Royal package, p.1
Royal Package, page 1
Royal Package
Lili Valente
All Rights Reserved
Copyright Royal Package © 2020 Lili Valente
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner. This steamy royal romance is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners. This e-book is licensed for your personal use only. This e-book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with, especially if you enjoy hot, sexy, emotional novels. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author’s work. Cover design by Lori Jackson. Editorial services provided by RCM.
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Contents
ROYAL PACKAGE
ABOUT THE BOOK
AUTHOR’S NOTE
1. Princess Sabrina Mila Lena Rochat
2. Sabrina
3. Prince Andrew Dario Lawrence Von Bergen
4. Sabrina
5. Andrew
6. Sabrina
7. Andrew
8. Sabrina
9. Andrew
10. Sabrina
11. Andrew
12. Sabrina
13. Andrew
14. Sabrina
15. Andrew
16. Sabrina
17. Andrew
18. Sabrina
19. Andrew
20. Sabrina
21. Andrew
22. Sabrina
23. Andrew
24. Sabrina
25. Andrew
26. Sabrina
27. Andrew
Epilogue
Sneak Peek
About the Author
Also by Lili Valente
ROYAL PACKAGE
By Lili Valente
ABOUT THE BOOK
The Royal Package is a legend in its own time, a pleasure-giving national treasure I’m far too generous to keep to myself.
* * *
But I have one rule: No good girls.
* * *
And they don’t get much nicer than sugar-and-spice Princess Elizabeth.
* * *
You’d think a woman who designs lingerie would be sexy and fun.
* * *
You would be wrong. My fiancée is a dreary little mouse, and I have no doubt we’ll make each other miserable if we go through with our arranged marriage.
* * *
But I can’t dishonor my grandfather’s dying wish.
* * *
Which leaves me one choice—make my sweet fiancée so miserable during our engagement festivities that she calls it quits.
* * *
Operation Prince Charmless will get her out of my hair. And then I'm back to Sexy Single Ruler business as usual.
* * *
Or that’s the plan…
* * *
But my fiancée is feistier than I remembered. Sexier, too. And she loves spur-of-the-moment adventures as much as I do. But did I mention that she hates my guts?
* * *
Looks like the Royal Package and I are in for more than we bargained for…
AUTHOR’S NOTE
The kingdoms of Gallantia and Rinderland are fictional Northern European countries. No actual royals were harmed in the writing of this manuscript.
Chapter One
Princess Sabrina Mila Lena Rochat
A woman on the verge of making several
very dumb decisions in the name of love…
My family is crazy.
Yes, I realize that, at some point, everyone thinks their nearest and dearest would take home honors at a Worldwide Weirdo Pageant, but in my case, it’s actually true.
I run nature retreats for a living, but my real full-time job is making excuses for my family’s oddball behavior.
“So, it’s okay to take pictures?” The timid woman pushes her thick glasses up her nose, visibly trembling as she shoots a worried glance down the green mountain toward the castle, where my mother apparently retreated after issuing threats to my latest campers that taking pictures would “steal what’s left of the kingdom’s soul.”
“It’s absolutely okay to take pictures.” I beam my brightest smile to the assembled group of women, while mentally composing a warning to my mother to quit frightening our paying customers.
I know she enjoys regular meals and internet access as much as the rest of us, though she pretends to be a starving Bohemian who can survive on angst and poetry alone.
“I take snapshots all the time for our PicsWithFriends page. See?” Holding up my phone, I scroll slowly through the grid of literally thousands of snapshots I’ve taken of the mountain in the past five years. Sunset views from the summit, shots of flower-speckled spring glens, and hundreds of close-ups of local flora and fauna—it’s all there, as well as the occasional obligatory shot of the castle looking hazy and romantic in the distance.
Staying on royal land is part of the draw for Camping at Rochat, but our ancestral estate is best viewed from a distance. Technically, I live in a castle—the original medieval main hall and tower still stand—but the building has been added on to by so many generations of eccentric royals that it now resembles a surrealist portrait painted by a deranged toddler.
Up close, the castle’s crazy starts to show.
Much like my family’s does.
I love my parents and adore my two sisters, but it would be so nice if at least one of them knew how to behave in polite company.
“Oh, those are really good.” A taller woman with long brown-and-gray braids leans in for a closer look. “You should be a nature photographer!”
“Thank you,” I say, warmed by the compliment. “My father and sister are the real artists, but…”
“Photography is a valid art form,” Timid whispers, a shy smile curving her lips. “I like to crochet. Sometimes I go off the pattern and make things up as I go along.”
“Wild woman,” I tease with a wink.
Thankfully, the joke makes her laugh and seems to put the entire company at ease, which is a relief. The group of ten college botany teachers is my first All-American booking, and I’d love for them to take positive stories about their experience back across the ocean.
“Seriously, you have talent,” Braids insists, pointing a stern finger at my screen. “Don’t waste it. Like I tell my students—no one will ever see the world exactly the way you do. That’s why we need new scientists and artists and all the rest. Each new pair of eyes can change the world.”
Touched, I nod. “That’s so true. And thank you again.” I tuck my phone into the back pocket of my jeans. “If you need anything before the hike this evening, please feel free to text me. In the meantime, get settled and take as many pictures as you want. Of anything you want!”
I lift a hand and back away down the path, a twinge of regret tightening my ribs.
I’d love to learn more about photography and see plants all over the world, but I can’t imagine when I’d find the time to take a class or venture more than a hundred miles from home. Someone has to hold this madhouse together.
Especially now that Lizzy is leaving.
Lizzy.
Leaving…
The thought of my older-by-four-minutes sister moving six hours away to a country accessible only by air or treacherous, winding Alpine roads is bad enough. Knowing she’s being sold into marriage to an idiot to secure our family’s legacy is flat-out heartbreaking.
No matter how much I love this mountain, if it were up to me, I’d sell our ancestral land, put my parents up in a condo, and free us all from the royal ties that bind and gag. But clinging to history and tradition is the only thing that gets my aging father out of bed in the morning, and my mother would die of a broken heart if she knew she’d never get to see one of her girls become a “real” princess.
Since the vote that relegated our family to ceremonial status, without taxpayer support or any power over our country’s governing process, my sister’s betrothal to Prince Andrew of Gallantia has been the hope my mother’s clung to like a sugar addict guarding the last chocolate croissant in the bakery. She’s raised Lizzy to believe that marrying Andrew is her duty and destiny, and no amount of common-sense talk from my younger sister or me has been able to change Lizzy’s mind.
But we’ve both tried. Hard.
Especially Zan.
My younger-by-ten-minutes sister, Alexandra, is a fiercely independent businesswoman presently living in Zurich who considers arranged marriage so horrifically medieval that she plans to wear black to the wedding in protest.
Maybe it’s the fact that we’re triplets that’s made Lizzy’s fate so hard to stomach. Zan and I know that if the stars had aligned a little differently on that cold December day, it would have been one of us led to the slaughter instead of sweet, shy Lizzy.
As I head down the trail, leaving my campers to get settled in their yurts before the guided hike this evening, I catch waves of Lizzy-flavored melancholy wafting up the mountain toward me.
Tomorrow.
Tomorrow, I will lose my sister forever.
Every time I think about it, tears prick my eyes. I’ve always been a look-on-the-bright-side kind of person, but lately, the sunny side has been hard to find.
I can’t bear the thought of my sister married to Andrew the Atrocious.
I only spent one summer with Andrew and his brothers, but that month by Lake Lucerne was enough to make me loathe the Royal Turd. Even under the supervision of the nannies hired to watch over the six of us while our parents and the boys’ grandfather drank too much German wine and debated the terms of Andrew and Lizzy’s betrothal, Andrew managed to make Lizzy cry no less than ten times.
He thought his pranks—everything from the relatively benign “crickets in the oatmeal” trick to the more brutal stashing of snakes in Lizzy’s bed—were hysterical. Zan and I were not amused, of course, but poor Lizzy was traumatized.
She still checks her sheets at least twice before she turns out the light, just to make sure nothing slithery is hiding under the covers.
And no, it doesn’t matter that the snakes weren’t venomous, or that Andrew was only nine years old. My sisters and I had only been five at the time, and all three of us knew better than to torment other children, and our parents were far more checked out of the parenting process than the Gallantian elders.
Surely, Prince Andrew had been warned by his grandfather to be kind to his future bride and her sisters, but he made a different choice. Sometimes people just turn out rotten, no matter how hard their parents and grandparents try to raise them to be decent human beings.
These days, Prince Andrew seems to be your average playboy prince, rambling around the globe with his brothers, drinking too much, partying too hard, and taking scandalous pictures with half-naked women. But I wouldn’t be surprised to learn he’s still got a mean streak.
Once a snake-hider, always a snake-hider.
And once they’re hitched, he’s going to be hiding his snake in my sister.
The thought makes my stomach turn. Lizzy deserves better. She deserves a man who worships her, a man she can’t wait to share her life and her bed with.
Which is why you have to do something, Sabrina. Now! Before it’s too late.
“But what?” I grumble as I head through the garden and into the afternoon shadows cast by the only home I’ve ever known. I talk a tough game, but I’ve never lived anywhere but here, with my parents. I was homeschooled by various nannies, got my botany degree online, and have lived a very sheltered life. I’m unfit to lock horns with a worldly opponent like Prince Andrew.
Or even my parents.
My parents mean well, but they’re from another age. They were raised to believe that children should be seen and not heard, that food magically appears at the table without any effort on their part, and that the cash to fund castle expansion and a lavish ball (or four) every year is their birthright.
By the time the royal bank account finally ran dry, my sisters and I were old enough to get part-time jobs to lessen the blow, but my parents have never fully recovered from the shock of learning that the heat would have to be turned off in the west wing for the winter and that there was no money for Brie, just cheddar, the cheap kind that can be bought in bulk.
The transition was especially hard on my father, a mild-mannered but largely oblivious man who was dressed by his valet until he was in his fifties and literally had to learn how to put on his own pants as a full-grown man. But he still awakens every morning and dresses in a three-piece suit from his vast collection, determined to keep the glamour of the old world alive.
He will never be an ally in the fight to keep Lizzy at home, no matter how much he enjoys having someone to talk art theory with at dinner. My father thinks this marriage is a good thing.
And maybe it is. Maybe my mother’s right and my mind has been warped by too much modern entertainment. Maybe love is a stupid reason to get married.
It certainly wouldn’t have worked out in my case. Thor, my first and only love, adored me, but only until an heiress with a bigger bank account (and boobs) entered the picture.
I often find myself wondering if it was the boobs or the money that sealed the deal, but it doesn’t really matter. Thor is gone; I don’t plan on taking surgical action to alter the flatness of my chest, and my bank account is perpetually overdrawn.
Living in an ancient castle that’s constantly in need of repair will do that to a girl.
As I mount the crumbling marble steps of the back veranda, I find my suited father at his easel, painting the sweeping Alpine view and the quaint village nestled in the valley below for the hundredth time.
“That’s lovely, Papa.” I pause to kiss his cheek and accept the usual pat on the head.
“Thank you, darling. And how are our guests? Settling in nicely?”
Initially, Papa resisted the idea of opening the estate for tourism, but framing the visitors as guests enjoying our royal hospitality won him over. That, and the steady income.
“They are. We’re hosting a group of American botanists this week. They’re looking forward to studying the early summer ferns.”
“The ferns are delightful,” Papa says, his gaze drifting back to the view. “I should paint them soon.”
“I’ll pick some for you on the hike this evening,” I promise, kissing his cheek again, comforted by the familiar scent of oil paint and turpentine clinging to his clothes. I pull in another deep breath, savoring the smell as I step through the open door into the Great Hall and make my way up the stairs to my sister’s tower studio.
He might be a little checked out, but Papa is always Papa, and there’s something comforting about that. If he’s excited about the royal wedding later this summer or sad that Lizzy will be leaving us, he hasn’t shown it.
Lizzy’s putting on a brave face, too—modeling her dresses for the engagement festivities for the family and helping Mother select gifts for her future mother-in-law—but I know better. I can feel her misery, a dark churning cloud that gets thicker and gloomier with every step I take.
By the time I mount the final stair, the sadness is oppressive.
So I’m not really surprised when I enter the room to find Lizzy lying spread eagle on the floor in the center of a circle of partially dressed mannequins with tears streaming down her cheeks.
“Oh, honey,” I say, my heart in my throat. “Just call it off. You don’t have to do this. You should only get married when you desperately want to be married, not to keep a promise made by your parents when you were too little to understand what it meant.”
“It’s not that.” Lizzy sniffs and drags a limp arm across her damp face. “It’s the collection. There’s no way I’m going to be able to finish by tomorrow. Not even if I work nonstop without eating or sleeping or peeing.”
“You do pee a lot,” I say, trying to lighten the mood.
I pad deeper into the room, seeking a piece of furniture that isn’t covered in fabric or likely to be hiding a pin that will stick me in tender places when I sit down. My sister is a talented lingerie designer, but she’s also a messy artist who thrives in chaos and believes bloody pins help make the magic happen.
