The Runaway Princess (13 page)

Each time Leo revealed a little more about his family. Within a few lunches I’d learned that his mother, Liza Bachmann, spent half her time in New York directing her fitness DVD and control lingerie empire, which currently made her the seventh richest model in the world; that his dad, Prince Boris, the fourth in line to the throne of Nirona, was currently in London to raise funds for his feral-cat charity; that Leo had just flown home for the night to celebrate the twenty-ninth birthday of his sister, Sofia, who worked for a big international law firm and specialized in family inheritance dispute resolution.

“Sofia doesn’t like being mistaken for a royal freeloader like Rolf either,” he explained. “But it helps that she also enjoys a good legal wrangle.”

In return, I told him carefully selected details about my own family: how my dad was a retired bank manager who’d won every prize going in the local vegetable show (not for nothing was he the Marrow King of Hadley Green, which Leo pointed out made me the Marrow Princess); how my mum had run the kitchens at the local school and invented several new puddings that were now on the national menu. I told him about my town councilor gran, who’d left me Badger, and mentioned my older sister Kelly again, who’d left home while I was at school.

And, of course, we always had Rolf to talk about. Rolf and/or Jo. I tried to pass on Jo’s message about the iPod with as much tact as I could, but Leo scratched his chin thoughtfully.

“The thing is, I’ve never known Rolf to make so much effort for a girl before. Normally he’s bored by now. You say he’s sent an iPod? With songs on it? He can’t even work his own. Is she really not interested?”

“I don’t think so.” I wasn’t sure what the tactful way to convey Jo’s reaction was. She did seem to be enjoying the outrage quite a lot, given that she could quite easily make it all stop with a simple restraining order. Maybe she saw something in Rolf I couldn’t. Maybe her outrage was an advanced version of the insulting banter she and Ted enjoyed. I was much happier to make excuses for her double standards, since it was Leo’s brother causing them. “If it’s just the challenge Rolf’s looking for, can’t he take up a new language? Or learn to knit?”

“Or maybe he really likes her.”

We both looked shocked at that.

“She could be the making of him. He needs someone with a bit of common sense,” Leo added. “Jo doesn’t take any of his nonsense seriously.”

“Well, if that’s the case, I think what would impress Jo more,” I said very carefully, “would be if he stopped
trying
to impress her. If he could make it less about himself and more about her? A lot less about himself, actually.”

Leo nodded solemnly. “I’ll pass it on.”

What I really wanted to say was that Rolf should start being a bit more like Leo. Although he answered my predictable questions about heating in castles and whether it was weird seeing your family on postcards with good humor, Leo seemed determined to make our dates as normal as possible. We ate out at simple French restaurants near his house, and he wouldn’t let me pay for anything, even though I tried. And at the end of the evening, even when I was literally trembling with the sort of desire I’d only ever read about in Kelly’s Judith Krantz novels, rather than whisk me back to his luxury townhouse for a princely ravishing, he kissed me—slowly, until my knees turned weak and the blood raced round my veins—and sent me home with Billy.

“I don’t want to rush things,” he said, in the long phone calls in the dark that followed. “This is special.”

I agreed. The time Leo and I spent together
was
special, but in a way that had nothing to do with him being fifth in line to the throne of Europe’s most exclusive island tax haven, after Pavlos, Pavlos’s sons, Serge and Guillermo, and Boris.

I
got my first glimpse into just how different Leo’s life was from mine at the start of February when he rang me at work one morning, to ask if he could take me to a charity gala event at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden.

He was using the same sort of voice Jo used when she begged me to go to one of her actor friends’ plays—the “I don’t really want to go to this on my own, and I’m not saying it’s going to be any good, but I said I would, and it’s only for a couple of hours, and you never know, there might be chips” sort of voice.

“It’s one of Dad’s charities,” he explained. “Sofia’s bailed out because of some hearing she’s got at the European Court of Human Rights, and Dad doesn’t want to have to talk to Rolf all night on his own, so I’m getting a fair bit of pressure to turn up and support the old man. Will you come and support
me
, please?”

“Of course!” I said, without even thinking. Leo made it sound very run-of-the-mill. In fact, he sounded more worried that I’d be put out by going. “What’s the charity?”

“The Boris Wolfsburg Foundation for Feral Cats.” Leo coughed. “I know. Dad’s got about five foundations, and all of them are a bit … out there, but there weren’t many left. Granddad’s got all the serious ones, and Uncle Pavlos bagged any interesting ones that were left, since he’s the official heir. At least Dad’s got some of Mom’s friends on board for his. I think Elle Macpherson might be coming. And Lulu.”

“Really?” I was impressed. I’d heard of them. “And will she be there herself?”

“ ’Fraid not. She’s in New York this week, launching her Valentine’s control lingerie range. Don’t ask about that either.”

I didn’t. I’d Googled it, though, with Jo. Though my slightly wobbly tum could have done with Liza’s help, I hadn’t invested in a Take Control Girdle. As Jo put it, even if your date was so impressed with your board-flat stomach that he took you home, that’d be about as far as it’d go, unless either of you had a pair of scissors handy.

“So when is it, this do?”

“Friday.” Leo sounded apologetic. “I know it’s short notice, but my assistant put it in my work diary, not my personal one, so I missed it. Will you have time to get something to wear?”

“Of course!” I said. There were four shopping days to Friday. That was loads of time.

“Great! I’ll have the invitation couriered round to you right now.”

I put the phone down in a state of fluttery excitement. A gala! With film stars!

Although, I thought, glancing down at the lingering aftereffects of my mother’s Christmas baking extravaganza, still making my jeans billow a bit, maybe it mightn’t be a bad idea to see if Liza did any girdles with easier access.

*

“
You can’t wear that,” said Jo in a no-arguments tone.

“Why not? What’s wrong with it?”

We looked at my reflection in Jo’s mahogany cheval mirror. Neither of us looked very happy, to be brutally honest.

“Darling, you’re going to the opera, not a piano lesson.” Jo tweaked my gray velvet knee-length dress, my second-best event outfit. I’d already worn my black dress in several different accessory permutations so I’d had to fall back on this, zhushed up with a pair of red shoes that I could walk exactly one hundred meters in before I started to limp. It was what I called a go-anywhere dress, and what Jo called my nun frock.

“But it’s a charity night,” I protested. “I don’t want to look overdressed.”

“It’s not
that
sort of charity,” said Jo briskly. “There won’t be a raffle for a fruit basket, it’ll be Katherine Jenkins singing selections from Puccini and everyone jangling their diamonds in time to the music. And his family will be there!”

“I don’t want Leo to think I’m making a bigger effort for his family than I do for him,” I said stubbornly. “I don’t want him to think I think it’s a big deal for me. Him being a prince. He’s already said how refreshing it is that I’m not some prince-hunter type.”

I paused, as the Other Voice in my head started to point out the stupidity of what I’d just said. Of course it was a big deal. Me deliberately not making it a big deal only underlined its big-dealness—and, if I was being honest, made me look a bit chippy.

I prodded the messy emotional reasoning churning away inside me, stirred up even more now by Jo’s reaction. It wasn’t as if Leo’s family was just any old family. In fact, wasn’t it rude
not
to make an effort? For anyone’s family? God, it was so complicated.

“Or have I got that all wrong?” I asked in a small voice. Any normal rules about dating had gone out of the window ages ago. I was literally clueless.

By way of an answer, Jo swung open her wardrobe door and started to rifle critically through the hangers.

I stared at my reflection in the mirror and tried to decide if I felt more excited or scared. On balance, I
thought
I was excited.

*

L
eo sent a car to collect me at seven, but it wasn’t Billy in the Range Rover, and when I got in—quickly, because the huge blacked-out limo was holding up two taxis in the road outside our house—he wasn’t in the backseat.

Rolf was. In evening dress, with his bow tie undone and his hair messy. He was texting, and barely bothered to look up when I slid in. A strong smell of expensive aftershave hung in the air, and I had an unwelcome mental blast of the “One Night with Rolf” playlist. Thankfully, it was in my head, not on the car stereo.

“Evening,” he said, squinting at his phone. “Be with you in a second.”

The backseat was so wide I wasn’t expecting him to lean across, but a wave would have been nice. Something to acknowledge the efforts I’d made to wriggle into Jo’s best full-length silvery silk evening dress, now carefully double-taped to my front and back to avert any embarrassing slippages.

“Hello, Rolf,” I said pointedly, to avoid an embarrassing repeat of the incident in the club. The driver closed the door behind me with a discreet clunk.

Rolf’s head turned and he did a double take, so hard his floppy fringe fell into his eyes.

“Well, hello.” He gave me the slow, sexy smile that worked on the stupid half of my brain. “Look at you! Don’t you look gorgeous?”

I blushed and tried to pretend that I hadn’t made that much effort. Admittedly, Jo had spent about two hours painstakingly tonging my hair into bigger curls than normal, and then doing my makeup to a depth of approximately one inch, but I didn’t think I looked
that
different.

Rolf stared at me for a moment, then gave me a wolfish wink, glanced across at our flat as if Jo might be at the front door, and went back to his phone.

“ ’Scuse me,” he said, “but I’ve got an awkward sitch with tonight’s guest list. Too many girls, not enough Rolf, if you know what I mean.”

I thought there was probably more than enough Rolf to go round, but I didn’t say anything. It was much easier to warm to Rolf when Leo was talking about his childhood terror of penguins, caused by an unfortunate incident at the Royal Zoo, rather than faced with the real thing in all its manicured glory.

“Where’s Leo?” I asked instead. “He is still coming?”

“Yup. He’s been delayed at the office. Says he’ll meet you there.”

My heart sank. I’d got my invitation in my bag, but no actual ticket, and I had no idea what I was meant to do on arrival. Leo hadn’t put any instructions in with the thick white envelope. “Must be something important.”

“I’m sure it is. It always is with Leo. I don’t know if he’s told you, but he’s the only person in London with a job.” He paused, glanced across at the house once more, then as the car purred away, said, “Text Tatiana.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Text Tatiana. I’m talking to my phone.”

“Oh, right. Sorry.”

“Hey, baby. Total nightmare.”

It took me a second to realize he wasn’t actually talking to me. “Mine doesn’t do that,” I said, feeling I ought to explain.

“What?”

“Mine isn’t voice-activated. Although I do shout at it quite a lot!”

Rolf frowned. “Delete. Delete. No, not that. Text Tatiana.”

“Sorry, did I mess that up?” I gripped my—Jo’s—evening bag and tried to focus my thoughts before I blurted out something else that might crash Rolf’s phone by accident. I wasn’t sure how this texting of Tatiana fitted in with Rolf’s determined wooing of Jo. I resisted the temptation to shout “Delete Tatiana.”

“Double booking,” said Rolf, with an ambiguous wink.

“On the Rolf Express?”

“Exactly.” He fiddled with his phone. “If someone hadn’t been washing her hair tonight, there might have been room for two. …”

Jo was
not
washing her hair; she was having dinner with Marigold at J Sheekey. I could have told him that for nothing, but I bit my lip and smiled enigmatically.

While Rolf fiddled with his phone, I turned my head away and watched the nighttime streets of central London flash past. I never got tired of seeing the postcard sights, all lit up for the evening as if they were onstage: the round face of Big Ben above the spiky Houses of Parliament, orange taxi signs like eyes in the darkness, and the pearly strings of lights along the Embankment.

After a while I noticed that people were looking at me. Well, at the car. As we swished past, their heads turned automatically to see who was in such a massive look-at-me limo.

The first time a tourist pointed, I shrank back in my seat, as if they could see me as clearly as I could see their curious faces. But as we went on and I realized I was safe behind the tinted privacy glass, I started to enjoy it. If Rolf hadn’t been there, I might even have indulged myself in a royal wave, just to see what it felt like.

It wasn’t a long drive to the Royal Opera House from Jo’s flat, but the traffic was gridlocked, and by the time we pulled up outside, we were nearly twenty minutes late. My heart was racing with tension.

Well,
my
heart was racing. Rolf was still smarming at his phone: “I’ll totes make it up to you. Big love. Delete big love. Text, kisses. Yeah. Rolf. Ex ex. Ex. Send. What are you doing?” he added, seeing me struggling with the car door.

“Trying to get out. We’re so late!” I checked my nails. I’d been to a salon down the road that afternoon, and already one was chipped. I wasn’t used to varnish.

“It’s deadlocked, babe,” he said, as if it were very obvious. “And the doors are armor-plated.”

I turned to look at him, to check if he was joking or not. “Why do you have an armor-plated car?”

“Because some nutter tried to have a go at Granddad once. Anyway, everyone’s got them. The Saudis. The Grimaldis. The Ecclestones.”

The Ecclestones were my parents’ neighbors in Yorkshire. I didn’t think they were the same ones, though.

“And don’t try to open the door!” he added, as I was digesting this startling information. “That’s what Mark’s for.”

“But I’m perfectly capable of—”

“That’s not the point,” said Rolf. “It’s about the show. The entrance. The
magic
.”

As he spoke, the door swung open and the driver offered me a hand out, as if I were some elderly granny. This driver actually wore a peaked cap, as well as driving gloves. I didn’t know drivers had formal wear too.

I stuck one foot out, but before I could remember what I’d seen in the films about exiting cars like a lady, there was another hand on my back, giving me a none-too-gentle push. I was already distracted by the banks of people with cameras waiting outside the door of the Opera House—some of them now pointing at me—and the unexpected shove nearly made me fall out onto the pavement.

“Hurry up, and don’t show your knickers,” said Rolf with a wink that said exactly the opposite. “I hope you’re wearing some?”

Somewhere in the seconds between finishing his text and copping a feel of my bare back, he’d done up his bow tie, smoothed down his hair, and somehow transformed his sleazy appearance into a more presentable version. Like Wonder Woman but in a limo rather than a phone box.

I swallowed. Dare I say it, a more princely version.

“Of course I am wearing knickers,” I said haughtily, and got out.

Immediately the cameras started flashing, and I had to fight my instinct to jump straight back in the car. I really didn’t enjoy having my photo taken—my best side was the back of my head—and the flashes were giving me black spots in front of my eyes. I hoped they would stop once they realized I wasn’t anyone famous, but they seemed to get more intense.

Stand up straight. Smile. Not like that. Don’t show your wonky tooth.
I turned my head so my beauty mark wasn’t facing the cameras, and the flashes went mad.

Then, of course, I realized Rolf was playing up to them behind me. He’d slipped on a pair of sunglasses, which he was now taking off again, while grinning and turning very slowly to give everyone his best side. While the cameras were still whirring, he yelled, “Okay, that’s enough!” He held up a hand and shepherded me into the foyer of the Opera House.

I really mean shepherded. I was so stunned he practically had to push me in, and this time he seemed to be checking whether I was wearing a bra.

*

O
nce inside, I pretended to be looking around while I recovered my composure. I’d never been to the Royal Opera House, and the first thing I noticed wasn’t a thing, but a smell—the drowsy scent of tiger lilies arranged in stripy starbursts all round the room. They were the most strongly scented lilies I’d ever come across and I wondered where they’d been flown in from.

Long gold banners with the Prince Boris Foundation logo hung from the ceiling, and waiters in dazzling white shirts and black cats’ ears circulated with trays of champagne flutes. They slid through the crowd of chattering guests, keeping their trays straight, all the streaming bubbles in the flutes aligning perfectly, despite jeweled hands reaching out of nowhere to grab them.

I turned to ask Rolf if he knew how long Leo would be, but he’d vanished, and my nerves reappeared in one panicky
whoosh
. I didn’t exactly feel comfortable with Rolf, but he was the only person here I knew—plus, he was the only one I could easily ask about what to do. Should I have shown my invitation to
someone
?