---

Angus Augustus Braxton-Lenox, the seventeenth King of Lektenstaten, was already awake and had showered when his valet knocked on his bedroom door and entered the room, carrying his pressed attire for the day.

“Good morning, Your Royal Highness. It’s a lovely day.”  

Angus’s answer to the cheerful greeting was more a grunt than a proper good morning.

It was a lovely day but Angus doubted that it would be the slightest bit different from any other day in recent months: without any loveliness.

He was bored and he scorned the feeling, well aware that he was blessed with health, wealth, and success.

Immaculately dressed, Angus finally descended the magnificent staircase of the family castle with all the cool assurance and dignity of his forebears. He walked down the hall between walls adorned with the portraits of his predecessors—the very proud Lektenstaten royalty—ranging from the first King, who had been a famous general, to his own father, a distinguished banker who had died of old age when Angus was not yet six years old.

“Your Royal Highness.”

Angus nodded at his butler, Kerr Carlsten, and two maids and two footmen at the foot of the stairs.

Every morning he was greeted with much the same pomp and ceremony that the first King would have received centuries before.

He entered the breakfast parlor where, as usual, the daily newspapers, including the leading financial publications, awaited him.

There was no need for him to ask for anything.

His every need and wish were carefully foreseen by a devoted staff that had been specially trained for decades. From the fresh monogrammed towels laid out daily in the bathroom for his shower to a tailor-made business suit and a monogrammed Egyptian cotton shirt recently pressed; from his favorite foods being served in the total peace that reigned while he ate, since his preference for silence at breakfast was well known, everything ran smoothly.

And it all bored him to death.

A phone was brought to him by his silent butler, who just said, “The Dowager Princess.”

With a sigh he picked it up from the silver salve. “Good morning, Mother.”

He frowned when Catriona Cristina Braxton-Lenox, his fifty-five year old mother, asked if it suited him to have lunch with her at Lektenstaten embassy in London today.

No, it doesn’t suit me. He rolled his eyes at the absurd request. As if he would reschedule business appointments at the bank; or cancel his appearance at the Parliament to fly down to London to have lunch with his mother. “I’m sorry, Mother, I can’t.”

As he half-listened to his mother rambling about her social meetings and stuffy, royal English friends, he reviewed his agenda for the day: the same boring meetings with the same clients, whose fortunes his family had handled for generations. Then he would stop at the Parliament for the opening ceremony and his discourse, and he would visit his late wife’s grave. He was indeed flying to London to attend a wedding of a prominent Lektenstaten businessman—probably another boring wedding, with the same boring people, and the same boring food and drinks.

Uneasily aware that he spent little to no time with his mother, when she asked him to stop by to have drinks before his appointment in the evening, Angus gave his reluctant assent, “I’ll be there, Mother.”

With a sigh, he ended the phone call. What I need is a new challenge.

Strikingly intelligent and gifted in the field of asset management, Angus had been marked out early as a genius at analysing the emergent-world money market. Juggling complex figures in politically conflicted countries gave him considerable pleasure and satisfaction. And as one of the financial world’s successful investment bankers, his expertise was in great demand. And since Lektenstaten was a small country, he balanced the two things very well.

Numbers, unlike people, are easy to understand and deal with. He sipped his coffee and his eyes landed on the wall at the other end of the room where there was a full-length portrait of his late wife and childhood friend, Innes von Furstenberg.

He wondered if anyone else in the family even remembered that the anniversary of Innes’s death was today.

Sentimentality was not one of Angus’s failings, and love had not been an asset in their marriage. But he had cheered Innes as a loyal friend—something he valued on top of everything else—and they enjoyed a peaceful coexistence with good chemistry in the bedroom. Her tragic passing almost a year earlier—a broken neck from a horse fall—had left a gaping hole in the settled fabric of his life which  was slowly closing again.

Angus folded his napkin and placed it over the table, contemplating the perfect creases. Then he stood and walked to the door, which was already being opened by a footman.

In the hall, he stopped and looked around.

“Kerr, please inform MacMillan I will leave earlier to London. Four o’clock instead of six.”

“Of course, sir.”  

Yes, I definitely need a new challenge.

---

“Happy birthday!” Jaxon Talbot pulled away the sheet covering her car and stood back from it. “What do you think?”

Wide-eyed, Siobhan Faulkner studied her 1973 Beetle. Jaxon, her best friend and foster brother,  had it repaired and repainted in a deep lavender color. She walked around the vehicle, stunned by a transformation that had caused all the rust, dents, and scratches to disappear. “It’s amazing! You’ve worked a miracle.”

“I knew that fixing your car was the best present I could give you,” he admitted with a smile.

Siobhan flung her arms round him in an exuberant hug, and he returned it, engulfing her in his arms. A stocky, blond man of six-feet, Jaxon was easily seven inches taller than her. When she stepped back, she said, “I don’t know how to thank you.”

Jaxon shrugged. “It was no big deal.”

Siobhan knew the full value of his generosity and it touched her heart that he had sacrificed so much of his free time—and his money, even though he was no pauper—to get fix up her car.

But then, Jaxon knew that she needed the vehicle to get around the craft shops and fairs where she sold her hand-crafted necklaces and bracelets on weekends. It was her dream to craft exclusive jewels and one day have a small shop of her own.

Success, however, had so far eluded Siobhan. But it was more because of her stubbornness than for the lack of talent. When she finished Birmingham School of Jewelry, she’d had her cut of the offered jobs, but none had appealed to her highly creative streak. So, she went back to her foster parents’ house and she worked every hour she could for a catering company, saving every penny, with high hopes of a better future. She still struggled to pay her bills and be independent since she was still a server and had yet to have her talent recognized.

“I wish we could go out and celebrate” Jaxon said.

“I wish too, but you know I can’t. I begged for an extra shift, so I can’t very well say that I changed my mind. Besides, I think they let me have the extra hours sort of as a birthday gift.”

“I know. Don’t forget I’m staying over at Aunt Moira’s,” Jaxon reminded her.

At the thought of her foster aunt who had Alzheimer’s, Siobhan stopped admiring her car and looked up. “How is she?”

“About as well as can be expected. It’s not like she’s going to get any better.” Jaxon kissed her cheek and said, “Go, or you’ll be late. And find yourself a nice, rich, single young man tonight, huh?”

Siobhan just laughed and shook her head at him.

Her mother’s volatile relationships with a long line of men who had treated both of them badly had left their mark on Siobhan even at a young age. She had known even then that she wanted something different for herself, something more than casual sex with men who didn’t want to commit, contribute to the home, or play any real part in a child’s upbringing. And she didn’t want to be hurt, either. With the exception of Jaxon, the sort of men Siobhan had met in the years that took her to adulthood had merely increased her wariness and distrust of the opposite sex.

When her mother died, her grandmother had put her up for adoption. The nine year-old Siobhan had never quite recovered from the simple fact that her own flesh and blood had handed her over to social services simply because she was illegitimate and, even worse, she was the embarrassing proof of her mother’s affair with a married man.

Siobhan had lived a tumultuous young life with constant change, broken relationships, and plenty of insecurity until she moved in with the Talbots at the age of fourteen.

When Jaxon’s parents’ died, one quickly following the other in the space of one week, he had invited her to continue living with him and even offered the servant’s quarters in the back garden for her to have more privacy, which she had readily accepted with glee. After some refurbishment, it turned into a one-bedroom apartment, with just enough space for a bed, an armchair with a side table, and a special desk with multiple mini-drawers, where she kept her materials and crafted her jewels.

But, even now, at the age of twenty-two, the sheer hurt of that unapologetic rejection by her grandmother had made Siobhan not seek contact with her birth relations again. She had blocked out the memories of the early years of her life. Not even wanting to think about it, she cleared her mind of such thoughts. There’s no point in dwelling on these recollections.

But even as she hummed a song under her breath as she got ready for work, there was still a sense of loss that had settled in her chest.