Prince Pierre Grimaldi, sitting beside her, was one of the few European monarchs or royals who was not descended from Queen Victoria of Great Britain. He was darkly handsome with black hair and dark eyes, olive skin, and sharp Mediterranean cheekbones and jawline. He was glamorously, extravagantly handsome.
When he smiled, women swooned, and there was a collectivethudas their panties hit the floorboards. At thirty-one years old, he was in that prime of mature manhood, with a deep, thick chest and narrow waist, athletic and masculine.
Yes, Flicka was smitten, too. The first time he’d asked her to dance at a charity ball she’d thrown, she’d been a little dewy-eyed. She’d been honored and flustered that he’d shown up at all, creating the kind of commotion that resulted in fantastic publicity for her charity. When he’d danced with her three times that night, the gossip pages had gone nuts.
And so had her brother, Wulfie, who had flown from Chicago to London the next day and blustered around, telling her to stay away from the Rat Bastard.
How could any girl resist that kind of sexy, forbidden fruit?
Besides, it wasn’t like anyone else wanted her.
When Pierre had dropped by the next weekend to take her to lunch, she’d gone with him, even though there had been some kind of a staring match between him and Wulf as she left with him.
Pierre could take it, though. He could stand up to the European royalty who’d looked down on his family for generations, many generations, because they were merely sovereign princes descended from feudal lords and not royalty.
Oh, yes.
It mattered.
The Grimaldi were Italian feudal lords who had managed to capture the Prince’s Palace, the stronghold overlooking the harbor and port, and ruled from it for seven hundred years, with one brief interruption. The palace had been built in 1191 as a Genoese fortress, and it still looked like it.
The Grimaldi had never built a Renaissance or Baroque fantasy castle like the other European monarchs for several reasons.
The main reason was that Monaco was a tiny strip of land seized from France. There wasn’t even room for an airport.
Pierre’s plane had landed in Nice, France, and they’d taken a helicopter to the helipad that jutted out from a cliff over the azure Mediterranean Sea.
There wasn’t enough land for another palace and grounds in the three-quarters of a square mile ruled by the city-state of Monaco. The whole country was only two and a half miles long along the coast, and the narrowest part of it was only 382 yards wide, which is 349 meters.
Yes, a 400-meter dash race could not be run across that part of Monaco without crossing the border into France or splashing the last fifty meters into the sea. As the world record for the 400-meter dash was a whisker over 43 seconds, that runner could sprint across the entire country of Monaco in about 36 seconds.
But Monaco was Pierre’s sovereign principality, and Flicka didn’t make jokes about how teeny-tiny his micro-state was.
Only Vatican City was smaller.
Let’s face it, the Vatican is abuilding,not acountry.
People teased the royalty of Liechtenstein for being too small to be a real country, and it was eighty times the size of Monaco.
The Kingdom of Hannover had encompassed most of Germany, thousands and thousands of square miles.
Even Flicka had a propensity toward petty royal carping.
It might have amused her.
The other reason that the Grimaldi hadn’t just torn down their medieval fortress and started over from the foundation was superstition.
While most of their sovereign power was theoretically derived from rather tenuous treaties with France and Italy, the stones of the fortress held the princely magic. They didn’t mess with the palace.
In the late 1700s, the Grimaldi had finally relaxed, secure that their treaties with France would hold. They’d torn down some of the palace’s fortifications to make it prettier and more like the Baroque and Renaissance castles that other monarchs lived in.
The French had almost immediately overrun the country, taken the palace, and stripped it of its treasure.
The Grimaldi had been exiled to Italy for twenty years.
When they’d won the palace back, they’d rebuilt the fortifications, which still stood to this day. They had never gotten some of their better art pieces back from the French.
Yes, the Grimaldi ruled Monaco by capturing the fortress above the harbor, and they held it by keeping the fortress strong.
