Page 8 of His Princess Brat
“You do know I’m a stripper, right?” I was only half joking. This was way too fancy for me.
“Not going to lie, if we let that become public knowledge, it will absolutely make you the life of the dinner party tonight.”
I turned on him. “Dinner... party?”
“Just a quiet ‘welcome to Osei’ sort of thing. Hardly anyone will be there, apart from Norah and myself. Maybe my cousin, but I don’t know. I barely know her.”
“I didn’t know you had a cousin.”
“Neither did I until I came here. She’s not a real cousin, anyway. She’s like a second cousin three times removed or some such thing. She just found out she has to rule, so her mother asked if we could help her get comfortable with the idea.”
Well, that was what family did for one another. Royal families anyway. The rest of us normal folk had bowling night or got together for beers over one another’s broken-down vehicles.
“I thought it’d be a great way for us all to catch up.”
“Yeah, okay.” I nodded. Sure, why not? Once again, when in Rome... “What time?”
“Eight tonight should be good?”
I checked my watch, then the clock on the wall to figure out the local time. “I’ll be there.”
“I’d love to stay, but I’ve got a meeting scheduled.”
“No, no, go.” I waved him off, but then called, “Hey,” stopping him on his way out the door. “All those people we saw in the hall... they’re not going to be there, are they?”
“What, the courtiers?” My good friend brushed that off. “No, don’t worry about them. They’ve got their own thing going on. Just ignore them.”
I nodded, set my watch to local time, and then walked across the room to throw myself on the bed. It was beyond comfortable, like sinking into a mattress of memory foam clouds. A private dinner with my brother, his wife, and his distant cousin, Princess something or other.
Sounded fun, was my last thought before jetlag took me off to sleep.
* * *
“You’re a lying sack, you know that?” I said through gritted teeth. My smile was strained as I stood in the doorway of an ornate ballroom, packed with pretty much all the same courtiers Mazi had promised would be ‘doing their own thing.’ This was not the casual ‘welcome to Osei’ dinner I’d been led to believe it would be. Everyone was dressed up but me. I saw suits, gowns, jewels and beads, feathered fans and colorful hats, and at least one lion-skin wrap. “I am so going to get you for this.”
“And this is my friend from America, Azid Madaki,” Mazi announced for the umpteen-millionth time.
The aged dignitary currently before us bowed and shook my hand. His daughter, a stunning woman in a yellow wrap dress and her pale long hair elaborately coiffed with diamonds, curtsied low.
“This,” Mazi said grandly, “is Ambassador Van Roijen’s daughter, Bethany Van Roijen. It’s her birthday.”
How did I get in this mess? My smile felt painful as I obligingly kissed the backs of her dainty fingers. “Happy birthday,” I said graciously.
“Thank you.” She smiled coyly up at me through her lashes.
“She’s twenty-one now,” Mazi informed me.
There was a reason he was telling me that. I didn’t know what it was, but if he was trying to set me up with this girl, I really was going to kill him.
“Good age.” I did my best to be polite but noncommittal. All I could think about was getting Mazi alone so I could choke the shit out of him.
The orchestra in a corner at the very back of the room chose that exact moment to strike up the chords of a waltz.
“Ah,” the Dutch ambassador perked. “What better present could there be for a beautiful woman on her birthday than to share her first waltz with a man in a strong king’s court.”
Suck up, I thought, then realized everyone was looking at me. Oh, motherfu—
I really was going to kill him.
