Code Name: Tiara by Sawyer Bennett
CHAPTER 2
Camille
“Ipulled out the melon-colored dress for you,” Netty says as she bustles about my suite. “It’s perfect for your afternoon tea with Mrs. Delmonde and her very handsome son.”
I sit at my vanity table, examining my brows for stray hairs to pluck, and heave a sigh. I set my tweezers down and turn in my seat. “Mrs. Delmonde’s son is in no way worthy of me or my title. It’s a waste of time.”
Netty doesn’t look at me but clucks her dismissal. “Of course he’s worthy. His family is solid and runs a shipping empire.”
I scoff and turn back to my mirror, nabbing the tweezers. “He’s not royalty. Princesses do not marry non-royals, no matter how wealthy they are.”
Which isn’t true. My parents would love me to marry a royal, but a very rich man would work just as nicely. As evidenced by the fact they’ve set me up with a Delmonde.
Netty makes that clucking sound again, something I’ve heard my entire life; it’s how she expresses her disapproval of my thoughts. I should bristle at not being taken seriously, but why bother? I’m expected to marry and produce an heir before I succeed the throne upon my father’s demise.
It’s not that I can’t choose to hold off on marriage and motherhood until after he dies—which I hope doesn’t happen ever—but my parents constantly bestow upon me the importance of succession to the throne and carrying on our lineage, which puts a lot of pressure on a young woman’s shoulders.
“You are a princess,” Netty replies with a chuckle. “And deserving of someone with a royal title. But you and I both know that options are limited if you’re shooting for that. Princes don’t grow on trees, you know.”
I spot a stray hair, lean toward the mirror, and pluck it efficiently with a slight wince. I’d rather be gored by a rhinoceros than pluck individual hairs out of my eyebrows, but a princess must do what a princess must do. The only reason I’m doing it now is so I don’t have to engage in this age-old conversation with Netty.
“I don’t want to wear the coral dress,” I command, tossing the tweezers down. “Pull out the navy-and-white-striped jumpsuit—”
“But that’s not dressy enough,” she insists.
I ignore her protest. “The navy-and-white jumpsuit,” I clip out as I stand from the vanity. “And my decisions are not to be questioned.”
It’s a brusque, cold response, and truthfully, she doesn’t deserve it. Netty stares at me with pink cheeks and bobs her head. “Of course, Your Highness.”
I grit my teeth. Netty has known me since the changing of my first diaper. She rarely addresses me so formally, and really only when I remind her of my station, which is really unlike me to do. But I’m stressed about this tea today with the Delmondes and the continual push for me to go down a path I don’t want to travel.
Pushing aside any sympathy for Netty, I turn my back on her. “That will be all for today. I don’t want to be disturbed until it’s time to get ready for the tea.”
“Shall I send your breakfast up or will—”
“No, thank you,” I say quickly but firmly so as to discourage further solicitations. “See yourself out, Netty.”
I harden myself against the hurt on her face. Netty has been my caretaker in one form or another since I was a baby. At first, it was to help my mother in any way necessary—a live-in nanny so to speak. As I grew older, it was to escort me to and from school and ensure I ate properly and did my homework, since my parents traveled a great deal as part of their royal duties.
I’m almost twenty-five now, and Netty’s job within the royal compound is to take care of me. That means choosing my clothes, making sure I eat, managing my social calendar, and generally clucking at me when I need it.
When Netty is gone and the door shuts behind her, I waste no time in moving to my bedside table where my phone has been charging overnight. I unlock the screen and send a quick text to Marius. We still good?
I glance out the huge balcony windows of my suite. From the uppermost elevation of Bretaria—the main island of our kingdom—the waters of the Coral Sea call to me. Mystic teal, lighter closer to shore but never deepening much, even a hundred yards offshore, due to the barrier reef that surrounds our land. Only past that does the water turn deep blue.
It’s January, the height of summer for our island sovereignty that sits about fifteen hundred kilometers from Brisbane, or roughly a two-hour flight via one of our family’s jets located at our private airport at the island’s southern end.
Bretaria is not only the name of our kingdom—a sovereign city-state—but also the name of the main island upon which we live. It’s eighteen square kilometers, which doesn’t sound like a lot until you remember that Monaco, also a sovereign city-state, is only two square kilometers.
Though it is by no means our family’s largest ruby mine, the original one sits on the north end of the island and still produces a hefty number of gemstones every year. We have other mines on the outlying islands, and I’ve visited every single one over my lifetime. It’s my family’s legacy, so of course, I’m intimately familiar with the operations—I’ve been schooled in such since I started talking.
The weather in Bretaria is near perfect. The high summer months of December through February hover in the mid-eighties, and our winter months never dip below the mid-seventies. Living on this island means you spend most of your days outside to soak up the warm breezes and sunny skies.
My phone dings, and I smile when I see Marius’s response. Already waiting for you. Bring breakfast.
Heart filling with joy, I text him back that I’ll be there in twenty minutes and scramble to my dressing room to find what I need.
Five minutes later, teeth and hair brushed and a swimsuit on underneath a T-shirt and jean shorts, I move with stealth through the palace.
I’m not sure why three people need almost twenty thousand square feet to live in, but our monstrous home was born of nothing more than the ego of our ancestors who fell into the riches of our ruby mines. Even though Bretaria was originally under British rule, our palace mimics neoclassical French architecture. It was meant to be grand and lavish—some would say ostentatious.
But I love the white brick and cut-stone facade, white marble columns, and gilded, wrought iron balconies that dot the exterior of all four stories. The black-and-white marble squares of the interior courtyard look like a huge chessboard, and given the semitropical weather, every room, balcony, porch, and patio are filled with verdant plants that flower year-round and perfume the air.
It’s my home, and it’s magical.
It’s also stifling, and that’s not just because of the massive twenty-foot stone wall that circles the outer boundaries of the palace lands. The wall was originally erected to protect the north mine from pirates and looters, but as the family’s wealth and associated notoriety became global knowledge, the wall was continued as to encircle the entire palace grounds. Every one of my family members is a high-value target. Me, my mother, and my father.
There are actual companies that provide kidnapping and ransom insurance for the wealthiest of the wealthy and those who travel to dangerous territories. However, it is often laughed about in our family that we are uninsurable. No insurance company would be willing to take on the risk of paying out a requested ransom if one of us were successfully kidnapped.
Instead, my father has taken our vast fortune—in the multibillions and rapidly growing—and invested it in an elite palace security force to protect us.
All of which means… I have to be careful making my way to Marius. I have to skulk in the shadows and cut through rooms with multiple entrances. I make a quick stop in the kitchen and snag some fresh cranberry muffins, wrapping them in a linen napkin and stuffing them into my backpack.
I then quickly make my way to the servants’ quarters on the eastern side of the palace in the basement. It’s an area about two thousand square feet and provides small but luxurious apartments for the top-ranking staff. That would include Netty; Armand, our household manager who reports directly to my mother; the head housekeeper Mary; the head land manager Jules; and the top dog of the security force, Dmitri, who intimidates me without even trying. He’s an imposing figure, very tall and barrel chested. He’s probably in his late fifties and can be incredibly austere. There’s a rumor that he’s supposedly ex-KGB. On the one hand, that is what intimidates me, but on the other, he’s my father’s most loyal and trusted person within all the palace, and I feel secure with him here.
At any rate, every one of those staff members is off tending their duties and managing the massive amount of people it takes to run the palace. As such, their quarters are empty. It’s a short dash through the common hall to the rear door that leads to a small parking lot for the household vehicles, available should one of them want to run into the city for something.
Seabirds call out to me as I hit the stony pavement and hitch my backpack over my shoulder. I cut between two cars, through a small hedgerow where an iron gate provides exit, and along a steep stone staircase that meanders down the butte.
At the bottom is the stone wall that circles the palace. A steel door is set into the thick wall with an electronic key code. It’s a direct port to the rocky shoreline below where another path cuts south to a small, protected harbor with a dock and boats.
Several steel doors sit along the perimeter of the wall, and all have different key codes. Those codes are kept secret—only me and my parents, as well as the head of security, have access to them.
I glance over my shoulder up the stone staircase carved into the side of the hill and search the parking lot that borders the staff entrance. I don’t know why I look. No one saw me come out here, and if they had, they’d be calling my name to stop. But no one is looking for me. It’s assumed I’m in my suite. It’s also assumed I’m a dutiful and prudent woman who understands that I shouldn’t go unattended outside the compound walls, and no one would ever think me daring enough to do so.
Still, there’s a measure of relief I’ve made it this far without so much as a hiccup, and I don’t hesitate moving through the door to the other side of the wall.
Rather than take the path that cuts right and leads to the dock, I turn left and meander along the trail that’s bordered by tall grasses. It eventually leads to a low-hanging cliff overlooking the Coral Sea, and it’s there that I find Marius waiting for me.
Six foot two inches of golden skin and rippling muscles, sun-kissed brown hair, and sparkling green eyes, Marius Lafayette is God’s gift to women, and he knows it. Whenever we’re out and about—on the rare occasions I get to go out and about—women actually stumble over their own feet looking at him. He notices it, too, and it only adds to his cocky swagger.
“About time,” he grouses as I walk up. He’s wearing a pair of board shorts and a white tank top. His hair is mussed, and it’s clear he rolled straight out of bed without running a brush through it.
I slide my backpack off a shoulder, reach in for the muffins rolled in linen, and toss them to him. He scrambles to catch the food as the muffins come free, but in addition to being ridiculously gorgeous, he’s incredibly athletic and graceful. Like a juggler managing four balls, he brings them all under control, catching two muffins in each hand.
I make my way across the thick carpet of green grass that flows right to the cliff’s edge. I nab one of the muffins from his hand and plop down. Marius follows suit, and we stretch our legs toward the sea.
It’s quiet—except for the seabirds and the waves crashing at the cliff base—and we eat silently as we soak it all in. This isn’t the first time we’ve met here, and it won’t be the last. Marius and I have been sneaking out for years to meet up.
When we finish our breakfast, I lean over and nudge my shoulder against his. “Do me a solid and come to afternoon tea?”
His head turns my way, eyebrows drawn inward and reticence in his tone. “Why?”
“Because Mum is trying to set me up with Boyce Delmonde, and he and his mother are coming to tea,” I mutter as I brush crumbs off my fingertips. That muffin went down way too fast.
“What’s in it for me?” he drawls, expression serious, ready to wheel and deal.
I sigh and lie back on the grass, tucking my hands behind my head to stare at the pristine blue sky. “Nothing. Your family is uber rich. There’s nothing I can give you that you don’t already have.”
“True.” He chuckles and reclines next to me. “But I suppose I could do you a solid and attend. I’ll even kiss you in front of them. That should send them running.”
I snicker as I remind him, “And it would only put you on my parents’ radar again. Besides… I kissed you once, and it did nothing for me.”
“Ouch,” he mutters.
But it’s true. Marius and I have been friends since we were eight, when his parents moved to the island. Bretaria had already started growing into a known mecca of finance, funded by the island’s thick layer of rubies. Many banks moved here given our lack of taxes and regulations, and along with that came Marius’s family, the Lafayettes. His father was a successful financial advisor in Paris, and his mother the heiress to a couture fashion line. They’re not in the billion-dollar bracket as the Winterbournes are, but they are in the multi-multimillion dollars, and that makes Marius a suitable contender—in my parents’ eyes—for me to wed and produce pretty little royal babies.
The only problem is that Marius and I are only friends. The best of friends, but friends nonetheless. When you’re a royal, your play options are limited, and the Lafayette family became good friends with mine. Thus Marius and I became good friends as we essentially grew up together.
When we were fifteen, we tried kissing and found that neither of us liked it. At first, Marius thought I was gay since I didn’t like kissing him—conceited oaf that he is—but we both realized it was because we were friends, almost like brother and sister, and it just seemed weird to be anything but.
At any rate, romantic love is not in the stars for us, but an enduring friendship most certainly is. We’ve about got our parents convinced to leave us alone and stop dropping not-so-subtle hints about a romantic relationship, but God… if Marius kissed me at tea today to send Boyce Delmonde packing, it would start them up again.
“Speaking of kissing,” I say, changing the subject, “how did your date go with what’s her name?”
“You mean Emelia?” he asks, a fondness in his tone.
“I guess,” I reply with uncertainty. He told me he’d made a connection at work and they were going to do dinner.
“Dinner went great,” he replies, and I don’t have to take my eyes off the sky to hear the mischief in his voice. “I didn’t give her a kiss good-night, but I banged her in her office the next day.”
My head whips to the left, and I lean up to stare at him, aghast. “Are you crazy? You can’t have sex with people in your dad’s office. That’s like … unprofessional or something.”
“She was begging for it,” he replies smugly, without even looking my way. “And besides, it’s my office too.”
That is true. While I graduated from university in Switzerland with a degree in humanities—totally useless for my trajectory but something I found to be incredibly fulfilling—Marius followed in his father’s footsteps and majored in economics and got his MBA immediately following. He joined his father’s firm as a full partner upon receipt of his master’s.
“You’re gross,” I say.
“You’re jealous,” he teases.
And he’s not far off the mark. Since graduating, I’ve been pretty much secluded back here in Bretaria. I’m not jobless, by any means—I’ve been working with my father to learn the family business of mining—but more importantly, I’m learning how to take over the role of sovereign as that event is inevitable.
In college, I was able to spread my wings. It was my first true taste of freedom, and while I always had a security detail, they were discreet and melted into the background. It let me be a college kid who could drink, smoke weed, and have meaningless hookups, although frankly, pretty sure the people assigned to protect me knew I did all those things.
But they wouldn’t have stopped me. My parents wanted me to have the enjoyment of university and all that came with it. My security detail was merely to keep me safe from would-be kidnappers and the like.
Those days are a fond memory, and yeah… I’m totally jealous that Marius gets to live his life the way he wants to.
And because I don’t want to get into my pitiful lack of a sex life since returning home three years ago, I push myself up from the grass. “Let’s dive.”
It’s really what we came here for, so I shed my clothes, leaving me in just a one-piece black swimsuit that’s modest and functional. If I were sunbathing on the beach or at one of our three palace pools, I’d be in a bikini, but cliff diving requires clothing that will actually stay on when I hit the water.
Marius pops up, too, and pulls his tank over his head, tossing it down on top of my clothes.
“Last one off is a rotten egg,” he challenges but politely waits while I wrap my long, blond hair with a hair tie.
I look out over the calm waters, and a shiver runs up my spine. Even though the water is smooth as glass, the thirty-five-foot drop is a bit harrowing. It’s not considered a huge cliff, but the height is dizzying for most people. Marius and I have been secretly diving into the warm waters from this cliff since we were fourteen, and no one has been the wiser.
“Let’s do this,” I say, and before Marius can fathom what I’m doing, I give him a hard push. He stumbles backward by about two feet, which gives me a two-foot head start.
I take one long stride toward the cliff, knowing I only need another four good ones to launch off the edge. Before my foot can leave the grass for the second stride, a voice snarls, “Stop, Your Highness.”
My blood chills in my veins as I recognize the roll of that Russian accent.
My father’s head of security, Dmitri Lebedev.
I slowly turn my head to find him standing fifteen feet away, and he’s pissed. After all this time sneaking out and cliff diving with Marius and essentially taking control of my life, I’ve been busted.
The woman in me—the one who hates being controlled and told what she can and can’t do—rebels against his command, and I actually step closer to the cliff’s edge. Dmitri’s icy-blue eyes flash with fury that I’d dare disobey him.
It’s quite a scary expression. Even Marius feels the dangerous vibes because he mutters in a low voice, “Don’t do it, Cami.”
He knows me well. He knows I’m ninety-five percent sure I’m going to take that dive off the cliff. I mean, I’ve already been busted. My escapades are coming to an end because now I’ll be put under heavy scrutiny and the steel-door passwords will be changed and I will not be made privy to them.
Fuck it. Might as well take one last dive.
I turn toward the cliff and the sparkling waters and prepare for a mad dash. He can’t catch me in time.
But before I even lift my foot again, Dmitri says in a deadly calm, rumbling tone, “Take one step, and I’ll shoot him.”
Ever so slowly, I glance over my shoulder and see that Dmitri has his gun unholstered, in his hands and pointed directly at Marius.
For a split second, I’m terrified he’ll actually shoot my best friend to keep me from jumping. Dmitri has no clue that I’ve done this hundreds of times, and he’s a bit crazy to begin with. He has no limits by which to hold him back in the protection of the Winterbourne family, so he could very well put a bullet in Marius’s leg to stop me.
But no … he won’t. He’d never. I’m sure of it.
Regardless, the jolt of adrenaline that nearly propelled me off despite the consequences fizzles, and my spine becomes boneless. With a sigh, I turn away from my adventurous free fall and stomp back to my clothes.
Marius gives me a sad smile, knowing that this little shenanigan we’ve shared through the years is done. He makes no move to put his tank on, and I’m sure he’s going to take a dip after I leave.
I pull my shorts and T-shirt on, shove my feet into my sandals, and turn toward Dmitri. His gun is again holstered, and he makes a sweeping motion toward the path that will lead us back to the door. He doesn’t bother looking at Marius but merely inclines his head for me to precede him.
I do so, and I don’t look back at my friend. I know it will be too painful to get that one last look at the freedom I’ve just lost forever.
It’s with a pissy attitude that I lead us back to the steel door. I step aside and make Dmitri punch in the code. Arms crossed over my chest, I demand irritably, “How did you know I was out there?”
“I went looking for you, and you weren’t in your suite like you told Netty you would be. It was a simple review of the security cameras to find you.”
We move through the door, into the palace through the servants’ quarters, and I assume he’s going to escort me either to my father’s office where I can face his ire or to my suite.
He does neither, though, instead turning down a hall that leads to the security offices.
“Where are we going?” I ask suspiciously.
“Some people you need to meet,” he replies curtly, not bothering to slow his pace or look over his shoulder at me.
“Who?” I demand.
“The members of the security agency your father hired to accompany you to London for the wedding and then on your trip to the States.”
I stop mid-stride, stunned by his revelation. “But why? I assumed you’d be heading up the trips with our own men.”
His tone is clipped. “Some of our men will be involved, but I cannot attend to you, and your father felt better with this American company to help us.”
“What do you mean you cannot attend to me?” I ask, scrambling to catch up with him. “You’re the head of our security. It’s your job.”
“It’s not my only job,” he mutters in annoyance as he comes to a closed door that leads into a conference room.
“Stop,” I command imperiously, and to my surprise, Dmitri faces me. In my haughtiest tone, I declare, “I am Princess Camille of House Winterbourne. I demand you look at me when I’m talking to you. I also demand that you give me the full details about what the hell is going on. You answer to me as much as to my father.”
Dmitri’s eyes flash again, not with anger like out on the cliff side, but with amusement.
He finds me funny.
And it’s humiliating that I don’t even get the respect my weighted title should afford me.
He reaches out and turns the knob, pushing open the door. He sweeps a hand and says, “Why don’t you see for yourself? All the answers to your questions wait in there.”