A Princess in Theory Read online

  Dedication

  For all the people who were told

  they couldn’t be princesses:

  you always were one.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  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

  An Excerpt from A Duke by Default Chapter 1

  About the Author

  Also by Alyssa Cole

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter 1

  Sender: [email protected]

  Subject: Salutations from the Royal Family of Thesolo

  Dear Ms. Smith,

  I hope that my letter finds you well. I, Likotsi Adelele, assistant to His Royal Highness, have sought you out high and low over the last few months, at the behest of the most exalted—and most curious—Prince Thabiso. He has tasked me with finding his betrothed, and I believe I have succeeded: it is you. Because our prince is magnanimous, kind, and understanding, he is willing to cleanse the festering wounds of the past and allow them to heal. In order to aid in this process, please send the following verifications of identity: a scan of your license, passport, or other form of ID; up to date medical records—

  Sender: [email protected]

  Subject: RE: RE: RE: RE: Salutations from the Royal Family of Thesolo

  Hello again, dear Ms. Smith,

  They say persistence is a virtue, and I consider myself most virtuous, as I have now written several times without acknowledgment, and yet I press on. It is the will of the prince that he meets the woman chosen by the goddess Ingoka to be his bride, and I am charged with bringing his will into fruition. It occurs to me that perhaps you fear repercussions for the headstrong and thoughtless actions of your mother and father, but fear not. All will be well . . . if you are indeed the woman chosen to be the future queen of Thesolo. I am quite sure you are the woman he is searching for. But, I must, MUST, have some proof of identity before we proceed any further. I will not expose the prince to perfidy. So, I beseech you to (a) respond and (b) provide me with—

  Sender: [email protected]

  Subject: FWD: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: Salutations from the Royal Family of Thesolo

  To the most kind, most gentle Ms. Smith,

  Perhaps you have not received the electronic missives I’ve sent over the past few weeks (see below)? I cannot believe that you’ve read my heartfelt pleas and ignored them. If you are worried that the people of Thesolo have forsaken you for your malfeasance, fear not. Despite the rupture in trust caused by your parents’ selfishness, the contract of marriage, made before goddess and government of our people, still stands. As I stated in my previous emails (see below, if you did not scroll down at my first urging), although I believe you to be the rightful recipient of this email, before I can introduce you to Prince Thabiso after this long absence, I will need more information. Please provide a scan of your license, passport, or other form of ID; your current address; social security number—

  I really don’t have time for this,” Naledi muttered, the soothing hum of various expensive laboratory equipment masking the aggravation in her tone.

  She deleted the email with a jab at the trash can icon on the screen of her phone.

  The first couple of emails had been amusing, a welcome distraction from the rest of her inbox, which was primarily comprised of calendar reminders about study sessions, student loan payment nudges, data sets to be solved, and other evidence of grad school life. The emails had become less entertaining as the subject lines grew more urgent and it became clear that this wasn’t a random occurrence: somewhere in the world, a scammer had zeroed in on her. The knowledge was disturbing to someone as private as Ledi and triggered a sense of helplessness all too familiar for a woman who’d been bounced through strangers’ homes for most of her childhood.

  Ignoring the emails hadn’t worked: the spammer had redoubled their efforts, undeterred by Ledi’s lack of response. She’d considered blocking messages from the sender, but it seemed scarier not knowing if she was receiving disturbing emails.

  Ledi pushed her safety goggles up onto her thick curls, which she’d smoothed back and pulled into a puff ponytail, and mentally reviewed her to-do list. She’d already created the media needed for experiments, prepared slides, and input data that morning, so she’d actually be able to get some studying in.

  She hefted her copy of Modern Epidemiology from out of the backpack at her feet and slid it onto her desk. Balancing her lab assistant job, waitressing, and grad school hadn’t seemed overly ambitious at first—Ledi had been juggling jobs and school since she was thirteen. But as tension gripped the back of her neck at the thought of finals and experiments and what the hell the future held, she wondered if maybe she hadn’t bitten off more than she could chew.

  She’d been lucky in that she’d transitioned from foster care to adulthood better than some people she’d been in the system with, but luck wasn’t a statistically significant factor in planning her future. Making money, on the other hand, was a proven course of action, and having multiple sources of income was a safety net she couldn’t live without. She didn’t have family to turn to when times got rough, and one mistake at work or school could have a domino effect on the life plans she had so carefully been setting up.

  “Hey, Naledi.”

  Brian, the postdoc, was suddenly hovering over her shoulder.

  Brian was super fun to work with: on her first day, she’d introduced herself, and he’d asked her to take out the trash more frequently—he’d thought she was the cleaning woman. He often stopped to explain basic concepts to Ledi—and Ledi alone—during lab meetings, while asking Kevin, the newbie, for his advice on how things should be run.

  So fun, that Brian.

  She turned to face him. His dark hair was sticking out every which way and his face was unshaven. He looked stressed-out, which wasn’t unusual but generally didn’t bode well for her.

  “Hi Brian,” she said, trying to find the pleasant but deferential tone that seemed to edify him. She hated that she couldn’t just talk to him like a normal human, but apparently there was something about her that had led him to tell Dr. Taketami—the lab’s Primary Investigator, and thus Ledi’s boss—that she was “giving him attitude.”

  Ledi couldn’t afford to be labeled as a problem.

  She’d wanted to be a scientist since her fourth-grade teacher had handed her a battered copy of National Geographic. Ledi had been fascinated with the cover: a close-up shot of a woman with dark skin, just like hers, peering into a microscope. That scientist had been trying to cure a mysterious disease, and Ledi had gleaned from the image not only that she wanted to do the same thing but also that she could.

  She hadn’t foreseen all the other variables that went into life as a woman in STEM: politicians who treated her profession with contempt
and threatened her future—and the world’s. Fellow scientists like Brian, who thought that women in the lab were their personal assistants instead of their equals.

  “How are you this morning?” she asked him in the tone she’d heard secretaries on old syndicated TV shows use to placate their sexist bosses. Brian smiled; he’d watched the same reruns it seemed.

  “Actually, I’m a little behind in my work after getting back from the Keystone conference.” That was when Naledi noticed the sheaf of papers in his hands.

  This motherfucker, she thought.

  “Oh what a shame,” she said.

  “There’s this grant application that has to go out and we’re kind of screwed if we lose this funding. Since you don’t have much to do . . .”

  “How do you know I don’t have much to do?” she asked in the same polite tone, unable to repress the question.

  Brian cleared his throat. “Well, you’re just sitting here.”

  “Kevin is just sitting here, too. He’s clearly watching a movie on his phone,” she said, tilting her head toward her lab mate across the room, who was laughing at whatever he was streaming. Her voice was still calm and polite, but she saw Brian’s brows drawing together in annoyance.

  “Look, we all have to do grunt work sometimes. It comes with the territory. Do you think you’re somehow exempt from putting in the work?”

  Ledi sucked in a breath. She worked hard—so much harder than she should have had to, really. That was the problem. When you worked twice as hard all the time, working at the average rate was slacking off.

  “No,” she said quietly. “I don’t think that.”

  Why did I even say anything?

  She’d learned early on that challenging the people who held power over you made you undesirable, and undesirability meant gathering all of your things into a black plastic trash bag and being sent back to the group home. She swallowed against the brief wave of nausea and remembered the workshop for women in STEM she’d taken. She had to lay down her boundaries or people would assume she had none.

  “I have no problem paying my dues, but this is the fourth grant you’ve asked me to help with,” she said. “And let me guess, it’s due this week?”

  Brian nodded stiffly.

  “Kevin has never done one of these for you before,” she said gently, though she was tired of being gentle. She was just plain tired.

  “All the more reason for you to do it,” Brian insisted. “You won’t make beginner’s mistakes.”

  And there it was; if she continued any further she’d be pushing, and as much as she’d heard about leaning in, when Ledi pushed she was usually met with a brick wall exerting equal and opposite force. She should have just taken the forms with a smile and kept her mouth shut.

  “Sure. I’ll get right on it. Sorry.”

  She put her textbook away and took the papers, somehow managing not to crumple them into a ball, and Brian walked off without saying thanks.

  Ledi took a deep, centering breath.

  Asshole postdocs are temporary, but scientific discoveries are forever.

  When she opened her eyes, Trishna, her lab mate and a fellow Public Health student, was watching her from across the work table. Her long, dark hair was pulled back and her safety goggles magnified the annoyance in her eyes.

  “He’s such a jerk,” Trishna said, and Ledi allowed herself a brief moment of camaraderie before shrugging it off.

  “It’s not a big deal,” she said brightly. She smiled at Trishna and hoped her expression wasn’t as murdery as she felt.

  “It is a big deal. Fuck Brian,” Trishna said. Then her brows lifted behind her goggles. “He’s probably jealous of your practicum with Dr. Kreillig’s Disease Task Force this summer, you know. It sounds so badass. Task force! Like that meme with the dude with sunglasses. ‘I’m here to cure diseases and chew bubble gum, and I’m all out of bubble gum.’”

  Trishna grabbed two test tubes and pointed them menacingly around the lab.

  Ledi might have laughed if Trishna hadn’t brought up yet another one of her bumper crop of problems. She shuffled through the grant papers Brian had just left her without really looking at them. “Yeah. I’m looking forward to learning a lot this summer.”

  What she wanted to say was that her advisor Dr. Kreillig had stopped responding to her emails and phone calls and she actually had no idea what was happening with her summer fieldwork, but sharing that kind of info would have been un-Ledi-like.

  “The task force seems to have a great dynamic,” she added for effect. If you said inane things with a smile people couldn’t tell they were being stonewalled. “They did a great job containing the recent outbreak of Legionnaires’ disease.”

  Being outwardly friendly while keeping people at a distance was second nature to Ledi. She thought of it as her social phospholipid bilayer: flexible, dynamic, and designed to keep the important parts of herself separate from a possibly dangerous outside environment. It had been working for the prokaryotes for eons, and it would suffice for a broke grad school student, which was only slightly higher on the evolutionary scale.

  “When are you starting?” Trishna asked.

  “Still waiting to hear back about that. Dr. Kreillig is pretty busy.” Both of those things were generally true.

  “Oooo, maybe he’s busy with some kind of epidemic?” Trishna offered helpfully. “Apparently, last year when cases of Zika started to pop up, he was MIA for a few days.”

  Ledi wouldn’t wish an outbreak on anyone, but that might explain why it’d been over a week since she’d heard from him. A week felt like forever when her practicum, her resulting thesis, and perhaps the path her entire career would take were on the line. If only Dr. Kreillig were as motivated as her Nigerian—or Thesoloian, to be more accurate—scammer, she wouldn’t be in this situation.

  “What about you?” Ledi asked, changing the topic.

  “Eh, I leave for Maine the week after exams.”

  Ledi’s phone vibrated and she saw a text from her friend Portia pop up on the screen.

  We’re having an opening at the gallery where I’m interning tomorrow night. Free wine and cheese! You love free wine and cheese! ☺

  Ledi loved free food and drink of all kinds, but if she went to this opening she’d have to squeeze into the trendy art gallery with a hundred other like-minded people to obtain it. She’d also likely have to deal with drunk Portia. Drunk Portia was not on Ledi’s miles-long to-do list.

  That sounds fun, but I have to work at the Institute until nine tomorrow. ☹

  Aw, boo. Maybe we can meet for drinks after?

  Maybe!

  Maybe not. Portia was her best friend, but Ledi was too exhausted to deal with alcohol-fueled hijinks. She wanted a glass of wine after a long day so she could unwind, not as a prelude to a night of debauchery. She didn’t have anything against debauchery, but she had no time for it—or for the spike of anxiety each time Portia flagged down a waitress or headed back to the bar.

  Portia was the perfect example of why Ledi’s social cell membrane existed. Once someone slipped through, Ledi couldn’t help but worry over them, and worrying had no concrete results in the real world except draining her much-needed energy.

  Oh, did you check your MyGeneScreen results? I’m 83% African and 17% European. I have to break it to my mom that we are not, in fact, descended from a Cherokee princess.

  Yikes. Hold off on that conversation though. You know I don’t believe in the accuracy of these tests.

  Portia had received a couple of the DNA test packs from some promotional event for social media movers and shakers, and had given one to Ledi. Ledi had been momentarily seduced by the possibility of knowing more about her background, but when the email announcing her results had arrived, she’d deleted it.

  What did it matter? She was 100 percent New Yorker and that was all she needed to know. Sure, the genetic database linked you with possible relatives but . . .

  But what? She had survived a not
so great childhood, she was on her way to being a pretty damn great epidemiologist, and she didn’t need any scientifically shoddy data to introduce more confounding factors into her life.

  She was fine.

  “Everything going okay with the grant stuff?” Brian called across the lab. “You understand everything?”

  He gave her a thumbs-up that was somehow a question. She wanted to reply with her own one-finger salute, but instead she gave him a wide, fake smile.

  “Everything’s under control!” she said brightly, and wished it was true.

  Chapter 2

  Sender: [email protected]

  Subject: URGENT! MARRIAGE CONTRACT

  To the esteemed Ms. Smith,

  I email again, hoping against hope for a response. Despite the past infractions of your parents, you maintain the benevolent blessings of KING LERUMO and QUEEN RAMATLA of the Kingdom of Thesolo, and your contract with their son still stands. It is imperative that you contact me immediately regarding your betrothal to HRH PRINCE THABISO—

  Ledi cursed the spam filter gods, again, as she stepped into her cramped Inwood studio apartment later the next evening. She also cursed herself for forgetting to throw out the trash before sleepwalking to the university library that morning—her place smelled like the cheap Chinese takeout that she’d eaten two nights before.

  She dropped her backpack on the floor and pulled the tied-off plastic bag emblazoned with an enthusiastic THANK YOU! from her doorknob. The sounds of her neighbors’ lives echoed in the hallway along with her footsteps as she headed for the trash compactor: Mrs. Garcia across the hall, the widowed retiree who DVRed her telenovelas and watched them at top volume every night when she got home from her volunteer work; Jayden and Ben, the children in 7 C, who always seemed to be laughing maniacally about something; Boca, the parrot that cursed in Lithuanian every time someone passed the door of 7 H.

  She could also smell her neighbors—dinners prepared in the style of at least four continents, plus the hazy contribution of the hipster stoner who had moved in a few weeks before.

  The trash compactor room took all the communal smells, then fermented and magnified them. She held her breath as she entered the small room, used her sleeve to open the bacteria-covered trap door to the chute, and dropped in the remains of her egg foo yung. Her phone vibrated in her pocket and, in a flash of irritation, Ledi considered tossing it in, too. That would be a temporary solution to her annoying spammer problem, however, and she’d worked much too hard for the phone to consider it disposable.