Read The Prince and I: A Romantic Mystery (The Royal Biography Cozy Mystery Series Book 1) for Free Online Page B

Silly question.”
    “I never want to reign,” the prince insists. “Next question?”
    There is an expectant pause.
    “Um, well, I read about your childhood. Descriptions of you by your nannies etc. They were supplied by the Palace. Sounds like you were a very happy child,” I say lamely, trying to regain the conversation.
    “I wasn’t,” he replies.
    Oh dear, this is going poorly. As a historian, I find it much easier to study the Narmer palette, and then form an educated guess as to what the first king to unite Upper and Lower Egypt was like, rather than to be forced to interview a living member or royalty. The dead don’t argue, which makes them convenient to study.
    “Oh?” I murmur, trying to get the Prince to open up about his childhood and feeling more like a shrink than a biographer.
    “Well, as you know my brother died when I was four. I’m pretty sure I was happy up until that point.”
    Right. Four. I hadn’t quite reached that part of the biography yet. I do know that Alex’s brother, the heir to the throne, fell from a high window at his grandmother’s estate.
    “I’m very sorry about your brother.”
    This time the silence is even longer than before.
    “Look, Lizzie, I told Alistair when I agreed to this that I wouldn’t talk about that. Alright? The terms were agreed to by your publisher.”
    “Right, right you are. I’m sorry, Alex, I was thrust into this position and I never read the contract, but we won’t put in anything that makes you uncomfortable. Why don’t you tell me about your mother?”
    “Lovely woman.”
    Somebody help me, I’m getting nowhere.
    “She toes the monarchy line,” he adds. I have no idea what this means. “She’s a good woman. A good mother. She loves my dad and he dotes on her. I’d like to marry someone like my mom.”
    Uh-huh, I need a little more to go on than this, but Alex is done talking about his family and turns the tables.
    “So tell me, Lizzie, how about you?”
    “What about me?
    “Are you close to your mom?”
    “Why, yes, she’s a wonderful mother. She’s a district court judge. She always worked full time. My father quit teaching for a few years to raise us. He’s currently a professor of women’s studies at Colorado College, but he’s taught at Cornell, Harvard, and Princeton.”
    This kicks off a whole conversation about me. Where was I raised? What schools did I attend? What’s my favorite book, color, movie? The last thing the Prince seems to want to talk about is himself. After a while, we settle into a conversation about some of his favorite memories when he was a child.
    “So you wrestled in the mud like you were a couple of pigs?” I find myself asking him as the digital clock on my windowsill registers nine o’clock.
    “She cut off my hair, she scalped me. I was three. I looked awful. My parents made me wear a toupee until the hair grew back in. So one day, I paid her back by tackling her outside the stables.”
    “No way, a toupee at age three,” I laugh.
    “Well, my mom was too embarrassed to let anyone know that Rose had been left alone with me long enough to take a pair of scissors to my head. At the time my cousin was much older and wiser. She was five. She was playing hairdresser, you see?”
    I lose track of time as Alex tells me all kinds of funny stuff about when he was a small child. How when they first told him that his brother was the Prince of Wales, he replied quite seriously, “The Prince of Whales, but how?” In another antidote he told me about when he explained the rules of the road to his parents.
    “I told them that red meant stop and green meant go and white meant fall down on the ground and crawl on your belly.”
    “That would have made for messy intersections,” I laugh.
    “But seriously, Lizzie, compared to --who the devil have you been studying lately?”
    “Croesus,” I respond quite seriously.
    “Right, Croesus. Compared to Croesus, who probably did many interesting