THE ROYAL
RUNAWAY
By Lindsay Emory
On sale October 9, 2018!
Book
description
Princess Theodora Isabella Victoria of Drieden of the Royal House
Laurent is so over this princess thing.
After her fiancé jilted her on their wedding day, she’s finally back home after
spending four months in exile—aka it’s back to press conferences, public
appearances, and putting on a show for the Driedish nation as the perfect
princess they expect her to be. But Thea’s sick of duty. After all, that’s what
got her into this mess in the first place.
So when she sneaks out of the palace and meets a sexy Scot named Nick in a
local bar, she relishes the chance to be a normal woman for a change. But just
as she thinks she’s found her Prince Charming for the night, he reveals his
intentions are less than honorable: he’s the brother of her former fiancé, a
British spy, and he’s not above blackmail. As Thea reluctantly
joins forces with Nick to find out what happened the day her fiancé
disappeared, together they discover a secret that could destroy a centuries-old
monarchy and change life as they know it.
Funny, fast-paced, and full of more twists and turns than the castle Thea lives
in, The Royal Runaway is a fresh romantic comedy that will
leave you cheering for the modern-day royal who chucks the rulebook aside to
create her own happily-ever-after.
Trade Paperback • Price: $16.00 • ISBN: 9781501196614
eBook • Price: $7.99 • ISBN: 9781501196621
About
the author
Lindsay Emory began her career as a lawyer but now writes romantic
suspense, mysteries, and romantic comedy. She hosts a popular podcast Women
with Books about genre fiction written by and for women. Lindsay lives
in North Texas with two big dogs and her romance hero, drinking gimlets and
raising two STEM warrior princesses.
Excerpt
Later, I would look back on this
moment and wonder why I hadn’t simply popped the sleeping pill and crawled back
into my gilded four-poster bed, the same one that my grandmother and
great-grandmother had slept in before their ascendancies to the throne.
I’ll never know what made me change
into street clothes, pull my hair into a bun, and slip on running shoes. But
that’s exactly what I did.
I knew the covert ways out of the
palace like the back of my hand. Part of it was due to a natural gift for
observation and investigation; part of it was thanks to my formal education. It
had been impressed on me by my tutors, secretaries, and Big Gran herself that a
good princess should learn everything about her country.
That included secret ways out of
the palace. This wasn’t the first time I’d slipped out undetected. That had
been when I was a teenager, a university student. There were things I’d wanted
to do, places I’d wanted to go, people I’d wanted to see without my official
security detail getting involved. For years, it hadn’t been a problem. Drieden
is a small country and the monarchy can still be informal if it wishes. My
uncle John, the Duke of Falender, works as a banker in the financial district.
My brother serves in the armed forces. Until my engagement, I produced
documentary films. With a discreet and small security presence, my family has
been able to keep up the pretense that we’re normal folk who just happen to
live in that big old house on the hill.
With my recent notoriety, though,
and my resulting cloistering in the palace and assorted hideaways, I hadn’t
been outside royal boundaries in over three months.
And sometimes a girl just needed a
change of scenery.
My feet flew over the carpet, down
the southwest stairwell, across the landing, into the upper gallery through a
service entrance, then down another set of stairs that led into the herb
garden, which was next to the kitchens with their loading dock and abandoned at
this time of night.
Just like that, I was outside in a
small courtyard. There was a guardhouse at the bottom of the cobblestone drive,
but I pulled up the hood of my jacket and hopped into a nearby white Fiat with
plates that matched the keys I had snagged from the loading dock bay.
The gates opened swiftly (as they
should for an official palace vehicle) and I drove two hundred meters and . . .
I had no idea where I was going.
To the lights?
Why?
Because the lights were pretty?
Was I insane?
Probably. Now I was talking to
myself. Just like Prince Karl the Holy when he believed a trout told him to
invade France.
My foot pressed the gas pedal,
indicating that I was, in fact, insane. Sleep deprivation had sucked all
the common sense out of my head.
But I kept driving. Instinct and a
memory pulled me forward.
There had been a night, two years
ago, right after I had started dating Christian. I had gotten a call from him;
he had flown to Drieden to surprise me. “Come see me,” he had urged. He had
given me the name of a bar where I was to meet him in an hour. And like
tonight, I had managed to slip out of the palace completely undetected.
Romantic, right?
Without being aware of my
destination, I now suddenly found myself parked outside that same bar. It
seemed just as I remembered it. A cocktail lounge in the theater district, its
raucous crowd was decidedly different from the posh, upper-crust circle
Christian usually ran with. As soon as I walked into the disorienting mix of
shadow and neon, I remembered that I hadn’t brought any money or
identification. Another sign of my deteriorating mental state. Still, I took a
seat at a table covered with chipped red paint. After all, the point of this
excursion wasn’t to drink. If I’d wanted to get drunk, the palace had vast cellars
full of very expensive spirits at my disposal. If I’d wanted to lose myself, I would
have just taken the damn sleeping pill.
The point of this trip was . . .
I had no idea.
Now I closed my eyes.
I saw Christian, as he was the
night I met him here. His longish blond hair curled around his collar. His skin
still tan from the ski season. Was this what I wanted? To see Christian again?
Was that why I came here?
“Excuse me. Is this seat taken?”
A deep voice. A Scottish accent. Christian?
