The Lily and the Cross by Melissa de la Cruz EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Author: Melissa de la Cruz
- Language: English
- Genre: Sword & Sorcery Fantasy
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
Wedding Night
Princess Marie-Victoria’s wedding day was over.
The hundreds of guests—thousands really—had been dismissed,
each and every one, depending on their rank and lineage, bowing,
curtseying or (if they were family or close friends, and the sorceress
Aelywn was both) double-cheek kissing the future queen and king of the
Franco-British Empire before wishing them a long, prosperous, and above
all peaceful reign. Marie was pretty sure the seventy-two-year-old crown
prince of Denmark had even tried to cop a feel.
It had taken four maids to get the wedding dress off. Their manner
had been deferential but ruthlessly efficient. They manipulated her body as
though the princess were a doll, loosening laces and unhooking clasps and
unbuttoning buttons until the great white garment had flown over her head
like a cloud ascending with the rising heat.
From white gown to nightgown: in place of a river of watered silk
and intricately beaded lace that an entire convent of nuns in Albania had
gone blind making, Marie was now wearing a simple satin sheath in a
creamy ivory color that fell delicately over her skin, leaving her shoulders
and arms exposed even as it draped intimately over her slight curves. A
sprinkling of fairy dust caused it to shimmer and sparkle even more. It was
like wearing a garment made of running water, Marie thought when she
examined herself in a full-length mirror.
Here goes nothing.
It was time for her wedding night.
Marie-Victoria Grace Eleanor Aquitane, Princess Dauphine of the
Franco-British empire, hesitated in front of the double doors that led from
her dressing room to her new bedroom. The room she would share with her
new husband, Wolfgang Friedrich Joachim von Hohenzollern, the
Kronprinz of the Prussian Empire. Their marriage had not only ended the
most devastating war in five hundred years, it had also created an empire
that covered half of Europe and a good portion of the rest of the globe, an
area so vast that it made the Roman empire look like the Duchy of
Luxembourg in comparison. Marie went over all this in her head to remind
herself all that was as stake—not just her future, or Wolf’s, but the fate of
untold millions, both her subjects, and the subjects of other nations that
might be tempted to go to war with the United Empire if its new rulers
showed even a hint of vulnerability.
The soon to be King and Queen of the United Empire.
Marie told herself to think regal, to think like a queen. But she
didn’t feel like a queen. She felt like what she was: a seventeen-year-yearold bride suddenly married to a boy she had known her whole life.
For More Read Download This Book
EPUB