Julia James - The Greek's Duty-Bound Royal Bride

‘Ellie! There is news about your father! Bad news!’

In her head, Ellie could hear the alarm in her mother’s voice, echoing still as she emerged from the tube station at Piccadilly Circus, hurrying down St James’s and into the Hotel Viscari.

A stone’s throw from St James’s Palace, Clarence House and Buckingham Palace itself, it was often frequented by diplomats, foreign politicians and even visiting royalty.

Including deposed visiting royalty.

Deposed .

The word rang chill in Ellie’s head and she felt her stomach clench. The coup causing her father and his family to flee their fairy-tale palace in Karylya had turned the Grand Duke into nothing more than a former sovereign in exile. Ellie’s glance swept the Edwardian opulence of the Viscari’s marbled lobby. Albeit a very luxurious exile...

She hastened up to the reception desk. ‘Grand Duke Mikal’s suite, please!’ she exclaimed, breathless from hurrying and agitation.

‘Whom shall I say?’ asked the receptionist, lifting her phone.

She sounded doubtful, and Ellie could understand why. Her work-day outfit, crumpled from an overnight transatlantic flight, was more suited to the life she lived in rural Somerset with her mother and stepfather, where she had been since an infant, than to someone who had an entrée to a royal suite at a deluxe London hotel.

‘Just say Lisi!’ she replied, giving the Karylyan diminutive of her name.

Moments later the receptionist’s attitude had changed and she was briskly summoning a bellhop. ‘Escort Her Highness to the Royal Suite,’ she instructed.

As she sped upwards in the elevator Ellie wished her identity had not been guessed—she never used her title anywhere outside Karylya, except on rare state occasions with her father. Instead she used the English diminutive and her British stepfather’s surname—the name on her passport. Ellie Peters. It made life a lot simpler. And it was also considerably shorter than her patronym.

Elizsaveta Gisella Carolinya Augusta Feoderova Alexandreina Zsofia Turmburg-Malavic Karpardy.

She must have been named after every single aunt, grandmother and other female member of every European royal house her father claimed kin with!

From Hapsburgs to Romanovs, and any number of German royal houses, not to mention Polish, Hungarian and Lithuanian ones, and even an Ottoman or two thrown in somewhere for good measure, the nine-hundred-year-old dynasty had somehow, by luck, determination, shrewd alliances and even shrewder marriages, clung on to the mountain fastness that was the Grand Duchy of Karylya, with its high snow-capped peaks and deep verdant valleys, its dark pine forests and rushing rivers, glacial lakes and modern ski slopes.

Except now—Ellie felt her stomach clench in dismay and disbelief at the news her mother had announced—that nine-hundred-year possession had suddenly, devastatingly, come to an end...

The elevator’s polished doors slid open as the car came to a halt and Ellie stepped out into the quiet, deserted lobby of this exclusive floor of suites and residences. One of the doors opposite was flung open and a figure came hurtling through, embracing her as she hurried forward.

‘Oh, Lisi, thank heavens you are here!’

It was her younger sister, Marika—her half-sister, actually, one of her two half-siblings, offspring of her father and his second wife. Although Marika was here with her parents, Ellie knew from the fractured phone call she’d made from the airport that her younger brother, Niki, her father’s heir—his former heir, she realised now, with a start of dismayed realisation—was still at school in Switzerland, in the throes of critically important university entrance exams.

How he had taken the grim news Ellie didn’t know—but Marika, as was clear from her heartfelt cry now, was not coping well.

‘I can’t believe this has happened!’ she heard herself cry back, answering her sister in the Karylyan Marika had used.

‘It’s like a nightmare!’ Marika said, drawing Ellie into the suite.

‘How is Papa?’ Ellie asked, her voice sombre.

‘Shell-shocked. He can’t take it in. No more can Mutti—’ Marika gave a shuddering sigh. ‘Come on...come in. Papa’s been waiting and waiting for you.’

Ellie hurried forward into the spacious reception room beyond the suite’s hallway. Absently, she took in the luxury of the place—though, of course, compared with the palace it was nothing at all...

Inside, she saw the room was crowded—her father, his wife the Grand Duchess, and several of the palace staff were there. Her father was standing immobile by the plate glass window that opened on to a private terrace, staring out over the rooftops. He turned as Ellie came in, and instinctively she rushed to hug him.

A sharp voice stilled her. ‘ Elizsaveta! You forget yourself!’

It was the Grand Duchess, her stepmother, admonishing her. Realising what she was being called to do, she took a breath, dropping an awkward curtsy in her knee-length skirt. But as she did so she felt her stomach hollowing. Her father was no longer a reigning sovereign...

He came forward now, to take her hands and press them in his cold ones. ‘You finally came,’ he said. There was both relief and a tinge of criticism in his tone.

Ellie swallowed. ‘I’m sorry, Papa—we were in Canada...far in the north. Filming with Malcolm. Communication was difficult, we were so remote, and then I had to get back here and—’

She stopped. In the disaster that had befallen him her father would hardly be concerned about her mother and her stepfather, a distinguished wildlife documentary filmmaker, whose work took him all over the world and for whom her mother had left her royal husband when Ellie had been only a baby.

‘Well, you are here now, thankfully,’ her father said, his voice warmer. Then he turned to one of the nearby members of staff. ‘Josef—refreshments!’ he commanded.

Ellie bit her lip. She’d always believed her father’s stiffly imperious manner had contributed to his growing unpopularity in Karylya. And her unspoken thoughts had been echoed in all the political analyses she had read since the news had broken, giving the reasons for the coup.

That and his intransigent refusal to entertain any degree of constitutional, fiscal or social reform in order to defuse the potentially toxic and historically fraught ethnic mix of the population, whose internecine rivalries had always required careful and constant balancing against each other to prevent any one minority feeling slighted and ignored.

Ellie sighed inwardly. The trouble was her father lacked the astute political management skills and charismatic, outgoing personality of his own father. Grand Duke Nikolai had successfully steered Karylya through the diplomatic minefield of the Iron Curtain decades, maintaining the duchy’s precarious independence against huge foreign pressures and gaining the great prosperity the duchy now enjoyed. Her father’s reserve and awkwardness had, in the ten years of his reign, only managed to alienate every faction—even those traditionally most supportive of him.

Which had left none to support him when the coup, led from the High Council by the leader of the ethnic faction with the strongest perceived grievances, had erupted.

Now her father and his Grand Duchess were harbouring a deep and, she allowed, understandable anger and resentment at their fate. It was evident in their condemnation of all who had contributed to their ignominious flight. For her part, Ellie merely murmured sympathetically—it was obvious her father and stepmother needed to vent their understandably strong emotions. More rational discussion could take place later—she hoped. And all the awkward questions could be asked later, too.