“I’m done with you, bitch,” he sneered, picking up my clothes and throwing them at me afterward. “Get your ass dressed. You’re going home to daddy.”
With my face bloodied and my body bruised and my clothes hanging off me, he shoved me into his truck and then kicked me out at the bus station. I remembered standing there on the road with a bloody rag over my nose, bawling like a baby as he drove away. I hated to admit it now, but if he had turned around I probably would have crawled into the truck and gone with him.
That was how fucking stupid I was back then.
I was not so stupid anymore.
The lady at the bus station felt sorry for me. She cleaned me up in the restroom and gave me a ticket back to Snowcap. My daddy met me at the bus stop and took me home.
I never mentioned Charlie Feenie or leaving Snowcap again.
That was the old me.
The poor helpless me.
If Charlie Feenie set foot in my bar now, I’d split his head open with a fucking meat clever and feed his little pecker to dogs.
Nobody would ever do that to me again.
Nobody.
CHAPTER THREE: Nikolay “Nick” Rostov
I tugged my iPhone from inside the leather jacket I was wearing and held it to my lips. “Siri, remind me to kill the idiot in the Kosnovian travel office who sent me to this horrid place.”
I was seething as I tucked the phone back into my jacket so I could focus on the road. Here I was, the crown prince of Kosnovia, one of the few remaining Russian monarchies, driving a Budget Rent-A-Car through a blinding snowstorm in upstate New York, trying to reach the Overlook Hotel where the economic summit was being held.
I cursed my father for sending me here.
Fine, I had a master’s in economics from Oxford, but surely someone less important than I could have made the trip.
It was not about economics, I thought. It was about finding a bride and producing an heir, preferably a bride from America so the American people would feel connected to our tiny monarchy. My father had seen too many old movies. He had become a romantic in his old age. Real life didn’t work that way. Not even for someone like me.
Granted, when the Kosnovian travel officer asked if I would need a chauffeured car to drive me from the airport in New York City to the summit in Snowcap, New York, I gave him a condescending look and told him that I was quite capable of driving myself. He gave me a respectful nod and said he’d have a car waiting for me.
I had no idea at the time that the summit would be held in November, a hundred miles from the airport, and that the car he reserved for me would be a Ford Focus—a car aptly named because if you didn’t focus, you might just run the damn thing over.
I also had no idea that snow started falling in upstate New York in late fall. When I told the woman at the car rental office that I was driving to Snowcap for an international economic summit, she shot me an amused look and wished me luck. I thought she was just flirting with me, as most women did.
In reality, she was probably thinking that I was a moron who really needed luck. At this point, I could not prove her wrong.
That had been four hours ago, and now it was getting dark and the snow was falling heavier by the minute. Great gusts of snow and ice swirled around the dark road in front of me. I was starting to feel like my luck was running out.
*
My father, Anatoly Rostov–rather KING Anatoly II–the ruler of the tiny monarchy of Kosnovia, would have laughed at such a storm. He would have poked a stiff finger into my chest and said, “You are a Rostov. Rostov’s are afraid of nothing.”
That may normally have been true, but this Rostov, his only son and heir, the one who was educated at Oxford and raised with everything handed over on a silver platter, was afraid of freezing to death on the side of the road in a FUCKING FORD FOCUS!
Would it have made matters any more palatable if I were to die in one of my Ferraris or Lamborghinis safely housed back home? Perhaps, but only slightly more.
I was just twenty-five years old, and one of the few remaining crown princes left on earth. I was most certainly the last monarch of a Russian bloodline. And if things in Kosnovia didn’t change, I would be the last to wear the crown that had been in my family for over two hundred years.
We were a dying breed, the Russian royals, and like in Britain, the monarchy had turned over the running of the country to parliamentarians. It had been a difficult decision for my father to give up his power, but he was not a man entirely driven by ego. He understood that we royals were mere figureheads now.
Unlike the British citizenry, which still held its royals in high esteem, the people of Kosnovia were growing tired of supporting the lavish lifestyle my mother and father—and I—enjoyed.
There had been rumblings for years that the royal family was a costly symbol of a bygone era.