A Royal Runaway Romance

Princess Amelia is first in line to the throne of Bundbury, that ascension sooner than later in her widowed mother, Queen Ava, already having made known her intention imminently to abdicate. While Amelia accepts her responsibility, she has not much liked her lack of freedom over the course of her life in wanting to experience some of it without the strict royal protocols. That experience extends to romance in wanting whatever eventual matrimonial match to be borne not out of royal arrangement but rather out of love, which she feels can only happen in that freedom of experiencing life. In that vein, she wants at least to discover if a connection she made with Chicago-based artist Wes Riverton, who was commissioned to paint her portrait, could be love, the weeks of portrait sittings which only gave each the idea that they are attracted to each other and want to continue to see each other, something that the protective Queen, if she knew, would probably not allow. Under the guise of celebrating with her maternal Uncle Andreas on his birthday in his home base of Beverly Hills, he the Bundbury emissary to the US, Amelia plans to escape the watchful eyes not only of her mother and her uncle while in Los Angeles, but also Grady Beck, the bodyguard her uncle assigns to her, to travel to Chicago to reunite with Wes. While she knows that her secretary Camille is on her side, Amelia is surprised to learn that her uncle is a romantic at heart and allows her to go, unknown to the Queen, with an initially reluctant Grady assigned as her bodyguard/escort/driver. The road trip may provide the Princess exactly what she wants, that freedom, however, showing her a different part of life than she was expecting with Grady as her guide. —Huggo