Working Stiff(18)
“Yes.” He blinked at her, obviously amused at her naiveté.
Fine. Whatever. “Is it called Dutch or Netherlanderese or what?”
His dark green eyes laughed at her. “Dutch.”
“So what does ‘Friso’ mean in Dutch?”
“John William Friso was the first monarch of the Netherlands. Most current European kings and queens are descended from him.”
“So you’re named after a king? My dad says that I was named after a literary character, Roxane in Cyrano de Bergerac.”
“Ah,” Cash said. “The one where the ugly man falls in love with a beautiful woman and writes letters to her for another man, one who is handsome but stupid, and he charms her with his wit and words into the other man’s bed, and then he dies. So romantic.”
“It’s too bad that the Netherlands doesn’t have a king anymore. There should be more kings.” Rox stared at the wavy patterns the sun screens shadowed on the walls. Hey, it was better than working.
“We have a king.” Cash shrugged. “The Kingdom of the Netherlands is a constitutional monarchy.”
Rox looked up at him, very interested. “So you have a king? A real king?”
“Well, that’s open for debate, whether or not he’s a real king.”
“You aren’t one of those anti-monarchists like they have in England, are you? I like royalty. They’re like celebrities who didn’t have to do anything stupid or crass to get famous, like ‘accidentally’ make a sex tape.”
Cash laughed. “Oh, there are always sex tapes.”
“No way.”
“Way. You seem to be channeling your inner surfer today.”
“Tell me about the king,” Rox begged, her eyes feeling too wide on her face.
“The King and the Queen—”
Fluster rose in Rox’s head. “Oh my God, you have both. That’s so cool.”
He tilted his head, looking at her, and the sunlight grazed the golden highlights in his hair and glistened off his short beard. “I didn’t realize you were so much of a royal watcher.”
Rox smoothed down her black slacks. “Oh, yeah. I stayed up all night to watch Wills and Kate get married.”
He blinked those deep green eyes of his. “I never would have guessed.”
“Oh, yes. I’m a royal geek.”
“Well, that I would have said about you, but I didn’t realize you followed the noble and royal families of Europe.”
“Dork. Tell me about the Queen.”
“The King is kept busy with state functions, garden parties, recognizing accomplishments, that sort of thing. The Queen is active in negotiating trade deals. Other heads of state seem to be amused by negotiating with a queen, and they sign rather favorable deals with us. It’s like they want to please her, and they don’t realize that what they are signing is binding. She’s a shark in the boardroom.”
“You don’t think of royalty doing business stuff like that,” Rox said. “You think of them riding in the backs of convertibles and waving like this.” She pursed her lips, held her fingers together, and waved by swiveling her wrist.
“They do the waving thing, too.”
She leaned in, demanding, “Do they have children? Are there princes and princesses? Who’s next in line for the throne? That’s how you say it, right?”
“So many questions. The King and Queen have four children. The oldest, who is the heir, is Crown Princess Anastasia,” he said.
“So they didn’t have any boys?”
“There are two sons. One of them was a terrible monster, cursed to be horrifically ugly. He was hidden most of his childhood in a far-away castle, and no one speaks of him. His curse can only be broken by true love.”
“I declare, you are teasing me now. I know the story of ‘Beauty and the Beast.’ You cannot fool me, Cash Amsberg. Tell me about why the princess will get the throne if there are boys.”
Cash laughed out loud. “The Kingdom is inherited through absolute primogeniture, so oldest-first, regardless of gender, a practice that I find brilliant.”
“Really, I would have thought you wouldn’t.”
“Why?” His wary tone should have warned her.
“Because you’re a guy.”
“And that’s supposed to mean—”
“Aren’t you rootin’ for your own team?”
He stared at the ceiling before answering. “The Netherlands had a succession of queens for over a century. We haven’t had a king inherit the throne since the eighteen-hundreds before the current one. Queen Wilhelmina was one of the great leaders of the Dutch resistance during World War II, managing to oust Nazi sympathizers from the government even though she was in exile in England, and she gave a nightly rallying broadcast over Radio Oranje. I think Anastasia will be a brilliant queen someday. Britain has the same succession rules, now. They changed them just a few years ago.”