The Royals Upstairs Read Online Karina Halle

Categories Genre: Alpha Male, Contemporary Tags Authors: Karina Halle Advertisement

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But I’m a man with my own pride, and I’m not about to interfere with the pride of someone else. So I wait, leaning against the SUV, watching as Ottar very carefully makes it to the back of the car and then opens the trunk, throwing my bag in. There are a few more twists and turns and near splits, and then he manages to pull himself back to me.

“Shall we?” he asks, opening my door with a triumphant smile.

And that’s when he totally loses ground, holding on to the handle for dear life while the rest of him slides under the door, heels first.

Bloody hell.

I reach over and grab him by the elbows, hauling him up. He’s not light as a feather, I’ll say that much.

“Tussen takk,” he says sheepishly, his cheeks going pink. “That’s Norwegian for thank you. You know any Norwegian?”

I step inside the car. “Not a word.” I’d had a brief affair with a wild Norwegian woman but only got away with knowing swear words.

“Ah,” he says. He shuts the door, almost falling again, then finally pulls himself into the driver’s seat, letting out a massive exhale of relief. “I’m sure you’ll learn fast. At any rate, everyone speaks English fluently, so it won’t be a problem if you don’t. Except for Einar, Magnus’s bodyguard. But you probably wouldn’t get more than a few words out of him anyway.”

He starts the car and thankfully the tires have more tread than Ottar’s shoes.

“Sorry I was late,” he says to me, eyeing me in the rearview mirror. “I run on Magnus’s schedule, and that can be off at times. You’ll find out soon enough.” He pauses. “I really didn’t expect them to hire someone this fast.”

I give a light shrug, looking out the window at the passing scenery. Farm fields covered in white and orderly forests of pine fly past in the dying light. It’s pretty here, I’ll give it that much, even if I feel a bit discombobulated about the whole thing.

See, Ottar’s not alone in thinking everything had gone so fast. It’s literally been a couple of weeks since my former employer, Prince Eddie of England, told me that he and his wife, Duchess Monica, were taking their daughter, Madeline, back to Canada.

Now, I’d gone with them before. Four years ago they’d moved to a tiny island off the very wet west coast of British Columbia to prepare for Duchess Monica’s pregnancy and escape the rubbish media of the UK, and I went along with them as one of their personal protection officers. We did our time there on the island, enjoying the much-needed peace and quiet, then came back to London for baby Madeline’s birth.

Then Eddie and Monica decided that they didn’t want to raise Madeline in the same environment that Eddie was brought up in, so they decided to move back to that tiny island and asked if I would go with them.

I ended up saying no. As much as I loved working for them, the island felt like early retirement. Suffice to say, I opted to stay behind, which then meant I was out of a job. And being a PPO or bodyguard, it’s not like you can start perusing the job listings on Craigslist and hand out applications.

Thankfully Eddie helped out. He nosed around and found out that Prince Magnus and Princess Ella of Norway were looking for a bodyguard, specifically for Ella and their children. Supposedly, one of the kids, despite having his mother and a nanny, is quite the troublemaker and is hard to keep an eye on. One thing led to another, and Eddie arranged for Prince Magnus to hire me without even meeting me. I guess Eddie’s word goes a long way in the royal world—enough so that I only found out I had the job just the other day.

“I’m grateful that Prince Eddie was able to put in such a good word with Prince Magnus, especially on such short notice,” I tell Ottar. “But from speaking to Prince Magnus on the phone, I got the impression that the role won’t be too dissimilar from what I was doing before.”

“Yes,” Ottar says, rather uneasily. He gives me a crooked smile. “I can see how you would think that.”

I frown. “What do you mean?”

“Oh, nothing,” he says, adjusting his grip on the steering wheel. “Let’s just say that I’m sure when you worked for the duke and duchess that they ran a pretty tight ship.”

“I suppose,” I say. “Not as uptight as the rest of his family, though.”

“Right. Well, Magnus…does not run a tight ship. Ella tries to, but it’s hard when she’s trying to balance her children and running her environmental group…the palace can be chaos on even the calmest days.”

“I see,” I tell him. This doesn’t really surprise me. Prince Magnus is famous for being the wild prince, especially before he settled down and married Ella. Some media outlets even report that their marriage was an arranged one to try to counteract a slew of bad publicity the prince had gotten. Extreme sports, sex tapes, being a drunken idiot—it was hard to go a week without reading something about Magnus in the papers.

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