The Secret Princess

Amy found her voice. “If this is a joke, it isn’t funny.”

He moved closer to her and put his hands on her shoulders, looking into her eyes. “I assure you, it isn’t a joke. Now, why don’t you sit down and let me tell you what brought me to you?” He guided her to her chair and she sat like an obedient child. “I only ask that you hear me out with an open mind.”

She glanced behind him. “Perhaps it would be wise of me to listen with an open door as well.”

He smiled. “You’re quite safe, I assure you.”

She gestured toward him. “Okay, I’m listening.”

He took a breath. “You are the heir to the throne of Lufthania.”

A moment passed. “Doesn’t Lufthania already have someone on the throne?”

He gave a short nod. “A crown prince who wants to return the throne to the rightful heir after his parents stole it nearly three decades ago.”

“Sort of like returning a lost wallet, huh?”

“This is no joke.”

She could see he meant it. “Okay. So where are the parents who stole the throne? Aren’t they going to be miffed that he’s giving it back?”

His face remained impassive. “They’re both dead. The princess died ten years ago of cancer. Her husband, who was much older than she, passed away two years ago of natural causes.”

“Oh.” Amy felt she shouldn’t have been flip. “Sorry, I—well, why don’t you tell me how this led you to me?”

“As I’ve indicated, twenty-five years ago, there was a political revolution, a coup d’état, in Lufthania. A very distant cousin thought the throne was legitimately his, since it had been taken away from his family several hundred years back owing to the fact that the only heir was not blood, but a foundling.”

“Adopted?”

He nodded. “Exactly. Although that is not a term they used in the sixteenth century.”

Amy frowned. “So this descendant of an adopted heir decided to take back what he thought would have been his right, had his ancestor been accepted three hundred years earlier?”

“Yes.”

“It sounds like Shakespeare.”

He smiled. “Shakespeare could have given it a much tidier ending.”

“What was the ending?”

“Prince Josef was removed from the throne and killed by overenthusiastic soldiers for the opposition.”

“What about his wife?”

He shook his head. “She had died years before in a riding accident. But his daughter, Princess Lily, escaped the country with her husband and their young daughter. Very few people knew where they’d gone, and not one person knew all of their movements, because it could have compromised their safety. But I have traced their path to the United States.”

She was skeptical. “How? It seems to me they wouldn’t have wanted to be traceable.”

“They didn’t. But it’s been so long now and the political climate of Lufthania has changed so much—it is now a democracy—that people are finally willing to talk about what they know.”

“People who knew them are still alive?”

He nodded, and she noticed a haunted look in his eye. “Lily and her family stayed with friends in Washington, D.C., for a while, before shedding their identities entirely and leaving the city. Sort of like your witness protection program, you understand?”

Amy nodded.

“They stayed in the city for some months before picking their destination and leaving. Their friends never expected to hear from them again, so when they didn’t, they were not alarmed.”

“They never heard about an accident involving people who couldn’t be identified but who fit the descriptions?” She very nearly said our descriptions but caught herself.

“No. When the accident occurred, it didn’t make national headlines because it was assumed all identifying papers had merely been lost in the explosion of the car. The authorities checked national databases for missing people for more than a year afterward, but nothing ever came of it.” His voice softened. “But, then, you already know that part of the story.”

Amy swallowed a very large lump in her throat, but it didn’t go away. She felt her lower lip tremble, and pressed her lips together to stop it. She didn’t want to cry. She’d spent a long time not crying about those missing first years and the parents she’d lost. Somehow it had felt disloyal to Pamela and Lyle Scott to even think about her biological parents, and the fact that Pamela and Lyle never mentioned them either seemed to corroborate that.

So for more than two decades Amy had dismissed those thoughts from her mind over and over again until, finally, she rarely had them anymore.

And now this man—this stranger—came in and churned all those emotions up again.

Seeing her distress, Franz pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to her. “I’m so sorry to touch on such a tender subject, but you need to know that you belong in Lufthania.”

Amy dabbed her eyes with his handkerchief and tried to smile. “Look, you must have the wrong person. I’m no princess.”

“As I understand it, you have no memory whatsoever of your life before the accident.”

“Who told you that?”

“I’ve done a lot of research in trying to find you.”

“I’m not sure I like that.”

He gave a half shrug. “It was necessary. Now, you can’t very well say that you’re not the princess if you don’t remember who you are.”

“It just defies logic,” she argued. “I have an ordinary life. An ordinary business, with ordinary bills that need to be paid.”

He smiled. “That doesn’t preclude your heritage.”

She sighed. “Look, what would royalty have been doing driving through Dentytown in an old Chevy, for Pete’s sake?”

“They didn’t want to be found.”

“Well, surely they could have traced my mother’s DNA during—” she paused and took a short breath “—during the autopsy.”

He shook his head. “Not in those days. It would, of course, be possible now. In fact, that’s exactly what I have in mind.”

She stepped back involuntarily, as if he might pull a syringe out of his pocket. “What exactly do you have in mind?”

“For you to go back to Lufthania with me and have your blood tested with DNA samples from your grandparents. The laboratory can have the results back four to seven days after the test.”