Her Royal Highness Read online

  ALSO BY RACHEL HAWKINS

  Prince Charming

  (previously Royals)

  Rebel Belle

  Miss Mayhem

  Lady Renegades

  G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

  an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, New York

  Copyright © 2019 by Rachel Hawkins.

  Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.

  G. P. Putnam’s Sons is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Visit us online at penguinrandomhouse.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Ebook ISBN: 9781524738273

  Names: Hawkins, Rachel, 1979– author.

  Title: Her royal highness / Rachel Hawkins.

  Description: New York, NY: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, [2019] | Companion to: Prince Charming, previously titled Royals.

  Summary: An American girl goes to an exclusive Scottish boarding school where she becomes the roommate, best friend, and girlfriend of a royal princess.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018035750 | ISBN 9781524738266 (hardback)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Boarding schools—Fiction. | Schools—Fiction. | Foreign study—Fiction. | Friendship—Fiction. | Love—Fiction. | Princesses—Fiction. | Lesbians—Fiction. | Scotland—Fiction.

  Classification: PZ7.H313525 He 2019 | DDC [Fic]—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018035750

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  For Jules

  CONTENTS

  Also by Rachel Hawkins

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  When it comes to boarding schools in Scotland, none can beat #4 on our list, Gregorstoun. The forbidding fortress up in the Highlands of Scotland has been the chosen spot for matriculating Scottish royalty and nobility since the early 1900s, but it’s never had the same gloss as some of the other schools on our lists, possibly because of its remote location. It could also be the school’s reputation for strictness and austerity keeping some notable names away. In any case, the school sits on 200 acres and was once the showplace estate of the McGregor family, hence the name. Students at Gregorstoun may have to face early wake-up calls, bracing exercise in the frigid Highland winters, and a particularly grueling Outward Bound–esque competition known as “the Challenge,” but they can do so among some of the most stunning scenery in Scotland and among the country’s most famous residents—Prince Alexander graduated from the school in 2009, and his brother Sebastian currently attends. Next year, the school becomes co-ed, welcoming its first female class in the school’s hundred-year history.

  (“Best Boarding Schools for Landing a Royal,” from Prattle)

  CHAPTER 1

  “There’s a unicorn on this.”

  Grinning, I take the letter out of Jude’s hands, leaning back on the nest of sleeping bags and pillows we’ve built inside the little orange tent I’ve set up in the backyard. The sun set about an hour ago, and the only light left comes from my Coleman lantern, which is affixed to a little hook on the ceiling of the tent. We haven’t done a backyard campout since we were in fifth grade, but it’s summer, and we were bored, and setting up the tent seemed like a fun thing to do.

  “Now you see why I wanted to go to school there,” I say, stuffing the letter back into its envelope. “Anyplace that uses unicorns in its official correspondence is a good place for me.”

  “Obviously,” Jude echoes, leaning back, too. Her long blond hair is dyed turquoise at the ends, and as she gets situated on the sleeping bags, those bright blue strands brush against my arm, setting my pulse racing and a whole fleet of butterflies loose in my stomach.

  Propping herself up on her elbow, Jude looks at me, the freckles over the bridge of her nose bold in the lantern light. “And you got in!”

  Nodding, I look back at the envelope from Gregorstoun, a fancy boarding school in the Highlands of Scotland, fighting the urge to pull the letter out and reread the heading.

  Dear Miss Amelia Quint:

  We are pleased to offer you a place at Gregorstoun . . .

  The letter has been sitting in my bag for over a month now. I haven’t even told my dad about it. And I hadn’t planned on talking to Jude about it, either, but she saw it while she was looking for lip balm.

  “So why aren’t you going?” she asks, and I shrug, taking the letter and tucking it back in the front pocket of the beat-up canvas satchel I bring everywhere with me. A light breeze rattles the nylon of the tent, carrying the smell of summer night in Texas—freshly cut grass and the smoky scent of someone grilling.

  “Millie, you’ve been talking about this school for, like, a year now,” Jude presses, reaching out to push me with her free hand. “And now you got in, and you’re not gonna go?”

  Another shrug as I sigh and fiddle with my bangs. “It’s super expensive,” I tell her, which is true. “So I’d need to apply for financial aid. And it’s pretty far away.” Also true, not that that stopped me from dreaming about it all last year. Gregorstoun is up in the Highlands of Scotland, surrounded by mountains and lakes—sorry, lochs—plus all the cool rock samples a geology freak like me could want.

  But last year, things were different with Jude.

  We’ve been friends since we were nine, and I’ve had a crush on her since I was thirteen and realized that I felt the same way about Jude as I did about Lance McHenry from Boys of Summer (look, everyone liked Boys of Summer back then, it wasn’t as embarrassing as it sounds now).

  And my crush on Jude had just as much a chance of being requited as the flame I’d carried for a
floppy-haired boy bander.

  Or so I’d thought.

  Now she scoots closer to me on top of the sleeping bag printed with daisies she’s had since that first fifth-grade campout. Unlike me, Jude isn’t much for camping.

  She trails her fingers over my arm, nails lightly scratching my skin, and my breath comes out all shaky as I break out in goose bumps. Each fingernail is painted a different shade of purple, her thumb a pale lavender, her pinky a violet so deep it almost looks black. There in the tent with the summer night all around us, it feels like we could be the only two people in the world right now.

  “You’re not turning it down because of me, are you?” she asks, and my heart does a neat little flip in my chest. This . . . thing between me and Jude has been going on since the beginning of the summer, but I’m not used to it yet. Being with her still makes me feel like I’m on some amusement park ride, heart pounding, stomach dropping.

  “What?” I ask, trying to huff out a laugh, but I’m the worst liar in the world, and the word basically comes out a squawk.

  Jude is really close to me now, so close our knees bump on top of our sleeping bags.

  “It’s okay if you want to admit you can’t stand being away from me,” she teases, and I go to shove at her, but she catches my wrist, tugging me closer so she can kiss me.

  Her lips taste like my cherry-vanilla lip balm, and in that moment, there’s only Jude and her mouth and the way she tucks my hair behind my ears as she kisses me.

  When we pull apart, she’s smiling at me, cheeks pink, our legs tangled on the sleeping bags. “I’m not going because it’s too expensive,” I tell her. “Like I said.”

  “They’d give you a scholarship,” she counters. “You’re, like, the smartest person in our school.”

  “That’s not saying much.”

  My high school isn’t terrible or anything, but it’s massive, and sometimes my classes feel more like an exercise in crowd control than anything else. That’s part of why I started looking at fancy schools far away.

  That and my dad taking me to see the movie Brave when I was ten. And the fact that geology, my favorite subject, was practically invented in Scotland. And the way I felt when I’d looked up pictures of all those massive, rocky hills surrounded by green, like something out of a fairy tale. There was this one place called Applecross that I—

  Okay, no. No more thinking about that. I’ve made up my mind to stay because even though I got in, running off to Scotland is insane, right? And not a thing people do. I’ll be perfectly happy finishing out my senior year at Pecos with Jude and our other besties, Darcy and Lee. There are tons of good colleges here in Texas that I can get into, and some fancy Scottish boarding school won’t count for more than my killer ACT scores and awesome GPA. It’ll be fine.

  But Jude is still watching me with a funny look on her face, three little wrinkles popping up over her nose.

  “I’m serious, though, Millie,” she says. “If this is about me or us . . .”

  She sighs, her breath warm on my face and smelling like that lemon-mint gum she always has on her.

  “It’s not,” I tell her again, pulling a thread from my plaid sleeping bag. “And we’re not really an us, anyway. I mean, we are in that I’m a person, and you’re a person, and together, that makes two people, which means the common grammatical definition of ‘us’ technically fits, but—”

  Her hand clamps over my mouth, and she laughs. “No nervous-talky Millie,” she says, and I nod behind her palm with a muffled, “Sorry.” There’s this fun thing that happens sometimes when I get nervous where words just come out, but not in the right order, exactly, and half the time, not the words I want to be saying, but there they are anyway, a flood of words between me and Jude, yet again.

  But when she drops her hand, those wrinkles are back. “We are an us,” she says, reaching out to twine her fingers with mine. “Maybe nobody knows we are, but to me, I feel . . . us-ish.”

  Cheeks hot, I squeeze her fingers back. “The us-iest.”

  Jude reaches over to fiddle with the ends of my hair again. “The most us I’ve ever felt with anyone,” she says.

  “More us-y than with Mason?”

  The words are out before I even have time to think about them, really, and I immediately wish I could call them back. Mason is Jude’s ex, the boy she’d dated since freshman year, and they broke up last spring. Right before it all started with me and Jude. Since that first kiss, sitting on the floor of her room last month, we haven’t mentioned Mason. It’s been easy, since he’s away at soccer camp or something for part of the summer, but sometimes I wonder how it’ll be when he comes back. I’ve always liked Mason even if I am head over heels for his girlfriend, but there’s no doubt things have been easier with me and Jude without him here.

  Jude flops onto her back, studying the ceiling of the tent. “Weren’t we kind of an us even when Mason was around?”

  She rolls back onto her side to face me, and I feel my cheeks go hot again, because yeah, we were. There wasn’t any of this kissing or other fun stuff, but she was definitely my favorite person to be around.

  “Maybe,” I acknowledge, and she grins before draping an arm over my waist.

  Jude kisses me again, and thoughts about Mason, Scotland, and fancy schools with unicorn crests vanish in the warm summer air.

  CHAPTER 2

  “Mason is back.”

  I’m sitting in Darcy’s game room at her house, slouched on the floor with my back against the couch, an Xbox controller in my hands.

  On the giant TV in front of me, I watch a dragon grab my avatar, Lady Lucinda, by the head, shaking her so hard that the body goes flying offscreen.

  Great.

  Sighing, I rest the controller on my stomach as the screen goes white. “That was my last life,” I mutter, reaching for the can of Sprite Zero beside me. Darcy nudges my foot with hers, her toenails a bright purple.

  “Millie, did you hear me?”

  On my other side, Lee sits up, taking the controller from me and restarting the game. “She heard you, Darce. She doesn’t care.”

  “I do care,” I insist, “because I like Mason, and it’s nice that he’s back. I just don’t think it has anything to do with me.”

  Crossing her legs, Darcy sits up straighter as she looks at me over the tops of her glasses. They’re new, the acid-green frames bright around her dark eyes. “Millie,” she says, and I roll my shoulders, uncomfortable.

  “They’re done,” I remind her as I sit up, too. “Over. And me and Jude are—”

  “A summer fling that will break your heart,” Darcy fills in, and I scowl at her.

  This is the drum Darcy has been beating ever since I told her about me and Jude—that Jude is flighty, that she changes her mind more often than she changes hair colors, that I know what Jude is like.

  I know she’s saying it because she cares about me, but it’s still not exactly my favorite stuff to hear, and besides, she’s wrong. And maybe a little jealous. Jude and Darce were really close a few years back, but as Jude and I got tighter, Darcy sort of ended up on the outside a bit. Our Foursome Friend Group is constantly shifting.

  Me and Jude now being a thing has obviously shifted things even more.

  “Jude is kind of flaky,” Lee acknowledges as his fingers fly on the controller’s buttons. He glances at me, auburn hair flopping over one eye. “Sorry, Mill, but you know it’s true. It’s one of the things we love about her, but I can see it making her a bad girlfriend.”

  “You’re not exactly an expert in girlfriends, Lee,” I say, and he gasps with faux outrage, his eyes still glued to the game.

  “How dare you, Amelia Quint?” Then his face breaks out in a grin. “Also, yes, fair. But I am an expert in you, and I don’t want to see you get your heart smashed. Darcy is being kind of bitchy, but Darcy is not necessarily wrong, which
is usually the case with Darcy, let’s all be very real here.”

  “Why do I even invite you over?” Darcy mutters, picking up her can of soda and taking a long sip.

  “Because you love me, and you want to support my video game habit,” Lee says, then gives a triumphant whoop as the dragon on the screen flops down dead.

  Tossing the controller to the thick carpet, he leans over me to grab the bag of cheese puffs that have ended up stuffed under the sofa. “This setup is so wasted on you, Darce,” he tells her. “You don’t even play.”

  Darcy shrugs, and I take a cheese puff from Lee, careful not to get any crumbs on the carpet. Not that Darce or her parents would care. But their house is so nice that I feel like I should care.

  Darcy’s dad works for some oil company in Houston, which means her family has a lot more money than mine or Lee’s does. It’s never been an issue, but I’m still really aware of the pretty flooring, the giant TVs, how Darce has her own bathroom attached to her bedroom.

  Now she looks at me, eyes narrowed a little. “Jude said you got into that fancy school in Scotland.”

  “What?” Bright orange flecks fly from Lee’s lips as he brings a hand up to his mouth, and I look back and forth between the two of them, my stomach dropping.

  “She told you that?” I ask, and Darcy grabs the bag of cheese puffs from Lee.

  “Yes,” Darce tells me. “Are you not going because of her?”

  I pick up my soda again, more for something to do than because I’m actually thirsty. “No,” I finally say. “I’m not going because it’s expensive.”

  Lee snorts at that. “Right, because a scholarship is totally beyond you, O Lady Smartypants.”

  “Exactly,” Darcy agrees, and I just shrug. It bugs me that Jude said anything to Darcy, especially since I hadn’t told anyone else myself.

  But I just say, “It’s probably too late to get financial aid. And it was a stupid idea to apply in the first place. I just . . . wanted to see if I could get in. I didn’t really want to go.”