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Go and play outside.
Beatrice’s voice, when it came, was hoarse. ‘I used to climb out of the window and go to the festival, searching for you.’ Then she would wake screaming and wet and she and Alicia would sneak down to the laundry to wash the sheets. ‘I used to go every night when the festival was in town.’
‘The festival has gone now,’ Sister Catherine said. ‘And so has your friend.’
‘Where?’
‘I don’t know.’ Sister Catherine shrugged. ‘You have your answers. I have been honest...’ She spread her hands, as if asking what more she could want. ‘There’s nothing for you here—just trouble for me if you stay. Beatrice, you have been fed and cared for, given an education I could never have afforded...’
But not loved.
Not for a single second.
Instead, she had been hidden in plain sight, and then when it had become inconvenient, she had been moved on.
‘You didn’t wrap me... You didn’t cover me...’
‘I knew you’d be found.’
Beatrice discovered sarcasm then. ‘How caring of you.’
She left and took a local taxi to the train station, vowing never, ever to return. So appalled was she by the answers she’d found, she gave up on finding Alicia too. Instead, she sat on the train and cut her mother from the one photo of the convent inhabitants she had from her childhood, and then she decided to change her surname from Festa to Taylor.
Cut, cut, cut.
She snipped her mother into tiny pieces and refused to shed so much as a single tear.
Beatrice knew then why she was so emotionally frozen. She hadn’t developed a heart of stone, she realised. Rather, she’d inherited one!
And now Beatrice Taylor would use it to her own advantage.
CHAPTER ONE
‘SIGNORA,ALLACCILAcintura di sicurezza.Fasten your seatbelt.’
The captain apologised for the rough air that had accompanied them, and the storm cells that had meant their flight path had taken them over Sicily.
Bellanisiá was, Beatrice decided as they commenced their descent, just a little too close to Trebordi for comfort. And she wasn’t sure she even wanted the job.
Liaison Aide to HRH Prince Julius of Bellanisiá.
It was a newly created role for a newly appointed heir.
The brief was simple: tidy up the reprobate Prince’s image prior to bridal selection.
Her career was PR. She cleaned up the images of fallen celebrities, MPs, sportsmen, or whoever needed her detached aloofness to help them navigate whatever mess they’d found themselves in. Affairs, dramas and lies—Beatrice just waded her emotionless way through it all. No one would guess that the brittle woman who could face press or cameras and address sensitive topics with ease had never so much as been kissed. Or that she’d struggled to make a single friend.
She worked on three-to six-month contracts and was successful enough to be approached for work through word of mouth rather than having to seek it out.
The secret to her success? Beatrice didn’t care. And she told all her clients just that—she wasn’t their agent, nor their wife, mother, psychologist...
While a royal wedding was an attractive enough incentive to have sustained her through three panel interviews, Beatrice herself now had doubts that she was suited to the role.
Deference was not on her impressive list of attributes. And, judging by the lengthy list of protocols she’d been forwarded just to meet with the arrogant Prince, deference was a prerequisite.
It washislife that was in chaos, Beatrice would politely remind him, not hers.
Their flight path, though unsettling, had offered an enticing view of the Kingdom of Bellanisiá. A beautiful archipelago of islands in the Ionian Sea, it looked from the sky as if pebbles had been skimmed between Sicily and Greece. Each island was unique, but all existed under one rule.
