AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Where are we going first? Just give me that much.”
“Fine, fine,” Cedrick answers in mock-resignation, but I can tell he’s excited to share. “It’s one of my favorite places, a villa tucked away in a dense mountain forest with a lake just out back. We’d go there in my childhood every year to commemorate some battle or other. But what I remember is how much fun my brothers and I had running around and disguising ourselves like normal people. We got into so much trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“Well, getting locked out without any way back and not being able to find where we put our clothes or swim trunks. That was an adventure. My father told us we were all disinherited.”
I can’t stop laughing as he tells one story after another, some about daily life in the palace, some about things that happened in the medical clinics, and some about the history of the country he’s finally giving me a chance to explore.
The hills start getting steeper, and I’ve never seen a place like this as we go up the long mountain. “This looks like the Swiss Alps, Cedrick. It’s incredible.”
“Yeah, the Solvarians wanted to hide the beauty of our landscape to maintain it for ourselves. But I always get a pang of jealousy when I see people praising Italy and Spain and France, when our mountains are so much more beautiful. This one time, we received the head of parliament from Switzerland, and… Am I talking too much?”
“What?” I’m shocked he even thinks anyone could get bored. “No, not at all. I love hearing it all.”
He proceeds to tell me about the visiting leader proposing renaming a mountain in his country after the tallest peak in Solvaria, Mount Abatton, where the villa happens to be.
We wander in the car through the cobblestone towns, with Dutch-style cottages and Tudor townhouses, and we wind through the countryside with paddocks full of cows. Families wave at us, as if they know there’s a royal in the convertible just based on the beauty of the car.
We climb up a mountain, and I’m terrified we’ll fall off the cliff. Without thinking, I hold Cedrick’s hand, and he smiles to himself and squeezes it.
“No reason to be afraid. I’ve done this a hundred times.”
“And how many times have you fallen off?”
We both laugh. As we pull up, the staff at the country house, an enormous Tudor villa with barns, silos, and wild gardens, gathers out front, talking excitedly. Some of them wave with huge smiles.
We swim in the lake for two days, just relaxing, reading, and getting to know each other. In the town, we explore shops and restaurants, and he tells me stories about practically each one.
“I opened this store, actually, to sell wares of the people in towns around the world that have our clinics.” He opens the door for me as we step into a shop that looks like it has curiosities from every continent through every century.
“This is amazing, Cedrick. Just amazing.” I shake my head.
“And then proceeds go back into the organization. I got the idea from Margaret, my program director, whose sister had a business selling silk. I went out in the middle of the country, not knowing what to expect, and her silk store was as elaborate as anything I had seen in Solvaria.”
“You should open one in Virkas.”
“I’m working on it. Hopefully, you can help me. When we get back from the different places we’re going.”
We go to Floramor, a town that’s known for its unbelievable plant cultivations, including the most beautiful gardens I have ever seen in my life. “My brothers and I would play hide-and-seek out here. It was glorious.”
We go to the beach villa for a week, and after that, we explore hidden caves in the desert in the eastern parts of the country for a day before arriving at the Vancourts’ historic hidden country house, where the King always escaped to forget about the pressures of royal life for a little while.
I love hearing his stories. I can’t believe I’ve been living in one for the last two weeks of our honeymoon. It’s perfect, and I don’t want it to end. If it stays like this, life with Cedrick could be more incredible than I ever thought.
I really hope it stays like this. It’s been just two weeks since our wedding, and only about a month since we re-met, so it’s not a lot of time to judge things by.
Especially once we add a baby, and with so much we don’t know about each other, there’s a lot that could change in a very short amount of time.
17
CEDRICK
“This looks like a good spot to start our excursion.” I park just near the beach and bring the car to a stop.
“To be fair, Solvaria’s entire coastline is exquisite enough that any point along it can be the start of most epic adventures,” Ellie says from the passenger seat.
I glance at her and am enamored once more by how dazzling she looks. Not unlike our nation's coast which is really showing off this evening. The street we're on is slightly elevated, and we have a bird's eye view of the water.
