationship had caused such stress for him. I felt guilty. If I hadn’t been born a princess, hadn’t invited the public to gawk at us, at him, then he would have been able to focus—on the car, the track, the competition.

So I stayed. After all, I cared about him, even if the first blush of passion soon faded. When he won, we smiled. Laughed. Made love. When he lost, he drank. Pouted. Stormed out and left for hours. And I started hiding in cottages.

He said it was easier to concentrate on the race if the world wasn’t reminded of who I was. Or who I used to be.

Stavros was losing the race when he crashed and flipped and his car exploded into a huge inferno on the thirty-second lap of the Slovenian Grand Prix. My dashing, intense husband, the great Stavros Di Bernardo, was gone forever, in one last, furious blaze. Dying like he lived.

Leaving me to face the flashbulbs alone.

I had never thought of myself as psychic, but I saw the future then in headlines and captions.

Poor Caroline. Grieving Caroline. The widow. The disinherited. The disgraced. The despondent former princess.

The drama would never be enough. The stakes would never be too high. The intrusion never too deep.

After my parents’ divorce, I saw first hand the two paths available to a royal post-scandal.

I could be like my father, Prince Albert of Drieden. Retreat to a country home. Spend my days fishing and planning gardens. (Because the only thing more boring than gardening is planning a garden.)

Or I could be like my mother. The one who sucked up media attention like an almost-melted ice cream on a summer day.

It was my terrible luck that neither option was acceptable to me.

I was only twenty-nine. Too young to play dead in the backwoods of Drieden and too young for the magazines to ignore me if I didn’t.

I needed time. Time to think, time to plan, time to regroup. And the clock was spinning fast.

Pieces of my plan snapped together, as if my subconscious had worked on this problem for years.

Everything fell into two categories: things I could take with me and things I would leave behind.

I had time for two short emails—one to London, one to an Italian village.

There was a knock at the door.

“Come in!” I called out, in a hoarse voice that sounded strange to me. The last twenty minutes had been a blur and I wasn’t sure if I had been crying or screaming.

It was Stavros’s manager. Luis Caballero walked into the room, his trim figure nearly vibrating with adrenaline. He stopped dead when he saw me.

“What happened to your hair?” he gasped, shock making him switch to his native Spanish. His eyes grew round with horror as he stared at the long blonde ponytail lying on the carpet at my feet.

Even though my grandmother, Queen Aurelia, had stripped me of my titles when I married Stavros, my princess blood ran true. I lifted my chin and said, “I’ll need a widow’s veil for the funeral. Thick enough that no one can see my face.” Luis inclined his head, a gesture of respect or a gesture to grant me privacy. “And a bottle of hair dye,” I told him. “Jet black.”

Chapter Two

Six months later…

“Don’t jump.”

Elena’s voice was grouchy, but Elena’s voice was always grouchy around me.

I made a point of stretching my neck out to look over the balcony edge, down to the softly lapping water of Lake Como below. “I won’t,” I promised her. “Just because it’s only four stories down. I’d likely survive it.”

Elena grunted. “And then I’d have to clean up the mess.”

“And here I was, thinking you’d started caring about me.”

Another dismissive sound, although I wasn’t quite sure yet how to translate it. My Italian was fluent, but the slight difference of meaning between “pah!” and “bah!” still escaped me.

I slid my hands along the stone balustrade and lifted my face to the sun, soon to set in the west. It was the first glimpse of sunshine we’d seen in weeks, as the shores of Lake Como had been hammered by one dreary winter day after another.

I closed my eyes and smiled, treasuring the thin layer of warmth to be found underneath the chill from the water.

For a moment, I was reminded of Drieden.

Home.

A tiny nation on the North Sea, Drieden suffered long, stormy winters that were dark and gray. My people knew how to treasure slivers of sunshine.

Elena muttered something I didn’t catch. I swore she did it on purpose, some sort of trick-the-Driedener game she played. “I’m sorry, what did you say?” I said politely.

“For a woman who doesn’t like to be seen, you’re showing yourself off to the world.”

I opened one eye and squinted at the view of the lake. This was about the farthest I could get from “showing myself off.” On the penthouse-level terrace of my house on the outskirts of Varenna, there was no one around who could see me, except maybe the people on the few boats that had braved a February day. And even then, I had taken care to wear my large Sophia Loren sunglasses and a chic wide-brimmed felt hat. Just because I was in hiding didn’t mean that I couldn’t bring it in the fashion department.

But I wasn’t going to get defensive with Elena. Or explain it all to her.

I had hired her almost a year ago to help me manage this property. Villa Cavalletta teetered on terraced land above the lake on the outer edge of the village. I had bought it as an investment, just before my marriage. Years ago, the villa had been split into three apartments. The basement and ground level I offered to Elena, as part of her salary. She would then manage the two apartments above, renting them to the near-constant stream of tourists and vagabonds that flocked to Lake Como every year.

I had never planned on being one of those vagabonds myself.

But now I lived like a hermit in the penthouse apartment. It was rather grand for a single woman who had no family, no friends and as little interaction with her property manager as possible. But it was rather humble for a former royal princess, so I supposed the whole thing balanced out on some universal scale of justice.

“Can I help you with something?” I asked Elena. “Or did you come up here just to criticize me? Again,” I added pointedly.

Elena refused to be intimidated by me. For the first few months, I tried keeping a proper employer–employee distance in our relationship. But Elena had a way of irritating me so much I couldn’t help but feel warmly toward her. I know it’s sick, but I had grown up in a royal family full of—let’s call them difficult—personalities. If someone acted superior toward me and chastised me for the way I chose to dress, I was reminded of dear Big Gran back in the Palace in Drieden City.

Home.

My issues would make a therapist’s head spin.

“I’m going to my sister’s for the next two nights. I just wanted to let you know.” She crossed her arms and nodded her head, all business.

“What about Signore Rossi?” I asked, referring to her elderly father, who lived in the ground-floor apartment.

“Two nights.” She held up two fingers. “Due.” She said the word in Italian, slowly, as if I hadn’t understood her. “He’s fine. I have left him food and water and a partially charged cell phone. Hopefully, he won’t use the battery up, texting his girlfriends.”

I couldn’t help but laugh. Disgraced princess, widow and recluse I might be, but I could still appreciate that Elena’s sharp wit hid a soft heart.

“I’ll check on him while you’re gone,” I said.

“Grazie, Lina.”

After six months of hiding in Italy, I was still not used to hearing my Italian alias on someone’s lips. My name is Lina DiLorenzo, I’d told Elena that first day, when I had arrived at Villa Cavalletta with nothing but a hat box and two Louis Vuitton suitcases.

Perhaps that was why it always took me an extra second to regroup after she used my name. “No one’s made a reservation?” I asked, referring to the middle apartment we still rented out to tourists.

Elena shook her head. “You can stay up here and watch the water, for all I care.”

I smiled slightly at that. “And the newspapers?”

She grimaced. “Pah! I forgot!”

“It’s okay,” I assured her. “I can go.”

Her answering frown reminded me that she wasn’t as grouchy as she pretended. And I wasn’t as scared of the outside world as I pretended.

Mostly.

I greeted the gentleman behind the newsstand at the train station in brief no-nonsense Italian. He handed over my papers, the same ones Elena usually collected every week. This newsstand was the only one in Varenna that carried a wide range of European publications, thanks to the tourists who regularly passed through the station on their way to and from their various holiday destinations.

I did not know the man’s name, and he did not know mine. Besides Elena and Signore Rossi, no one knew my alias in Varenna, which was just as I liked it.

After another short errand, I hefted my bags back through the streets and up the steep steps in the hillside to my home.

I put my shopping on the pale marble table that served as a desk in my salon and cracked open a window that looked out over the water. Even though it was winter, I needed fresh air. Craved it, in fact. I had spent my entire life, it seemed, in houses and castles and manors where windows were sealed tight.

Here in Varenna, I wanted to breathe freely.

Through the open window, I heard music coming from the streets below. For five, six days, it had been the same. A guitar and a sad, yet strong, baritone. It seemed like most of the songs were in English, although a few were in a language I couldn’t identify. Gaelic, perhaps? The lyrics were mostly about women who had left. Maybe that’s why I liked them so much.

But I couldn’t listen to a busker’s song all day long. Lina DiLorenzo had to finish a chore.

Not that reading was a chore. In fact, reading took up most of my days here in my northern Italian hidey-hole. But reading the newspapers from my home country made me feel like acid was eating a hole in my stomach lining.

At first I had resolved to leave everything behind. When I escaped from the reception held after Stavros’s funeral, I knew it would be hours before anyone looked for me. And when they did, they would be looking for the blonde Driedish princess they thought they knew, inconsolable with a grief they could not imagine.

They didn’t know that the highlighted hair had been left in Slovenia. The title of Princess had been dropped on her wedding day. And my Driedish heritage had been forgotten as soon as Lina DiLorenzo stepped off the train in Varenna.

Or so I had thought.

Until a Driedish paper left behind in the rented apartment brought a part of my past back to me. The language of my childhood, the stories about familiar places and names were a balm I hadn’t known I’d needed. But it wasn’t a soothing balm. Oh, no. It was more of a burning liniment, a necessary discomfort for a sore back or aching muscles.

I still told Elena to start buying the papers, though. If anyone asked, they were for my guests.

Computers were out of the question. Too many sites kept track of who came and went. Consistent clicks on articles about the Driedish royals from an Italian backwater town could raise flags. But the newspapers provided me intelligence on what my distinguished family was up to now and were my aversion therapy when homesickness reared its inconvenient head.

I settled into an emerald-green velvet chair and started flipping through the Driedish news. My grandmother was Her Royal Highness Queen Aurelia, and there was a lot about the preparations taking place for her fortieth-anniversary celebration next summer. I skimmed through and, as always, I kept an eye out for my name.

After Stavros’s death, the papers had been crammed with stories about me. Most of it was speculation—about my future plans, whether I was returning to Drieden (no) or begging for my grandmother’s forgiveness (certainly not.) Finally, my sister, Princess Theodora, made a statement to the press: “The Royal Family of Drieden thanks the entire country for their prayers and well wishes on the death of Stavros Di Bernardo. On behalf of our beloved Caroline, we ask for privacy and the time to heal.”

It was typical, perfect Princess Theodora. Saying just the right thing, in just the right way, and no one noticed that she said absolutely nothing at all about anything important.

Still, I was in her debt. The press coverage about me, my dead husband and my whereabouts trickled down significantly after my sister’s statement. Everyone assumed I was in deep mourning on a mountaintop or on a cloistered island and, apparently, if I hadn’t had a scandalous affair with a race car driver, I would have been very boring indeed.

Which suited me fine.

And speaking of my perfect older sister, here she was in the newspaper. Again. Months ago, they had heralded her new “Princess Theodora Trust,” which seemed to be some sort of charitable money-laundering operation for my grandmother, if I knew my grandmother at all. Now my older sister was constantly appearing at philanthropic events and good causes dressed in chic suits and holding up big checks.

Driedeners loved her.

PRINCESS THEODORA BREAKS GROUND ON HISTORICAL MONUMENT.

Yawn. That was right up Thea’s alley, though. She always paid more attention to Driedish history than the rest of us did. My sister Sophie barely knew how to spell her own name. My brother, Henry, liked the bits about wars and battles but tuned out the rest.

Me? I learned what I needed to learn to navigate life in the palace. Make everyone happy. Negotiate and collaborate. Be perfect.

After finishing the Driedish papers, I breathed a sigh of relief. There were no imminent threats to my way of life. At least, for today.

One more newspaper had to be reviewed. I had saved it for last.

I found what I was looking for on the second page of The Times. The latest in a series of reports revealing a massive corruption scandal in race car driving under the byline of Clémence Diederich.

All right, fine. Clémence Diederich was me. It was my pseudonym.

I know, I could drag this secret out and play coy with it, but really, I am quite proud of the work I do.

My journalism career—for want of a better word—began years ago. I had made friends with an American reporter through some charity work. One thing led to another and I started quietly explaining (off the record, of course) some of the finer points of Driedish divorce law to him. Then, I wrote a small piece about the opening of a cultural exhibit in New York, and maybe a few more that I wish I hadn’t, under the name Cordelia Lancaster.

To cut a long story short, once I was free of my royal shackles and just a commoner married to a race car driver, and I saw first hand what was going on behind the scenes in Stavros’s profession, I contacted my friend about a tell-all.

Now, my series had been published in The Times over the past four months. This was the last article.

And then what?

It was the question I kept ignoring.

There wasn’t much investigatory journalism I could do while hiding in the attic of a remote Italian villa.

And I couldn’t go out in public yet. What sorts of stories could a disinherited royal princess report on, anyway? I didn’t want to talk tea parties and etiquette or film-festival fashion.

I wanted to write about interesting things. Important things.

From bitter experience, I knew that no one really wanted me to be interesting. Or important.

They would want either bland and banal or shocking and fabulous.

It was my bad luck to be somewhere in the middle.

I gathered up the papers, intending then to check the reservation website for the villa to ensure that no guests had made a last-minute booking. Since it was February, tourism was at a low, but one never knew if a couple of frugal Americans had taken advantage of a low fare and decided to visit Lake Como in the coldest month of the year.

But before I could get the website up, I heard the baritone again on the streets below and it made me stop in my tracks.

How long had it been since I had felt anything like this stirring in my chest? Since my husband’s death? Since his kisses first took my breath away? Since our wedding day?

I had been numb for so long. The day that Stavros died, I screamed, trembled, felt my heart break.

We hadn’t had the perfect marriage, but then, I wasn’t a perfect wife. Our notoriety, my fame, my impulsive yes, had led directly to his death.

For a fleeting moment when Stavros proposed I thought I was loved for myself, for the woman I was. But then I learned the truth. I was not a perfect wife, or daughter, or sister. Not fit for a crown, not fit for anything, really. So I shut down and locked the door to the past.

I was living the life I had now out of necessity. I was nothing but an anonymous Italian woman in a small tourist village. No one looked twice at the dark-haired Lina, who kept herself to herself and didn’t cause any trouble. I lived behind high walls and stayed invisible. Like a ghost.

It had to be like this. Distance and anonymity meant safety. For everyone. For me.

Songs like that, though. Flowing through my window like a cool, peaty stream, made me want to feel again, like I used to.

I marched across the kitchen and slammed the window down.

There would be no more feeling. No chances taken.

Until it was safe.

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