“The King and the Queen—”
Fluster rose in Rox’s head. “Oh my God, you haveboth.That’s socool.”
He tilted his head, looking at her, and the sunlight grazed the golden highlights in his hair and glistened off his short beard. “I didn’t realize you were so much of a royal watcher.”
Rox smoothed down her black slacks. “Oh, yeah. I stayed up all night to watch Wills and Kate get married.”
He blinked those deep green eyes of his. “I never would have guessed.”
“Oh, yes. I’m a royal geek.”
“Well,thatI would have said about you, but I didn’t realize you followed the noble and royal families of Europe.”
“Dork.Tell me about theQueen.”
“The King is kept busy with state functions, garden parties, recognizing accomplishments, that sort of thing. The Queen is active in negotiating trade deals. Other heads of state seem to be amused by negotiating with a queen, and they sign rather favorable deals with us. It’s like they want to please her, and they don’t realize that what they are signing is binding. She’s a shark in the boardroom.”
“You don’t think of royalty doing business stuff like that,” Rox said. “You think of them riding in the backs of convertibles and waving like this.” She pursed her lips, held her fingers together, and waved by swiveling her wrist.
“They do the waving thing, too.”
She leaned in, demanding, “Do they havechildren?Are there princes and princesses? Who’s next in line for the throne? That’s how you say it, right?”
“So many questions. The King and Queen have four children. The oldest, who is the heir, is Crown Princess Anastasia,” he said.
“So they didn’t have any boys?”
“There are two sons. One of them was a terrible monster, cursed to be horrifically ugly. He was hidden most of his childhood in a far-away castle, and no one speaks of him. His curse can only be broken by true love.”
“I declare, you are teasing me now. I know the story of ‘Beauty and the Beast.’ You cannot fool me, Cash Amsberg. Tell me about why the princess will get the throne if there are boys.”
Cash laughed out loud. “The Kingdom is inherited through absolute primogeniture, so oldest-first, regardless of gender, a practice that I find brilliant.”
“Really, I would have thought you wouldn’t.”
“Why?” His wary tone should have warned her.
“Because you’re a guy.”
“And that’s supposed to mean—”
“Aren’t you rootin’ for your own team?”
He stared at the ceiling before answering. “The Netherlands had a succession of queens for over a century. We haven’t had a king inherit the throne since the eighteen-hundreds before the current one. Queen Wilhelmina was one of the great leaders of the Dutch resistance during World War II, managing to oust Nazi sympathizers from the government even though she was in exile in England, and she gave a nightly rallying broadcast over Radio Oranje. I think Anastasia will be a brilliant queen someday. Britain has the same succession rules, now. They changed them just a few years ago.”
“Oh, a princess who will be queen. That’s so—” Rox trailed off, trying to find a good word, her hands clasped under her grin.
“Romantic?”
“Feminist,” she decided. “I love thatsheis going to rule the kingdom. Queendom?”
“Kingdom. They don’t change the money and the stationery every few decades.”
“Is she beautiful?” Rox asked, thoroughly aware that she was going all girlie-girl over the princess, but Valerie’s contracts were so damn boring.
“Oh, yes,” Cash said, his tone sing-song because he was obviously humoring her. “She is as beautiful as she is evil.”
“Oh, no!” Rox sat up straight. “She can’t be evil. She’s aprincess.”
