A Royal Affair Book One: A paranormal, time travel, royal romance Read online

  A ROYAL Affair

  A Royal Affair Series - Book One

  By Christina George

  All rights reserved. Use of any part of this publication, whether reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior consent of the publisher, is an infringement of copyright law and is forbidden.

  ASIN: B06Y4GZQHR

  Interior and Cover Design: Fusion Creative Works, fusioncw.com

  First Printing

  Printed in the United States of America

  . . .

  This book is dedicated to Belgium and its wonderful people. Thank you for letting me call you home for so many years and for welcoming me back each time I return.

  prologue

  There’s a belief among past life enthusiasts and experts that we often return to this life to complete work from a past life—or, in some cases, to reunite with people we love. In rare, unfortunate cases, we even return to continue vendettas.

  There have also been accounts of people having features and habits similar to those they had in a past life or lives. This is not uncommon, though it’s fairly rare. I had a personal experience of this via a friend of mine who was sought out by a man who dearly loved her in a past life, and she and the man both bore a remarkable resemblance to their past incarnations. My friend’s experience sent me on a journey to dig up all I could about past lives and the thin veil separating this world from the hereafter.

  chapter 1

  The dream was back. It had haunted Emma for months now, and it was always the same scene. A large, ornate palace off in the distance, but not so far away that she couldn’t hear the laughter of two children who were playing on the grass. A man and a woman stood with their backs to her, watching the children.

  It was a different time, Emma was certain of it. From this distance, she could see the woman wore a long dress, and the man wore a suit with a waist-length jacket and long trousers.

  Emma could not move. Though part of her longed to walk up and take a closer look, something kept her rooted in place. Fear. A deep fear. And dread. Yes, that, too. She watched until the scene faded. The parents were gone, the children were gone, and the laughter stopped.

  As she always did after this dream, she woke with a start, but this time she woke yelling a name, too.

  Fitz.

  chapter 2

  The beach at Cannes was packed as usual, though Emma’s best friend and cousin, Peyton, did manage to find a narrow, semi-secluded strip of sand away from the crush of celebrities showing off their swimsuit bodies. The girls settled in and, as usual, Emma was careful to slather on sufficient sunscreen to protect her typical-of-redheads porcelain skin (which she inherited from her mother).

  While Emma finished making sure she hadn’t missed a spot with the sunscreen, she filled Peyton in on the latest behind-the-scenes shenanigans of her former boyfriend, Twitter’s favorite TV hottie, #BadBoyRob. After breaking up with him earlier in the week at the climax of one of Rob’s massive, toddler-like, very public meltdowns, Emma had also, by default, quit her job as a celebrity publicist. Inconveniently, Rob had been one of her richest clients.

  “I’ll tell you one thing,” she said, adjusting her swimsuit, “my new motto is ‘Never date a client and never, ever, ever again date a celebrity. Ever.’” Yes, her life as a celebrity publicist was all about being a lackey and managing bad media, and it was especially during times like this that Emma wished for a quiet life. Maybe running a bookstore like her grandfather did.

  “Rob is a dick,” Peyton agreed. She paused to watch a man who looked remarkably like George Clooney—oh, wait, he probably was George Clooney—jog past, tossing around a volleyball with friends.

  Turning back to Emma, she said, “Em, listen, I’m off to Paris after this. Why don’t you come with me? In fact, why don’t you find someone who’ll trade their right arm or a fistful of cash—which you might need while you rethink your life—for tonight’s front row seats? Let’s skip all this red carpet nonsense so we can pack and catch an early flight tomorrow.”

  Peyton was the only family Em was close to, other than their grandfather, of course. Her friend was in the middle of a pretty high-profile divorce, having just left her richer-than-God husband, the owner of a national league baseball team. He was a cruel man, and Emma was glad Peyton had finally taken steps to move on without him.

  “I’d love to, but I have to get back to New York.” Emma leaned on her elbows, watching the surf.

  “To what?” Peyton crinkled her eyebrows, “Paris will do you good, trust me.”

  After Emma’s mother and father left to pursue their own selfish interests, Peyton made it a point to spend as much time with her cousin as she could. During this time, the girls discovered they shared something more than a familial bond. They shared the ability to see outside the boundaries of the regular, everyday world. Peyton’s gift was insight and foretelling, and Emma was visited by mysterious intuitions or “visions” like the one that tempted Emma’s mother to abandon her only child.

  While Peyton was comfortable with using her gift and trusted it, Emma did everything she could to pretend hers didn’t exist. It frightened her sometimes and other times made her want to weep.

  Emma’s cell phone rang. She checked the number to make sure it wasn’t Rob calling to try and talk her into sex again. She picked up.

  “Hello?”

  “Emma, this is Gretchen.”

  Gretchen owned a small gift shop next to her grandfather’s bookstore, and had been a family friend for years. Emma got an odd twist in her stomach. If Gretchen was calling, something was wrong.

  “Is Grandfather okay?”

  “No, dear. I’m sorry, he’s not. He’s taken quite ill. I think you should come home.”

  chapter 3

  The flight home was endless. Gretchen hadn’t been able to give her many details, because the doctors were still trying to figure out what was wrong with Grandfather. Gretchen found him collapsed in his store, and he was rushed to the local hospital in the Hamptons.

  After her family fell apart, Emma moved to the Hamptons to live with her grandparents. She arrived heartbroken and angry, but her grandparents had soothed her and adored her and made sure she lacked for nothing, especially love.

  Growing up in the Hamptons was sort of an odd thing. The summers were packed with rich (very rich) people eager escape their lives in the city, and during those times, Emma made sure she was always around to help with the bookstore. As her grandparents aged, the rigors of running the store became a bigger challenge for them. Once summer faded, so did the crowds, and the Hamptons became quiet, almost sleepy, as winter ushered in cold weather and ushered out all the sun-beach-lovers.

  When Emma was in high school, her grandmother died, and for a time Emma left her grandfather’s side only to attend classes. She helped him with every aspect of the bookstore, even though he insisted he didn’t need the help. Emma hated to think what would have become of her if her loving grandparents hadn’t taken her in, and supporting her grandfather then had become a way to demonstrate how much she loved and appreciated him.

  . . .

  The moment her plane landed at JFK, Emma was met by a driver. God bless Peyton for ordering a car to take her directly to South Hampton hospital.

  The driver was nice enough, but he had an air about him Emma found disturbing. An image star
ted to surface in her mind. It was how her “gift” often showed up, in images, or in feelings, and she wasn’t always able to ignore or control them. Occasionally she could, but other times, when her psychic ability picked up on something truly horrific, it shoved the vision to the forefront, refusing to be ignored.

  Like now. In the late 1700s, her driver had forced aristocrats to submit to the untender mercies of Madame Le Guillotine, and he especially relished displaying the gory remains of each beheading to the cheering masses with a grin. The sick, bloody reality of this worked her stomach, and the aura of blood and death still swirled around him, until it was all Emma could do not to puke all over the limo’s ritzy upholstery.

  In truth, Emma despised her psychic gift. In fact, she didn’t understand why it was referred to as a “gift,” because it seemed anything but. Unlike Peyton, who sort of owned (but never advertised) being psychic, Emma wished she’d never seen that first vision, or now continued to see odd things when she looked at people.

  Even worse, when people find out you’re psychic, they assume you can see all the future and the past, and oh, by the way, can you tell me the lottery numbers, too? In reality, psychic or intuitive gifts didn’t work that way at all. Gifts tended to be specific, and limited, though occasionally they overlapped in unexpected ways.

  Emma could see past lives—though, thankfully, not everyone’s. At least she finally learned how to keep it turned off most of the time.

  Unless she encountered a person like her limo driver, someone who had taken part in or instigated a mass killing or another event that affected thousands or altered history. Then the lives tended to muscle into the foreground of her consciousness, refusing to be ignored.

  Despite personal beliefs to the contrary, most people weren’t celebrities in their past lives. Emma could remember a friend in college who insisted she was Mary Queen of Scots in a past life. Then she prodded Emma to dig in further. Emma mistakenly told her she could see past lives. She was forced to tell her friend that she’d been an average, everyday human for most of her lives. Emma’s friend insisted she was wrong and never spoke to her again.

  As gifts went, this one was not terribly useful, unless it was true that past lives affected a person’s future, which Emma would rather not believe—even though she kept encountering examples that demonstrated the opposite. Her driver, for example, who spent one of his lives unjustly killing thousands of people, was now forced to be at the beck and call of wealthy individuals who paid little or no attention to him. If she dug further, Emma was sure she’d find that many of the driver’s passengers were people he killed in a past life.

  That was the thing about past lives. Many times, they were about karma. Unfinished business had a way of following a person from life to life, demanding either completion or restitution or allowing the person to experience what they had done to others in prior lives…for good or ill. At least that’s what Peyton always told her.

  . . .

  The car came to a smooth stop in front of the hospital. Emma glanced at the angry-looking driver. Yeah, I’d be pretty pissed off, too, if I had to spend my entire life tethered to a steering wheel and feeling invisible, no matter how hard I worked.

  “It’s all taken care of,” he nodded, and then his eyes skittered away from her. Emma often wondered if the souls buried deep beneath someone’s persona or ego could tell she saw who they really were. I see what you did. People who had led deceptive or ugly past lives often found Emma “difficult” to be around. Emma didn’t care. In fact, it was one of the few advantages of her gift, serving as a natural filtering process, bouncing undesirables off her radar.

  As Emma walked into the hospital, her phone buzzed. It was a message from bad-boy-Rob (and yes, she had listed him that way in her phone after the breakup). It read:

  Emma, miss you, wish you were here so I could lick your…

  DELETE

  She stabbed the delete button before she could finish reading his text. The guy was seriously a piece of work. She’d told him they were over and she was no longer his publicist, which hadn’t stopped him from texting her.

  In the beginning, she found it hard to say no to him…He looked like a cross between Ben Affleck and Bradley Cooper, and the first time they went out he told her, with soulful looks, that he was really a simple boy at heart and only wanted to find the love of his life.

  Which was hard to say no to, and why, Emma found out later, most women didn’t. Admittedly, Emma liked the sex, but she didn’t like Rob. To add to the mounting reasons why she should have dumped Rob sooner, he referred to their time together as “fucking.” Sensitive, no?

  Another note to self: When a man refers to lovemaking as anything else, a future isn’t likely. Also avoid men who call it ‘boinking,’ though the term ‘shagging’ is acceptable, as long as it’s said with a British accent.

  Shaking off Rob’s scumbag message, she stopped at the information desk. The woman there said her grandfather was on the third floor and also gave her the name of his doctor. Emma raced to the elevator, punched three, and, after it rose painfully slowly, exited to find another information desk. As luck would have it, she was immediately introduced to her grandfather’s doctor by one of the nurses.

  “I’m Emma Avery,” she said, shaking his hand. “My grandfather is Marcel VanDyke.” The doctor was youngish, and handsome, and gave her a genuine smile.

  “Your grandfather is quite a character, Ms. Avery.”

  “That he is,” she said. “And please call me Emma. How is he doing?”

  “Better. We moved him from ICU last night. He had a small stroke, nothing life-threatening, but he does need to take it easy.”

  Taking it easy was not in her grandfather’s vocabulary. She wasn’t even sure he knew what the phrase meant.

  The doctor continued, “He runs a bookstore, yes?”

  She nodded.

  “He’ll need to take a break from work for at least a month. He needs to be careful about lifting and climbing ladders. In fact, it’s better if he doesn’t do either.” The doctor’s smile broadened. “I’ve been to his bookstore. It’s one of my wife’s favorite places. But running it is a lot of work, I imagine.”

  The wheels in Emma’s head began spinning. “It is,” she said quietly. Then, without hesitation, she added, “I will run it for him.”

  It was exactly the break she needed. Fresh off a disastrous breakup and newly jobless, she needed a change, and her grandfather needed her help.

  Emma thanked the doctor and went to find her grandfather.

  chapter 4

  She was allowed to bring Grandfather home three days later, with specific instructions for rest, rest, and more rest. She knew she’d have a battle on her hands to keep him in bed, or at the very least on the couch. Even at eighty, he was still eager to work, and terrible at taking orders, least of all hers—even when she was careful to make them sound like suggestions.

  Emma enlisted the neighbors—Gretchen, who had called her when he was hospitalized, Bob, the man who ran the deli next door, and a few other friends who had stores on the same block.

  The bookstore, named Willa’s Books after her late grandmother, had been in the family for nearly sixty years. It survived many presidents, several downturned economies, and a few wars. Her grandfather believed reading would never go out of style, despite whatever the papers said about electronic books (he hated those) or the electronic e-readers (Marcel hated those even more). He believed that reading real books, the kind you could hold in your hand, run your finger along the spine, and sniff the pages of (was there anything so wonderful as a new book smell?) would never go away.

  Emma called her super to tell her she’d be by her apartment later in the week, but first she needed to get her grandfather settled. She planned to go into the city to grab her mail and then go back to the bookstore right away. It was Memorial Day weekend, and the
crowds were once again returning to the Hamptons in droves. It promised to be a busy summer.

  “Emma, darling, there’s a special client coming today for a stack of books I ordered.” Her grandfather was seated on the sofa, having insisted on being released from his bedroom. He disliked spending time there, forced to stay in bed. It was too painful a reminder of when his wife was dying.

  “They’re for my friend Peter. You remember him, right? You played together when your Oma Willa and I took you to visit Belgium when you were about seven.”

  Emma shook her head, “No, Opa, I only remember bits and pieces of what you’ve told me about him.” She always referred to her grandfather using the Flemish word for grandfather, Opa. She spoke very little Flemish, but enough to get her by whenever she visited Belgium (which wasn’t often, given her crazy schedule of celeb wrangling).

  Her grandfather nodded thoughtfully, “Right, right, you’ve been gone when he’s visited here. Well, you’ll delight in meeting him. He’s a lovely gentleman,” he finished with a twinkle in his eyes.

  Emma did an internal eye roll, fully aware of exactly what Grandfather meant: matchmaking time. Yes, exactly what she needed.

  “I’m sure he is. Now drink your tea. I have to open the shop.” Emma put the teacup and saucer down on the coffee table and looked around the room. The apartment was very old world European, with antiques everywhere and family photos (even one of her mother—out of respect, her grandfather had insisted).

  “Emmeline, would you turn on my music?” Even though he had lived in the US for many years, he still spoke with a Belgian accent, though not as thick as it once was.