His Royal Secret [His Royal Secret: 1] by Lilah Pace

Author:Lilah Pace [Pace, Lilah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Romance, Contemporary
ISBN: 9781101989128
Google: rKaoCwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B01CFBV2O4
Barnesnoble: B01CFBV2O4
Goodreads: 29485840
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2016-06-30T14:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Cover Stories

Ben wound up realizing he needed to poke around in the royal archives for real. No history of corporations could be written without paying attention to early mercantilism and the royal charters that had created the East India Company, the South Sea Company, and others. Amused that their cover story had turned genuine, James told Ben to put a request through normal channels; his assistant, a Ms. Tseng, would make sure it got approved in no time. Which it did.

So he found himself in an entirely different area of St. James’s Palace on a rainy Thursday afternoon, surrounded by the delicious dichotomy of a top-notch, sophisticated, searchable database and thousands of leather-bound, pleasantly musty old books. It was the perfect place for research, but Ben’s mind kept wandering, traveling through the corridors seeking the door that would bring him to James . . .

Who is in Wales until the weekend, Ben told himself sternly. Put your libido aside and get back to work.

His imagination had other ideas, however. The solid days of writing he’d done over the past week seemed to have tapped his store of concentration. He found himself dawdling at one of the computer terminals, following links further and further from his original task. What began as research into the South Sea Company led to the king who had given that company its royal charter, namely George I, founder of the House of Hanover that still ruled the United Kingdom. How odd, to look at a portrait in oils of a bewigged figure in stockings and ribbons and realize this was one of James’s ancestors.

Ben hadn’t bothered going into the history of James’s house for that long-ago assignment in Kenya, but now he became intrigued. At first it was mostly a matter of looking at picture after picture of long-ago kings and queens, wondering when he would start to recognize some of James’s features in their faces. Yet no writer could ignore words for long. Slowly Ben became absorbed in the narrative of James’s family history.

It turned out the survival of the House of Hanover had been very much at risk in the early nineteenth century, when King George III had only one legitimate grandchild, Princess Charlotte. The fragility of the royal line had become even more apparent when the princess very nearly died giving birth to her one and only son. But thanks to the use of forceps—then a newfangled medical device distrusted by many—both she and her son survived to become Queen Charlotte and King George V, respectively. Ben was amused to realize that, technically, the House of Hanover should have been considered over and done with right then; such things were determined through the male line, and every ruler from George V on ought to have belonged to another house, one determined by Charlotte’s husband, a German prince. But he had died in his son’s infancy, and when the time came for Charlotte to ascend to the throne, the English government wordlessly but firmly kept referring to the House of Hanover.

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