Courted: Gowns & Crowns, Book 1 (29 page)

“It’s okay—it’s okay,” she murmured, standing back to wipe her tears away. She offered him a shaky laugh and shook her head. “I’m being ridiculous. It’s just this night, this dress, you—” She flapped her hand around, her voice wavering dangerously. “You really should put all this in a tourism brochure, because I’m telling you, you’d be completely overrun by hopeless romantics. Especially from Missouri.” She pursed her lips, glancing away. Then she looked back at him.

“Thank you,” she said. Her words were certain and firm, as if she was making a declaration to him, maybe to herself as well. “Thank you for rescuing me.”

He lifted his brows. He should ask her now. This was the time. “Well, you weren’t really in all that much danger—”

“Yes, yes, I really was.” She closed her hands over his again, holding on to him as if he were some sort of a lifeline. “I think I’d given up on one too many things by the time I reached Garronia. My music, my life. Maybe even myself, a little bit. You made me see that all I needed to do was reach out for someone who might just reach back for me. Might just believe in me, see me as I couldn’t see myself. I did, and you were there. I’ll never forget that. I really won’t.” She glanced away again, toward the flickering screens.

That sounded an awful lot like good-bye.
Do it now.
“Emmaline, I want to make sure you won’t forget.” He drew in a breath.

“Wait, what
is
that?” Emmaline’s gaze had sharpened on the screen. “Where is that coming from?”

“What?” He turned as well to see what she was looking at, then he frowned too. First one, then another screen was switching to breaking entertainment news, with Emmaline’s picture featured prominently and the headline. “Princess Gold Digger” flickered across the screen in English and Garronois.

He flinched. “Emmaline, don’t look at that.”

“Princess
Gold Digger
?” She repeated the words, her eyes going wide as she read the captions. “Can you turn any of these up—oh my
God
.”

“Your Highness.” An aide rushed into the room, stopping short. “You are needed in the ballroom, sir,” he said quickly, his gaze going from Kristos to Emmaline.

“Tell them I’m busy,” Kristos snapped as Stefan stepped around the aide, coming to stand beside them. For the first time, Kristos noticed the thin wire trailing from his cousin’s ear. A headset. He must have been given word about this newest media bomb.

“Go,” Stefan said. He reached out and gripped Kristos’s shoulder. “I’ll translate for Miss Andrews—”

“You don’t need to translate!” Emmaline’s sharp words drew their attention. “I can read the captions easily enough. Oh my God—that’s my house—where did they get those photos? How dare they! How is this even
allowable
!”

Stefan began to speak, but Kristos stopped him, anger and a gut-wrenching awareness sparking through him. He had done this. He had let this happen. “It’s allowable because we have freedom of the press, Emmaline.”

He knew his words were harsh by the way she jerked her attention to him, but he couldn’t help it. Because he also knew what would happen next, as the media story got bigger and uglier and even more hurtful. The
only
thing that could happen next, given all she knew about him, and all she’d already experienced about what her life would be like if she remained. He’d been a fool to expect anything different. “This is simply part of being in the castle.”

“Well, I want to
leave
the castle, then. Now. Tonight. I want us all out of here. I’m sorry, Kristos, I truly am. You’ve been nothing but gracious to me. But this—they have a picture of my
house
. We have to leave.”

“
Emmaline
.” He didn’t even know if he’d spoken her name aloud, but he must have, since she stepped sharply away from him, as if his touch would undermine her resolve.

“I have to go.” Her words were absolute. “I don’t want to be here any longer. I can’t.” She held up a hand, forestalling any response on his part. She glared back at the screens, and her face changed with each new image—first to anger, then to disbelief. Then to humiliation.

This
was what he’d brought her by drawing her into his life. This was what he’d done to her. And now the last image he’d ever have of her would be Emmaline’s stricken eyes as she stared past him, shock and outrage drowning out all the memories of laughter, of passion—and what he’d thought was even love.

His chest burned with cold fire beneath the secret he kept there.
What was I thinking?
Of course she’d leave. No one would stay for this—this life of constant scrutiny. He himself didn’t want it, and he’d been born to it. Why on earth had he thought he could ask her to live it with him?

He straightened, feeling the cold finality of her decision like a slap, and forced his voice to be calm. “Of course, Emmaline. Dimitri and Stefan will ensure the safety of you and your friends.”

She blinked, some of the color returning to her cheeks as she looked back at him. Still, he didn’t want to hear her apologies, if indeed she was about to give them. He couldn’t. Like a battle that couldn’t be won, some things were better off being forgotten.

“Kristos—”

He drowned out her response with the memorized rhetoric of the speeches he was still expected to make tonight. The first of a hundred thousand speeches, he had no doubt, to cover over the emptiness in his heart until he could finally break free from this castle once more. He’d been a fool to think he might find a path forward as the crown prince.

He had only one path, and he needed to find a way to reclaim it. Alone.

Emmaline took a step forward, then stopped short as he bowed to her with excruciating politeness.

“Good evening, Emmaline,” he said, not even recognizing his own voice. “Godspeed to wherever your travels take you.”

Chapter 20

“Where did the captions go?”

Turning from the sound of Kristos’s fading footsteps, Em glared at the screens, willing herself not to cry. Her words seemed sucked away by the enormity of the images flashing across the screen in front of her, the closed-caption translations having somehow disappeared. Pictures of her mother and father in their younger years, herself in her concert uniforms, bending seriously over her violin. They looked like benign pictures, positive pictures, but why were they being flashed across the screen at all, and what—

“What are they saying! Turn that up!” she demanded, uncaring that she sounded coarse, common, unwilling to look away as a new caption flashed up again on the screen below a sleekly blonde woman and her metrosexual counterpart, both of them looking serious and vaguely sad. The translator apparently was attempting to interpret the slightly slurred voice that now came streaming over the speakers of the conference room, as light as feathers falling in the breeze and so, so sweet.

“She always loved to read about princes.”

Those were the words
she
heard, in her mother’s voice, but her ears had grown used to interpreting the stops and starts, the broken whispers. The drifting voice that now made Dr. Honor Andrews sound so different to anyone else. Anyone who wasn’t Em and her father. Because clearly, these were not the words the media station had heard. Below her mother’s face, the caption read: “She always wanted to be a princess.”

As the real voice of her mother finally assaulted her, she could hear every defect, see the images of her mother’s slack face from the local newspaper coverage of the brave recovery of the local professor, a story that barely anyone had seen when the accident had first happened, but now…

“She’s worked so hard,” her mother said, the words so frail, so fragile. After that, she said something else that not even Em could decipher, but her statement ended once more with: “…a princess.”

Given that those words could have been interpreted any way possible, the station went in for the kill, and the words “She’ll stop at nothing to be a princess” flickered to life beneath her mother’s face.

Em put her hand to her mouth, taking a step back as telecasters then flashed to images of Em getting out of the SUV that had taken them to the ball earlier tonight, her beautiful dress shimmering around her like a dream come true, her face beaming, juxtaposed against the heart-wrenching picture and fractured breathing of her mother.

My God. The woman on the screen—
her
—with her laughing eyes and perfectly styled hair… She was
horrifying
. She was leaving her mother behind to be cared for by hired help while she ran across the globe and tried to throw herself into some unsuspecting prince’s arms, all for a chance at becoming something she was never meant to be.

“Why is she doing it?” the serious blonde asked her grim counterpart. “Who could do such a thing? Abandon her parents to go play at being princess. Does she really think she’s going to land her prince? And then what? Where will the riches of Garronia go? To help care for Emmaline Andrews’s parents so she doesn’t have to, or into her own pockets?”

Em backed up another step, sharply.

“Only she can tell us.” The male part of the duo turned to the camera. Somber. Sad. But with a hard glint to his eye as well, as if here was the news that the people needed to know. “And yet the Gold Digger Princess once again isn’t talking. Royal spokespeople confirm only that—”

“What the hell! Turn that off! Turn that off now!”

There was a flurry of silks and rushing feet, then Em felt arms around her, pulling her back, turning her forcibly away from the screens as the pictures flickered. But she’d seen it all already. This was only the leading tide of newscasts, and they weren’t even the American ones.

“I’m a
monster
,” she said, and her vision swam as Lauren stood directly in front of her, her hands on her shoulders.

“You’re the least monstrous person I know, Emmaline.” Her words were sharp. “The story had died, and the media secretary here had done too good a job burying it. Am I right?” she demanded of someone over Em’s shoulders, but Em was too sick to look. “But you can’t just cut something off like that. That’s not how it works. All the parades of the local women were great, but they were boring. They should have leaked something about our next location, or—”

A snort of derision that sounded too close to them went a long way toward calming Em’s nerves. Dimitri stood watch beside her now, scowling at Lauren, but it was Stefan who spoke.

“The effect of stoppering the story completely versus an approach that would have simply let a little air out? Worthy of consideration, but ultimately not any more likely to succeed. The story was going to die or it was going to explode. It was a fifty-fifty chance no matter which way we allowed it to play out.”

Em blinked at him. “You
knew
that? You knew this might happen tonight, and you still let us go in front of everyone like we did? Waving and laughing like we didn’t have a care in the world, when my parents—my God, my
dad
. I have to call my dad!”

“I’ve already texted the nurse. She’ll stay on-site for the next few days.” Nicki’s voice cut into Em’s scrambling thoughts, and she held up Lauren’s phone. “She’s worked with Lauren before, and it’s not the first time this sort of thing has happened. She knows how to handle the media.”

Em’s gaze swung back to Lauren, who shrugged. “You get used to it. It sucks, but you get used to it.”

“And give your parents some credit, Em,” Nicki said. “They aren’t exactly fans of
E!
or whatever shows would carry this crap.”

“Not only
E!
, unfortunately.” Fran was at the computer set up at the base of the monitors, her fingers racing over the keyboard. Stefan immediately stepped toward her.

“You don’t have access—”

“Just hitting the Internet, don’t get your tights in a twist.” Fran scowled at the screen. “The story’s been cooking since about noon our time, looks like, gathering up a head of steam. It’s been picked up by the
Guardian
in Britain, which will pick up anything that’s bleeding, but it hasn’t hit the AP yet.”

“The AP!” Em felt what was left of the blood in her face drain away. “Tell me you’re joking.”

“I’d like to say I was, but it all depends on the current news cycle. If it’s a slow day, this will definitely get noticed. Gowns and crowns are always an attraction.” She frowned, her gaze tracking the scrolling information. “Unfortunately, where it’s hit is bad enough. The
Guardian
has a direct feed into most of the tabloid sites in the US.”

“This is insane.” Em turned to Stefan. She already felt terrible for how she’d treated Kristos, but she’d been so horrified at the implications.
Princess Gold Digger. Who’d even come up with that?
Far better for her to just leave and stop the damage altogether. “There’s no fallout for the royal family, is there?”

Lauren groaned. “Like that should be your concern.”

“I’m serious,” she said, forcing Stefan to turn his attention to her instead of continuing to scowl at Frannie, her fingers flying over the keyboard as she pulled up various search engines. “This newest round of stories, what is the net effect?”

“None, not in any lasting sense.” Stefan shook his head. “The queen, or more likely the king and Kristos, will make a statement exonerating you of any intent, malicious or otherwise. It’s not necessary, but—”

“Not necessary.” Em stared at him, his callous tone grounding her further, yet swinging her right back into anger. “My parents are on
TV
. My mother’s voice was played on international media. She’s a respected historical scholar, and they made her sound like an imbecile!”

“And so the royal family will almost certainly make a statement about their shock and dismay over the entire situation, their plea for the media to report news and not gossip, and their deep apologies to you and your family.” Stefan spoke the words as if he was checking off items from a PR list instead of discussing the defamation and embarrassment of Em’s family on a global scale. “Once you’ve left Garronia and the ordinary state schedule is resumed, the story will be replaced.”