The Royals of Vallemont

That didn’t stop him from weighing up the likelihood of dragging her back to bed. He deemed the chances slim.

Brought up never to readily surrender the advantage of position, Hugo sat up, the sheet dragging with him. His feet curled as they hit the rough wooden floor. Then he pulled himself to standing.

Amber’s gaze flickered to his bare chest and she sucked in a sharp breath. The chances looked slightly more promising.

But then her arm lifted, one pointed finger aimed towards her front door, and she said, “Get out.”

“Excuse me?”

“I said, get out. Do you not understand what that means? Were you raised by wolves?”

“Nannies. Mostly.”

“Of course you were. Get out of my bed. Get out of my shack. Now.”

Hugo ran both hands over his face, hard and fast. Better to be fully awake for this. “Start at the beginning. You’re not making any sense.”

“Then look at my face. Look deep into my eyes so that you see I am serious. I want you to get out.”

Well, this was new. Her voice rose with each word, rare emotion tinging her words. She was genuinely upset.

“I will go. Of course. If that’s what you want. Look, I’m already out of your bed.” The sheet at his hips slipped as he reached up to scratch his chest.

Her tongue darted out to wet her lips, which alleviated his concern, at least a little.

“In the spirit of fair play, I deserve to know why. What has changed in the world since you fell asleep while trying to convince me that honey was better than peanut butter?”

Her hand dropped, just a fraction. Then she regrouped, pointing her finger towards the door with renewed conviction. “Nothing has changed. Not a single thing. Apart from the fact that I now know who you really are.”

Time stood still for the merest fraction of a second, but when it resumed, everything seemed to sit a little off from where it had before.

He nodded, dropped the sheet back onto the bed and ambled over to the metal chair in the corner to gather his clothes. His underwear was nowhere to be seen, and, not about to go searching, he went commando, pulling on his jeans, taking care with the fly.

He’d known their liaison would end. They both had. That had been the underlying beauty of it.

In the first few days it had been diverting, watching things unfold from a safe mental distance. Distance was his usual state of being and Amber had seemed glad of it. The guiltless pleasure, the ease of transaction, the lack of desire on both sides to pry deeper than what the other might like for lunch had led to a beautifully contained affair.

Somehow, in all the hazy sunshine, with the cicadas a constant background hum, the clear edges of their association had begun to blur...until he’d found reasons to come to her earlier, to stay longer. They’d fallen into a rhythm of days lit bright and nights lost to exquisite, immoderate pleasure and murmured nothings in the dark.

As he pushed one arm through his shirt, then the other, he no longer felt distant. The dissatisfaction he felt was real.

But only a fool would have expected the halcyon days to remain that way—like a bug trapped in amber. So to speak. And Hugo was no fool.

“Is that it?” Amber’s words hit his back like bullets. “You don’t have anything to say for yourself?”

He patted his jeans pockets in search of his wallet, phone, keys—then remembered he didn’t carry any. Not here. So he snapped the top button before looking up at her. “What would you like me to say, Amber?”

“I don’t know, that I’m acting crazy? That I’ve been duped—by someone other than you, I mean. That it’s not true.”

She looked so incorruptible, like a force of nature. But something he’d learned in his month in this part of the world—nobody came to Serenity without a good reason. Or a bad one.

He opened his mouth to call her on it, but he stopped himself in time.

He’d never known someone to wear their absoluteness like a badge of honour the way she did. The moment she’d decided to let him into her house she’d decided to let him into her bed. No coquettish equivocation. Only firm decision.

This was the first time he’d seen it waver. Enough for him to take heed. To hold out his hands in conciliation. “I never lied to you, Amber. I am Hugo to my friends, my closest family.”

“To everyone else?”

“I am Prince Alessandro Hugo Giordano, sixth in line to the principality of Vallemont.”

The quiet that followed his statement wasn’t new. The rare times Hugo found himself in a conversation with someone who wasn’t aware of who he was, what he was worth, and who his relatives were, it was clear when the penny dropped.

Though this might have been the first time he was half-dressed when that realisation occurred, he thought ruefully.

A hippy beekeeper on the Central Coast of Australia had not been in the plan, meaning it was taking him a little longer to decide upon the appropriate protocol with which to navigate this moment.

Meanwhile, Amber’s nostrils flared, fury dancing behind her bedroom eyes. He imagined she was finding it hard not to climb over the bed and tackle him. As unmoved by convention as she was, she could do it too.

For a man whose entire life had been ruled by ritual, no wonder she’d been impossible to resist.

“Wait,” he said. “Fifth. I’m fifth in line. My uncle’s recently abdicated all rights and moved to California to produce movies. Not that it matters. I am a prince in name only. I will never rule.”

She blinked and it was enough to snap her from her red haze. “I don’t give a flying hoot if you are set to be Master of the Universe. Don’t even think about turning us out on our ears.”

“Excuse me?”

“These people are special. The community needs this place. The commune is Serenity’s heart. If you mess with that you will kill it dead.”

That was what had her so het up? Not who he was, but the plans he had for this land?

What the hell had she found out? And how? This wasn’t his first rodeo. He’d been discreet. Painstakingly so. Who had talked?

He did up a couple of quick buttons on his shirt before re-rolling the sleeves to his elbows. Then he moved slowly around the bed, hands out, palms up.

“Amber, until this point in time, we have been having a nice time together. I’d go so far as to say very nice. With that in mind, I suggest we sit down, have a cup of coffee and discuss any concerns you might have.”

He could still fix this.

“I don’t want to discuss anything with you. I just want you to tell me, right here, right now, if the rumours are true.”

“Which rumours might they be, exactly?”

“That you have been meeting with the local town council. Discussing plans...development plans that may or may not put the commune in danger.”

“Would that be such a bad thing?”

Emotion flickered behind her eyes. Deep, frantic, fierce. “Yes,” she managed. “It would be a terrible thing.”

“Look at this place, Amber. It’s falling down around your ears.”

“Not every home has to be a castle.”

Touché. “And yet if you have the chance to sleep somewhere that doesn’t whistle, drip, or threaten to fall down the hill every time you step onto the porch, it’s worth considering.”

“My sleeping arrangements are none of your business.”

“They became my business when I began sleeping here too.”

“Lucky for you that is not a problem you’ll have to face again.”

Hugo breathed out hard, while emotion darted and flashed behind her big brown eyes. With the tension sparking in the air between them, it was all he could do to keep from going to her and letting the slow burn of her fill the empty places inside.

“Tell me, right now, if we have made incorrect assumptions. Are you planning on developing the land? Should we be concerned?”

A muscle ticked beneath his eye. And she took it for the admission it was.

Amber slumped onto the corner of the bed, her face falling into her hands. “This can’t be happening.”

“I hope you understand that until anything is concrete I can’t discuss the details.”

She looked up at him, beseeching. “Understand? I don’t understand any of this. Like why, if you are so offended by my home, you kept coming back. Was I reconnaissance? Were you hoping to create an ally in your devious plans?”

“Of course not, Amber.” Hugo’s stomach dropped and he came around the bed, crouching before her. “Amber, you know why I came back. And back. And back. For the same reason you took me in.”

He lifted a hand and closed it around hers. Her soft brown eyes begged him to stop. Heat sat high and pink on her cheeks. Her wild waves of hair caught on a breeze coming through one of the many cracks in the woebegone shack in which she lived.

Then her fingers softened as she curled them into his.

A moment later, she whipped her hand away and gave him a shove that had him rocking onto his backside with a thump that shook the foundations, raining dust over his head as she scrambled over him and into clear space.

As he cleared the dust from his hair, his eyes, Hugo wondered how his life had come to this.

The downward spiral had begun several months earlier when he’d agreed to his uncle’s sovereign command to enter into a marriage of convenience. His former fiancée—and long-time best friend—Sadie, had come to her senses and fled before they’d said I do, bringing about a PR nightmare for the royal family...and freedom for Hugo. The fact that he would likely have gone through with it had been a wake-up call. What had he been thinking? Where was his moral compass? Not that that should be much of a shock—he was his father’s son after all.

Afterwards he’d needed to get away. Clear his head. Recalibrate. He’d never have imagined that would lead him away from a life of luxury to camping out in a small, lumpy bed in a country town in the middle of nowhere, Australia, tangled up with a woman he barely knew.

He’d not hidden his position on purpose, she’d simply never asked. Their affair had been lived in the moment, fulfilling basic needs of hunger and sleep and sex while talking about everything from Game of Thrones to Eastern philosophy...but nothing truly personal. His family had not come up. Nor, for that matter, had hers. He’d been so grateful to avoid talking about his own that he had given no thought as to why she might also be glad of it. Perhaps he was not the only one for whom that question opened Pandora’s box. Either way, after a while, the privacy had felt like a true luxury.

“I need you to leave, Hugo,” said Amber, yanking him back to the present, only this time she added, “Please.”

It was enough for Hugo to push to standing. He looked around the small, dilapidated room, but he’d left nothing behind bar the impression of his head on the pillow. It didn’t seem like enough.

Too late to rectify that now, he turned to walk out.

“Wait,” she called, grabbing him by the arm. Before he even had the chance to feel relief she pressed past him and headed out onto her wonky porch, causing the area around her shack to tremble in response.

Ned nuzzled against his hand. And Hugo lost his fingers in the dog’s soft fur, taking a moment to work out a burr.

“All clear,” Amber called.

“Wouldn’t want your friends to know you’ve been harbouring the enemy.”

She glanced back at him, the morning sun turning her hair to gold, her eyes to fire. When she saw Ned at his side her mouth pursed. “Away,” she called. But Ned didn’t move, whether because of his deafness or his obstinacy. She clicked her fingers and with a harumph the dog jogged to her side.

He joined them on the porch. The old wood creaked and groaned. A handmade wooden wind chime pealed prettily in the morning breeze.

“Is that why you came to Serenity?”

Now, there was a question. One she might have thought to ask at any point during the last few weeks if she’d had a care to know anything at all about the man she’d been sleeping with. “You really want to know what I came to Serenity hoping to find?”

She only nodded mutely.

“Absolution. How about you?”

She snapped her mouth shut tight.

He raised an eyebrow. Now, what do you have to say about that?

Nothing, it seemed. He’d finally managed to render Amber speechless.

With that, Hugo left her there in her bright yellow gumboots, her tank top clinging to her lovely body, her hair a wild, sexy mess. He jogged down the steps and headed down the hill, past the hammock, through the field of lavender to the small dead-end dirt road on which he’d parked his car.

The urge to look back was acute but he kept his cool. Because he had the feeling that it wouldn’t be the last he saw of Amber.

She might be done with him, but he wasn’t done with Serenity. For he did indeed have plans for his mother’s ancestral home—plans which had him excited for the first time since the debacle of the wedding that never was. He might even go so far as to say they excited him more than any other development he had ever actualised.

For Hugo was renowned for taking underused or overlooked tracts of land that others would deem too remote or too challenging, and turning them into stunning holiday playgrounds for diplomats, royalty, the rich and famous, and families alike. His series of Vallemontian resorts—including a palatial masterpiece tucked into the side of Mont Enchante and an award-winning titan overlooking Lake Glace—had been a revelation for the local economy, making him invaluable to his uncle in terms of commerce if not in terms of the line of succession.

But this one, this place...it would be all his.

When he reached the bottom of the lavender field he did look back, Amber’s shack and the rest of the commune relegated to glimpses of purple and red and orange obscured by copses of gum trees.

He’d keep the natural landscape as much as possible, but the caravans, tents and shanties would of course have to go to make way for the bungalows, tennis courts, lagoon-style pool and a peach grove where Amber’s shack now wobbled.

Hugo wasn’t some monstrous land baron. With the council’s help, he would assist them in their relocation. Help them find safer places to live.

And he would create something beautiful, something lasting, something personal to break the cycle of tragedy in his mother’s family.

He would make his very personal mark on the world without trading on his family name, a constant reminder of the top job for which he and his heirs would only ever be back-ups.

Amber would just have to lump it.

* * *

Serenity’s Town Hall was packed to the rafters, with people lining the walls and spilling out through the open doors. It was late enough that young ones would normally be home in bed, but nobody was missing this meeting, so they sat in messy rows on the floor at the front, making occasional mad dashes across the stage, followed by their harassed parents.

There was only one reason for the big turnout: the news had spread. Nothing this momentous had happened in Serenity since Anna had been swept away to an exotic foreign land.

Amber slumped on her bench in the third row, her legs jiggling, her thumbs dancing over her fingertips. There was a good portion of the commune lined up beside her, including Sunflower, who was humming happily despite the cacophony of white noise, and Johnno, who was staring out into space.

Only, Amber wasn’t here in the hope of spotting the exotic stranger. She’d seen enough of him already, from the scar above his right eyebrow to the birthmark on the base of his left big toe—and everything in between. She shifted on her seat and cleared her throat.

She was here in case the Hinterland House plans—whatever they might be—were on the agenda in the hope she could see with her own eyes as someone shouted it down. Then Hugo would leave and things could go back to normal. Or as normal as things ever got in Serenity.

Someone, but not her.

It hadn’t passed her by that her parents would have loved this kind of David and Goliath fight—though nobody would have mistaken them for David in their Gucci suits and Mercedes four-wheel drives. It made them great lawyers, but terrible parents.

How could they be expected to nurse a “difficult” baby when there was so much injustice to stamp down? Enough that Australia’s most infamous human rights lawyers put the care of their only child into the hands of daycare and night nannies from six weeks of age. Their work was far too important for them to abide the distraction.

The smack of a gavel split the silence and Amber flinched, reminded of the number of courtrooms she’d been in as a child. Well, she didn’t have the mental space to think about her parents today. Or ever, if at all possible. She sat taller, stopped her nervous fidgets and waited.

“Squeeze up,” called a voice as someone managed to squash into the end of Amber’s row, the rickety wooden bench wobbling as the crowd sardined. When she looked back to the stage, Councillor Paulina Pinkerton—the leader of the seven-member local council—and her cohorts trailed onto the stage then took their seats.

The gavel struck a second time. Amber flinched again. It was a conditioned response, like Pavlov’s ruddy dog. The twitters settled to a hush, chairs scratched against the wooden floor, a teenaged boy laughed. Somebody coughed. A baby started to fret. And the town of Serenity held its breath.

“Nice to see so many of you here today. I might choose to think it’s because you’ve heard around the traps how darned interesting our meetings are, but I fear there is some issue that has you all aflutter. So let’s get through the necessaries.”

The councilwoman swept through the minutes and old business with alacrity. Then she opened the floor.

“Any new business?”

The hum started up again. Whispers, murmurs, the shuffle of bottoms turning on seats. But nobody said a word.

“Fine. Next meeting will be...next Tuesday at—Ms Hartley? Did you have something to add?”

Amber blinked to hear her name being called from the councillors’ table, only to realise she was on her feet. Did she have something to add? No! Legally emancipated from her indifferent parents at sixteen in a legal battle that had become a national story in a slow news week, she’d spent her life living like dandelion fluff, flitting from place to place, not getting involved.

Until Serenity. Sunflower had taken one look at her empty backpack, her bedraggled state and offered the shack for a night, then another, and somehow she’d found herself stuck in this sweet place, with these kind people, none of whom had a clue what was about to befall them.

This place...it was her sanctuary. And she’d harboured the enemy—however unwittingly. She owed it to them to do whatever it took to protect them.

Damn him. Damn Hugo Prince Whatever-His-Name-Was and his whole crazy family for making her do this.

Amber scooted past the knees blocking her way down the bench. Once she had reached the small rostrum—a literal soapbox attached to a stand fashioned out of a fallen tree, which had been a gift to the town from Johnno, who was a pretty brilliant artist when he was in the right head-space—Amber squared her shoulders, looked each councilman and councilwoman in the eye and prayed her parents would never hear word of what she was about to do.

“Ms Hartley.” Councillor Pinkerton gave Amber an encouraging smile. “The floor is yours.”

“Thank you. I’ll get right to it. I have come to understand that the owners of Hinterland House are back and I believe that they have plans to develop the land. Firstly, I’d like to know if the latter is true, and, if so, I put forward a motion to stop it.”

Once she had started, the words poured out of her like water from a busted pipe. Energy surged through the crowd behind her like a snake. It was electric. And she hated it. Because the thrill of the fight was in her veins after all.

“Much of Serenity belongs to the Van Halprins, Ms Hartley, and, apart from the segments bequeathed to the township, they are within their rights to develop that land.”

“Into what?”

The councillor paused, clearly thinking through how much she was legally allowed to say, and legally allowed to hold back. “The plans as they are will be up for local consideration soon enough. The Prince plans to build a resort.”

Whispers broke out all over the room.

Amber breathed out hard. Sunflower’s rumours were one thing, Hugo’s indefinite admissions another. But having Councillor Pinkerton admit to as much had Amber feeling sick to the stomach. In fact, she had to breathe for a few seconds in order to keep her stomach from turning over completely.

She glanced over her shoulder and saw Johnno grinning serenely back at her; found Sunflower watching her like a proud sister. Her gaze landed on another dozen members of their collective community—all of whom had come to Serenity in search of acceptance and kindness and peace.

Where would people like them, people like her, go if they had to move on?

She turned back to the front, her heart pumping so hard it seemed to be trying to escape her chest. The room was so still now, even the fretting baby had quieted, meaning her voice made it all the way to the rear of the room and out into the halls, hitting every ear as she said, “I ask that Council accept the inclusive community living on Serenity Hill has been in residence long enough to legally remain. I cry adverse possession.”

The murmurs began in earnest. Most asking what the heck adverse possession was.

“For those who do not know the legalese,” said Councillor Pinkerton into her microphone, “Ms Hartley is claiming squatter’s rights.”

At that, the town hall exploded as a hundred conversations began at once. Cheers came from some corners, jeers from others. The fretting baby began to cry in earnest.

The gavel smacked against the wooden table, quieting the crowd somewhat. And this time it rang through Amber like an old bell. Sweet and familiar and pure.

“Thank you, Ms Hartley. Your position has been noted. Does anyone else have anything to say on the matter?”

Amber glanced over her shoulder to find movement at the back of the hall.

A man had stepped into the aisle, a man with overlong hair swept away from his striking face and dark hazel eyes that locked onto Amber. She didn’t realise her lungs had stopped functioning until her chest began to ache.

Hugo. But not the Hugo she knew. Not the man in the worn jeans and button-downs who was happy rolling on the ground with Ned, watching her collect honey, or sitting on her stairs staring towards the horizon chewing on a blade of grass.

This was Hugo the Prince. His stark jaw was clean-shaven and he looked dashing in a slick three-piece suit with such bearing, composure and self-assurance he was barely human. Behind him stood a big, hulking bald man in black, watching over him like a hawk.

She hoped no one noticed how hard she clenched her fists.

“Your Highness, good evening, sir,” said Councillor Pinkerton, the friendly note of her voice making it clear it was not the first time she’d set eyes on the man.

Hugo’s deep voice rang out across the room. “If I may?”

Councillor Pinkerton waved a hurry-up hand. “Up you come, then. State your name for the record. And your purpose.”

While Amber had had to climb over a tangle of legs to get to the lectern, the crowd parted for Hugo like the Red Sea.

He slowed as he neared, his head cocking ever so slightly in a private hello.

Amber hated the way her cheeks warmed at the sight of him, her heart thumping against her ribs as if giving the death throes of remembered desire. Nevertheless, she held her ground, waiting until the last moment to give up her position. Then, with an exaggerated bow from the waist, she swooshed out an arm, giving him the floor as she backed away.