Royal - Danielle Steel Page 0,74

They had nothing in common. “So when are we going to race?” he asked her halfway through dinner. “It should probably be sometime when my father’s not around. There will be hell to pay if he catches us. He’s going to an auction in Scotland next week. Maybe then, if I’m not in London. I’m going to Saint Tropez for a weekend. I have a friend who has a yacht there.” He would have asked her to come, she was pretty enough, but it would be like taking his little sister. There was nothing racy about her, and he could sense that she had no interest in the fast life of fashionable beach towns and yachts. All she cared about was horses, and her dream of being a jockey. “And after horses, what?” he asked her. “Marriage and babies?” She seemed like that kind of girl. He had no interest in either one for now.

She looked blank when he asked her. “I never think about it. I just think in terms of horses right now.”

“I have a half-sister like you, from my father’s second marriage. She breeds horses in Ireland. She and her husband have a big operation there. My father helped them set it up. They have seven kids. Scary thought,” he said and she laughed.

“I have twin brothers. They’re sixteen, and they drive me crazy. I’ve been helping my dad with them since my mother died…my stepmother,” she corrected, in her new life. “Actually, my world is a little confusing right now. I thought she was my mother all my life, and I loved her that way, and now it turns out she wasn’t. My real mother died when I was born, but I never knew about her until after this mother died, and it all came out. Now suddenly I’m a Royal Highness, and the queen is my aunt. I haven’t sorted it all out yet. I’m going to Balmoral to meet the rest of the family for a weekend at the end of August. I suddenly feel like two people, or one person in two worlds, my old life and my new one. The only constants in my life at the moment are horses and my stepfather. He runs the stables for John Markham. Most people in horse circles know John.” She was so honest and open about everything that he didn’t know what to say. There was no artifice about her. She was a straightforward person who had been cast into a new life that would have daunted most people. It forced him to be real with her too, which was new to him and unfamiliar. He was used to much more complicated girls who always wanted something from him. She didn’t, which was refreshing.

“It must be a little strange to suddenly be a Royal Princess.”

“The queen and her mother were very nice to me when I saw them. I haven’t met Princess Victoria yet.” And the queen had gotten her the highly coveted internship.

“She’s more exciting than her sister. She’s never married or had children, but she’s had some exotic romances, with the Aga Khan, an American senator, a few married men no one talks about, except the tabloids. She was in love with someone who died when she was young. I think she decided to pursue a different life after that. She’s very amusing,” Anthony volunteered. “I see her in nightclubs a lot. She actually went out with one of my friends a year or two ago. She and her sister are chalk and cheese. She’s the racy one. The queen is all about duty and the job. I think the crown is heavier to wear than one thinks. It can’t be a lot of fun.”

“I wonder what my mother was like in the midst of all that. She died when she was so young.”

“So did mine,” Anthony said quietly. It was the first serious side of him she’d seen.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t know.”

“You wouldn’t,” he said with a forgiving look. “You haven’t been around for all the scandals. She left my father for another man when I was eight. They were killed in a car accident in the South of France shortly after. I went off to boarding school a few months later, and that was the end of family life as I knew it. She was my father’s third wife, and he never married again. He’s always had women in his life, but no one he’s serious about. He’s