Chapter One

When my husband died, a strange calm settled over me.

I saw the past, present and future unfurl, clear as the images of smoke and fire on the television screen in front of me.

My life had always been captured in such detail. My birth was announced with heraldry and pomp. My parents’ marriage disintegrated piece by piece in the columns of newsprint and between commercial breaks.

And now…my husband’s death. Excruciatingly slow. Replay. Replay. Replay.

I had spent the last few hours watching the race on television from a small cottage just yards away from the press and fans and sponsors. Other wives sat in the stands, but Stavros preferred me out of the public eye. One couldn’t blame him—our relationship and elopement had sparked an intense media glare. A Formula One driver winning the hand of Caroline, a royal princess of Drieden? It was a scandal for the ages.

I loved Stavros as soon as I met him, and he moved as quickly as the cars he drove. I let myself go along, recklessly perhaps, giving up my title and my position as third in line to the Driedish crown in exchange for the delicious thrill of being with him.

We married in Monte Carlo, in a small chapel overlooking the sea, right before the Monaco Grand Prix.

Twelve hours later, after he lost the race and he was sulky and accusing me of bringing a bad energy to it, I started to wonder if he was right…

Was I a bad luck charm?

And yet I felt sorry for him. Because he’d lost his race, because our relationship had caused such stress for him. I felt guilty. If I hadn’t been born a princess, hadn’t invited the public to gawk at us, at him, then he would have been able to focus—on the car, the track, the competition.

So I stayed. After all, I cared about him, even if the first blush of passion soon faded. When he won, we smiled. Laughed. Made love. When he lost, he drank. Pouted. Stormed out and left for hours. And I started hiding in cottages.

He said it was easier to concentrate on the race if the world wasn’t reminded of who I was. Or who I used to be.

Stavros was losing the race when he crashed and flipped and his car exploded into a huge inferno on the thirty-second lap of the Slovenian Grand Prix. My dashing, intense husband, the great Stavros Di Bernardo, was gone forever, in one last, furious blaze. Dying like he lived.

Leaving me to face the flashbulbs alone.

I had never thought of myself as psychic, but I saw the future then in headlines and captions.

Poor Caroline. Grieving Caroline. The widow. The disinherited. The disgraced. The despondent former princess.

The drama would never be enough. The stakes would never be too high. The intrusion never too deep.

After my parents’ divorce, I saw first hand the two paths available to a royal post-scandal.

I could be like my father, Prince Albert of Drieden. Retreat to a country home. Spend my days fishing and planning gardens. (Because the only thing more boring than gardening is planning a garden.)

Or I could be like my mother. The one who sucked up media attention like an almost-melted ice cream on a summer day.

It was my terrible luck that neither option was acceptable to me.

I was only twenty-nine. Too young to play dead in the backwoods of Drieden and too young for the magazines to ignore me if I didn’t.

I needed time. Time to think, time to plan, time to regroup. And the clock was spinning fast.

Pieces of my plan snapped together, as if my subconscious had worked on this problem for years.

Everything fell into two categories: things I could take with me and things I would leave behind.

I had time for two short emails—one to London, one to an Italian village.

There was a knock at the door.

“Come in!” I called out, in a hoarse voice that sounded strange to me. The last twenty minutes had been a blur and I wasn’t sure if I had been crying or screaming.

It was Stavros’s manager. Luis Caballero walked into the room, his trim figure nearly vibrating with adrenaline. He stopped dead when he saw me.

“What happened to your hair?” he gasped, shock making him switch to his native Spanish. His eyes grew round with horror as he stared at the long blonde ponytail lying on the carpet at my feet.

Even though my grandmother, Queen Aurelia, had stripped me of my titles when I married Stavros, my princess blood ran true. I lifted my chin and said, “I’ll need a widow’s veil for the funeral. Thick enough that no one can see my face.” Luis inclined his head, a gesture of respect or a gesture to grant me privacy. “And a bottle of hair dye,” I told him. “Jet black.”