Chapter Three

Signore Rossi hated the way I made coffee, but I gave him a cup anyway. “Bah. Australian coffee,” he said as he made a face.

I should explain that. When I met Elena and her father, they commented on my accent. Instead of giving them a reasonable explanation, such as I was Italian but grew up in Drieden, I told them that I was Italian but had grown up in Australia.

It should probably be a point of pride that I don’t lie adroitly.

So Signore Rossi and Elena blamed all my idiosyncrasies on my Australian childhood. I had no family nearby, because they all still lived in Australia. My Italian was a bit formal—because Australians were like that. Now, my coffee-brewing technique was Australian.

I hoped a real Australian never rented the guest apartment. They would be very confused about the misconceptions that awaited them.

As we did every time I visited, Signore Rossi and I settled around the television. Signore Rossi was almost completely blind, but he stared at the screen as it played the news all day and, in the evenings, he enjoyed soap operas and talent competitions.

The international news station was on, so I watched and he listened to reports about a drought in India and a hurricane in Mexico. There was a woman turning one hundred and twelve in Osaka (it was all the fish the Japanese ate, Signore Rossi observed, and the cigarettes) and a boy who had been miraculously rescued after spending fifteen days in a boat off the coast of Florida. “He’s lucky it’s warm there,” Signore Rossi said. I pulled a cashmere scarf tighter around my shoulders and agreed wholeheartedly.

After a commercial break featuring Italian coffee pods endorsed by the soccer superstar Mastropieto, the news anchor returned and read the next report, about the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “Among this year’s influential attendees are President Salovic, noted economist Madeleine Berger, biotech billionaire Karl Sylvain von Falkenburg and, for the first time, advocating the education of girls in the engineering and science fields, Her Royal Highness Princess Theodora of Drieden.”

I froze as a photo of my family shot up on the screen. Why they couldn’t have used a beautiful formal portrait of my sister, I don’t know. But there she was, at one of the Driedish national holidays, with the rest of us, on the steps of the city hall. She stood on my grandmother the Queen’s left, my father on the right.

And there I was, shoulder to shoulder with Thea.

It had been taken two or three years ago, I guessed. My hair had been blonder, and my blue eyes, the same as my sister’s and my father’s, were not hidden behind dramatic oversize sunglasses. I remembered those giant amethyst earrings, a gorgeous deep purple that had looked so well with that fresh green dress but had nearly made my ears bleed from the weight.

Signore Rossi. I jerked, remembering where I was. That I was not reliving that day with my family, waving at the crowds, but I was here, hiding, in a cold Italian apartment with a blind man.

He was blind…wasn’t he?

It was a crazy suspicion but still I searched his face, his blank eyes staring at the screen. If he saw anything, or was able to recognize my face through his hazy vision, he showed no sign of it.

The television reporter was still talking about Thea. What was she saying?

“The princess achieved worldwide notoriety last year when her royal wedding was canceled at the last moment. But in the last few months, she has stepped out and resumed her work as an activist in the arts, science and education. Her appearance in Davos signals a new commitment to bring those causes to the world stage.”

They moved on to another story. I looked down at my frigid hands in my lap. They were shaking slightly. Too close a call? Or something else? Maybe seeing my family—myself—on television was too intimate. I should probably stick to newspapers. Static black-and-white newsprint seemed safer, somehow.

Signore Rossi had said something. “I’m sorry, I missed that,” I said to him.

He lifted a chin at the television. “That royal wedding. The one that was called off. Did you hear about that?”

I closed my eyes. If Signore Rossi only knew. I had been the one to go into Thea’s dressing room to tell her that her fiancé, Christian Fraser-Campbell, had gone missing. That he had left her at the altar in front of the millions across the globe waiting to watch a romantic spectacle. It had killed me, to watch her confusion, her humiliation, and know there was nothing I could do about it.

“I did hear about it,” I said carefully.

“I wonder who had to pay for it all. A royal wedding can’t be cheap.”

“What is money, to those people?” I asked rhetorically. Truth was, I doubted Thea had any idea what her wedding had cost. It wasn’t like royal princesses were shown the bills for occasions such as that. Hundreds of government and palace staffers had orchestrated the event—and then methodically taken it all down, piece by depressing piece.

Signore Rossi grunted. “Still, you have to sympathize with those young people.”

“Which young people?”

“That princess and her groom. Clearly, they were caught up in a passionate love affair and it burned out. Poof. It’s probably better that they found out they weren’t suited before the wedding. So many first loves think they’ll last for ever.”

Strange. I had never heard an outsider give their opinion of my sister and Christian’s failed relationship. I had still been in the palace bubble in the aftermath, and no one had been allowed to speak his name. And after my elopement, no one brought up Thea and Christian to me; they only gushed about how romantic my elopement with Stavros was.

Of course, I knew people would have ideas about Thea, about me, about Big Gran and my parents and the institution of the monarchy in general. But after a lifetime of being a princess one learned to just…filter them all out.

But here was a man—an elderly Italian man in a remote village—who had the most curious and incorrect preconception about my sister’s love life.

I had to correct him.

“I don’t think it was a first-love situation,” I said.

“No? Aren’t big, grand weddings for first loves?”

“Not for people like that, I don’t think.”

Signore Rossi’s eyes crinkled at the edges. “I wouldn’t have taken you for a cynic, Lina. We Italians are passionate, and Australians also seem to be fairly gregarious folk.”

“I’m not a cynic,” I said, surprised at the defensiveness in my voice.

“That’s right. You told me you eloped with your husband. No cynic would do that with their first love.”

“He wasn’t—” I broke off. Recovered. “I don’t believe I had a first love.”

Signore Rossi chuckled. “Of course you had a first love. Everyone has a first love.”

“Love? I don’t know about that,” I replied drolly. “Maybe the first man I lost my head over.”

“There you are. First love.” Signore Rossi spread his arms dramatically. “Losing your head, it’s the same experience.”

I stood, instinctively heading for the window. Of course, this apartment was on the ground floor so the view of the lake wasn’t the same. But I saw sky and clouds and open space. I took a deep breath. “Yes, maybe it is,” I replied, mostly to placate the old man, not because I agreed with him.

“Well, tell me about him,” Signore Rossi urged. “Was he young and awkward? Or someone your parents did not approve of?”

A flash of a face in my memory made my stomach tighten. Embarrassment—I identified the emotion. Extreme and total embarrassment.

“No. Yes.” I shook my head and remembered that Signore Rossi couldn’t see me. “I mean, no, he was not young and awkward. And my parents never knew about my…feelings,” I ended inadequately.

“A short affair, then.”

“It never even got to that point, I’m afraid.” I raised my arms. “He rejected me when I approached him.”

Signore Rossi’s gray brows shot up in surprise. “No! He was not a real man, then?”

I closed my eyes tightly and remembered that day. A tall, broad-shouldered man with eyes that watched my every move, luring me into a false feeling of intimacy. “He was a real man,” I said. “That was the problem. I was just a girl. Young, foolish, with no experience with the opposite sex. And he was full of himself and a complete egomaniac.” For months I thought we had flirted, sparring verbally. I had considered myself so witty, so adorable, such a cosmopolitan match for his dry, sexy comebacks.

“How old were you?”

“Nineteen.”

Signore Rossi made another sound of disbelief. “Nineteen? Were you raised in a religious family?”

“It was Australia,” I explained.

“Ah. Australia,” Signore Rossi nodded. “Yes, I see.”

The door had been unlocked, and now memories were coming back, almost tangible. I could smell the hay in the barn. Feel the sweat under my jodhpurs, the clinch of my riding boots. The way my pulse danced when I was alone with him. The anticipation of matching him, move for move. “I was so carefully guarded…in Australia. And he was older. He…worked for my father’s company.”

“Hm… Many fathers wouldn’t mind their daughters marrying a man with employment in their own business. A steady job means he’s a good worker.”

I smiled. “Perhaps. But like I said, it never got that far. I had carried a torch for him for months and, when I finally approached him, my feelings were not reciprocated.”

Not reciprocated. What polite language. It completely glossed over the truth of the event. How Hugh Konnor had looked shocked, then repulsed. How he stepped away from me. Held his hands out, even, as if to shield himself from the teenage princess about to jump his bones.

How he left me in the barn.

How he was reassigned to my mother’s detail the very next day, presumably after storming to the security offices and demanding a transfer.

“I was humiliated.” I finished, surprised that those words came out of my mouth. I had never admitted as much to anyone. A young Princess Caroline of Drieden had never dreamed that she would be rejected by a commoner. But speaking to Signore Rossi was almost as good as a confessional booth. He would never tell anyone, and if he did… I dismissed that thought. Ten years had passed since that excruciating encounter in the palace stables. Ten years since Hugh Konnor had been within restraining-order distance from me. Even the past few years, when he’d been assigned to my older sister, he always conveniently had the day off when I was back at the palace.

Not that I noticed. Or asked.

As if he could read my mind, Signore Rossi asked, “Do you still think of him?”

“No.” That sounded abrupt, so I tried to soften it. “It’s been years. I had a husband,” I said, as if an impulsive set of marriage vows wiped clean one’s memory of all prior infatuations.

“And you no longer live in Australia,” Signore Rossi said, with a little wave at the building around us.

“No,” I agreed, with a small laugh. “Australia is very far away.”

A comfortable silence settled between us. All the things I had said to Signore Rossi were true. It had been a decade since Hugh Konnor rejected my heart. My body. I had eloped, was now a widow. There was no reason to hold any feelings for the man now.

“But still…” Signore Rossi mused, staring off into the middle distance, at shadows only he could see. “First loves can haunt us for many years.”

I opened my mouth to disagree. To say emphatically that my first love was ancient history.

But the spinning nerves in my belly begged to disagree.