American Royals Read Online Free PDF

that her parents had contributed all that much. Everything Daphne had accomplished with Jefferson, she’d done squarely on her own.
    She slid into the dining chair across from her parents and reached nonchalantly for the pitcher of iced tea, to pour herself a glass. She already knew her mother’s next words.
    “He got back last night.”
    There was no need to clarify which he her mother had meant. Prince Jefferson George Alexander Augustus—the youngest of the three royal Washington siblings, and the only boy.
    “I’m aware.” As if Daphne hadn’t set a dozen internet alerts for the prince’s name, didn’t constantly check social media for every last shred of information about his status. As if she didn’t know the prince better than anyone else did, probably even his own mother.
    “You didn’t go to meet his plane.”
    “Next to all the shrieking fangirls? I think not. I’ll see Jefferson tonight at the Queen’s Ball.” Daphne pointedly refused to call the prince Jeff, the way everyone else did. It sounded so decidedly un royal.
    “It’s been six months,” her father reminded her. “Are you sure you’re ready?”
    “I guess I’ll have to be,” Daphne replied in a clipped tone. Of course she was ready.
    Her mother hastened to intercede. “We’re just trying to help, Daphne. Tonight is an important night. After all we’ve done …”
    A psychologist might assume that Daphne had inherited her ambitions from her parents, but it would be more accurate to say that her parents’ ambitions were magnified and concentrated in her, the way a curved glass lens can focus scattered beams of heat.
    Rebecca Deighton’s social climbing had begun long before Daphne was born. Becky, as she’d called herself then, left her small town in Nebraska at age nineteen, armed with nothing but stunning good looks and a razor-sharp wit. She signed with a top modeling agency in a matter of weeks. Her face was soon plastered on magazines and billboards, lingerie ads and car commercials. America became infatuated with her.
    Becky eventually restyled herself as Rebecca and set her sights on a title. After she met Daphne’s father, it was only a matter of time before she became Lady Margrave.
    And if things went according to plan and Daphne married Jefferson, her parents would surely be elevated above a lowly baronetcy. They might become an earl and countess … perhaps even a marques and marchioness.
    “We only want what’s best for you,” Rebecca added, her eyes on her daughter’s.
    You mean what’s best for you, Daphne was tempted to reply. “I’ll be fine,” she said instead.
    Daphne had known for years that she would marry the prince. That was the only word for it: known. Not hoped to marry, or dreamed of marrying, or even felt destined to marry. Those words involved an element of chance, of uncertainty.
    When she was little, Daphne had pitied the girls at her school who were obsessed with the royal family: the ones who copied everything the princesses wore, or had Prince Jefferson’s picture plastered on their lockers. What were they doing when they swooned over his poster, pretending that the prince was their boyfriend? Pretending was a game for babies and fools, and Daphne was neither.
    Then, in eighth grade, Daphne’s class took a field trip to the palace, and she realized why her parents clung so obsessively to their aristocratic status. Because that status was their window into this.
    As she gazed at the palace in all its inaccessible grandeur—as she heard her classmates whispering how wonderful it must be, to be a princess—Daphne came to the startling realization that they were right. It was wonderful to be a princess. Which was why Daphne, unlike the rest of them, would actually become one.
    After that field trip, Daphne had resolved that she would date the prince, and like all goals she set for herself, she achieved it. She applied to St. Ursula’s, the private all-girls school that the daughters of