“Yeah, I don’t think you can go back there,” she agreed.
“I have the whole rest of the world.”
Rox stroked his arm, fretting over him. “I’m sorry. That must have been awful.”
Casimir shrugged. “It was a long time ago.”
The new burn still felt like fire on his skin.
“If you want, I have some gauze and paper tape in my purse for,” she gestured to her own cheek, “you know.”
Anger boiled up in him, but he didn’t let it show in anything more than an eyebrow twitch. “Let them look. Let them take pictures and talk.”
“Good Lord, what did they say?”
Her horror at his response suggested that he hadn’t been entirely successful in pressing that down. “That I should give up my spot in the line of succession in favor of my brother Willem, just in case anything happened to my sister, because no one wanted their prince or a king to look like a monster.”
Rox’s sweet eyes widened, this time with sympathy. “They said that about a child.”
Damn it, he didn’t want her sympathy. He didn’t want her to look at him as a monstrous object of pity and scorn. “Luckily, my sister married and began pushing me down the line of succession quite quickly, so it was a moot point, anyway.”
“Where are you now, in the line?”
He stroked Pirate, who had a smile on his smashed, ugly face. “Sixth. Ana is first, followed by her four children.”
“So, ‘Ana,’ your sister whom I talked to, is Anastasia the Nefarious, the Warrior Queen of the Netherlands.”
He felt his smile widen. “The Warrior Crown Princess of the Netherlands. Our parents are still very much alive.”
“And who’s after you?” she asked.
“My younger brother Willem and my sister, Margriet. You’ll probably meet everyone within a day or so. Ana said that she’ll ‘arrange something,’ which is every bit as ominous as it sounds.” He shifted in his seat. “Look, I don’t mean for you to be impolite or anything, but when you meet Willem, don’t take anything that he says seriously. Margriet is fine. You’ll like her.”
“Why, is he going to tell me that you’re a manwhore who ran around Amsterdam, screwing in all the brothels in the De Wallen district?”
He raised one eyebrow. “I think I liked it better when you only knew about windmills and tulips.”
“Yeah. Well. I Googled.”
“I never frequented the De Wallen district. Did you find that on the internet?”
“I just read about the red light district. I didn’t know that I should Google you. If I had, I probably wouldn’t be all shocked right now.”
“To be clear, Willem might have had such a story planted, if he thought it would be effective or if I would care. He probably would say that or worse if he thought that it would cause me to abdicate.”
“Are you serious? Abdicate what?”
Ah, such naiveté. “So he could be sixth in line for the throne instead of number seven.”
“Why would he want to do that? There would still be your sister and four kids ahead of him!”
Casimir shrugged. “I have no idea why he does anything. The rest of us live in the real world, working in the law or finance or trade. He thinks he’s in a high fantasy novel and has to win the throne or die.”
“Literally?” she asked, her eyebrows raised and skeptical.
Casimir shrugged. “He’s not delusional, but I swear that, if he could have, he would have massacred us all at his wedding last year.”
“That is weird, Casimir.”
He sighed. “I know.”
Rox hesitated, but she asked, “It’s actually Prince Casimir, isn’t it?”
Casimir scratched the cat’s chin, knowing that he was being ridiculous, but stroking the cat’s fur was soothing. “That’s what people will call me to my face in Amsterdam.”
Behind his back, they still called him Prince Monster.
NOTHING CHANGED
Okay, so “Cash Amsberg,” Rox’s boss, the smokin’ hot lawyer whom Rox had known for three, long years, the insufferable tease whom she could make actually giggle when she got on a roll, the man who rescued her from leeches in the Amazon rain forest and gropers in Italy and had poured her into bed on more than one occasion when she misjudged the strength of unfamiliar international liquors, the guy who needed her to rescue him from a persistent Russian prostitute and to hold his hand when he was in pain after the car accident, that guy was actually Prince Casimir of the Netherlands.
Rox’s head boggled.
She wanted to throttle him.
You need to tell a girl something like that.