RAGS TO RICHES: BEFORE MARGOT MET STELLAN
And my personal favorite…
SHE’S ALREADY PREGNANT WITH HIS ROYAL BABY
God, even in that picture of her scurrying away from my hotel, her face pinched, Margot looks incredible. She’s a tiny person, yes. And she’s wearing nothing but a dark-colored negligee and that shocking pink hair… I could’ve given up everything if only she had let me keep sleeping with her.
Instead, she ran away?—
“Stellan!” my grandmother calls. I look up, my cheeks coloring slightly. She nods to Finley. “Prime Minister Finley isn’t done.”
I crease my brow but my expression stays… not placid, but fixed. Margot reached out to me after she fled my hotel. Several times, actually. I’ve obsessed over her messages but not returned any of them.
After all, I’m supposed to be on publicity lock down now. The last thing I need in the world is a spotlight.
“You see, that’s the problem with your generation…” Finley says, puffing his chest out and pacing again. He pulls out his glasses and puts them on, blinking at me like an owl. “You don’t have any privations or restrictions on what you can do. You have so much more freedom than our generation ever had…”
The feral beast inside my chest raises his head at that. He glares at Finley, showing his teeth.
What Finley knows about my personal freedom could fill a thimble. And the fact that he has the audacity to come here to my home and lecture me makes me fucking furious.
But I shove that anger down deep, trying to exude a vaguely repentant air. I want everyone in this room to know that I’m concerned about the scandal, but nottooconcerned. There is an art to wearing the right level of intensity on my face.
My grandmother Ida checks her tiny gold watch, silently sighing. Her gaze rises to take in the whole room with its vaulted ceilings and baby blue walls. Outside the gauzy drapes of immense windows, the summer sun is at its zenith.
Could that mean that Ida expects this to end soon? It’s been going on for over an hour and it’s the fourth time this week that I’ve been yelled at for…
Well, anindiscretion, to say the least. It’s really not even my fault… I just looked into Margot’s eyes and saw myself. Or not myself, exactly. But myself if I were not a royal.
If I weren’t going to be king, how different my life would have been. How could I be so close to that reflection of my other self and not lean in a little?
She just had this quality that made me forget about everyone else around us, homing in onher. What is that, exactly? If I could, I would find out and bottle that essence for the future.
It made me fall for her, at least a little.
Besides, I can guarantee that one glance at Margot’s incredible body and her unbelievable ass would have even old Finley howling like a wolf at a cresting moon.
“What do you have to say for yourself?” Finley’s smug expression and cocky strut make me fucking angry.
I roll my neck, listening for a loud crack. When I speak, I try to show Finley and his government cronies not an ounce of genuine emotion. “It was a mistake.” I grit my teeth. “It won’t happen again, obviously.”
“You’re damned right it won’t happen—” Finley starts.
Ida rises from her seat. As soon as she does, the room falls silent. Everyone is extremely afraid of her, the physically weakest one among all of us.
One day, I hope to wield that kind of power.
“I think that’s quite enough, don’t you?” she says. She gives Finley a smile that is as cool as ice. “As it happens, I have a solution.”
Finley looks astonished. “A solution?”
The smirk is in her voice but not on her face. She just appears critical, as usual. “Yes. A solution. You may not be familiar with them as you are only prime minister, but in the royal family we require them from time to time.” One of the cabinet members gasps quietly. Ida cocks her head and her lips curl up. “It appears that the girl has already moved here. All the royal family has to do now is find a way to silence her.”
My eyebrows rise and I rock backward in my chair. “She moved here?” My brows hunch. “Why?”
My grandmother eyes me for a long moment before walking purposefully over to the table, looking down at the tabloids splashed out there. “It appears that Miss Margot Keane is a journalist. I used a contact atPolitikento lure her here.” She frowns. “Not that I gather she will miss much about New York. From my understanding she doesn’t own anything of value.”
She shrugs, the movement barely raising her shoulders. What she isn’t saying out loud is the second part of her sentence.In comparison to us; we have all the castles and all the yachts that anyone could want.
