Royally Screwed Book Summary: Emma Chase’s Prince Nicholas Romance

Welcome, fellow bookworm! Ever wondered what happens when a playboy prince meets a woman who refuses to curtsy? Royally Screwed by Emma Chase is the delicious answer. This summary of Royally Screwed covers the full story — Crown Prince Nicholas of Wessco, the American woman who turns his world upside down, and the scandal that threatens them both.

Nicholas Arthur Frederick Edward Pembrook, Crown Prince of Wessco, has spent his life being perfect in public and wild in private. Then he meets Olivia Hammond in New York — a sharp, independent American who doesn’t care about his title and won’t play royal games. For the first time, the prince who could have anyone wants the one woman he might not be allowed to keep.

Whether you’re here for the royal fantasy, the steam, or the spoilers, you’re in the right place. The crown has never been this fun.

Book and Author Details

Author: Emma Chase is the New York Times bestselling author of the Tangled series. With the Royally series, launched in 2016 with Royally Screwed, she traded boardrooms for ballrooms — bringing her signature wit, male POV narration, and reformed-rake heroes to a fictional European monarchy.

Publication: 2016, Gallery Books (St. Martin’s Press hardcover editions followed), approximately 300 pages.

Genre & Audience: Contemporary royal romance / romantic comedy. A modern fairy tale with real stakes — duty versus love, tradition versus authenticity. Perfect for royal-romance lovers, reformed-playboy fans, and readers who like their princes with a sense of humor. Adult readers.

Table of Contents

• One Minute Book Summary
• The Book in Three Sentences
• Royally Screwed — Full Summary
• Characters
• 6 Main Key Lessons and Concepts
• Quotes
• Conclusion

ONE MINUTE BOOK SUMMARY

Nicholas Pembrook, the Crown Prince of Wessco — a small, wealthy European principality — is royalty’s most eligible bachelor: dutiful in public, discreetly wild in private. On a trip to New York, he meets Olivia Hammond, a beautiful, quick-witted American graduate student working as a waitress, who has no idea who he is and treats him like any other charming stranger. The anonymity is intoxicating, and Nicholas falls hard for the first woman who ever wanted him without the crown. But a prince doesn’t get a private life: when the press discovers the romance, scandal erupts, the Queen and the royal apparatus pressure Nicholas toward a ‘suitable’ match, and Olivia is thrust into a world of protocol, paparazzi, and impossible expectations. Torn between duty to his country and love for Olivia, Nicholas must decide what kind of king — and what kind of man — he intends to be, while Olivia must decide whether loving a prince is worth surrendering the ordinary life she values.

The Book In Three Sentences

Crown Prince Nicholas of Wessco meets American Olivia Hammond in New York, where she falls for the man without knowing he’s royalty. When the press exposes them, palace pressure and scandal threaten the relationship — duty versus love, with a kingdom watching. Nicholas must choose between the crown’s expectations and Olivia, redefining what it means to be a modern prince.

Royally Screwed Book Summary

Part 1: The Prince in Plain Clothes

Nicholas Arthur Frederick Edward Pembrook has been royal since birth and exhausted by it nearly as long. As Crown Prince of Wessco, every public moment is choreographed, every relationship vetted, every impulse weighed against the monarchy’s image. In private, he’s earned a reputation as a charming rogue — not cruel, just determined to feel alive in the narrow corridor his life allows. On a visit to New York, he does what he rarely gets to do: he goes unrecognized, or at least unacknowledged, and meets Olivia Hammond.

Olivia is everything his world isn’t: unscripted, unimpressed by titles (she doesn’t know his), working her way through graduate school, and quick enough to match him barb for barb. Their connection is immediate and disarming precisely because it’s normal — coffee, conversation, chemistry without protocol. For Nicholas, it’s the first relationship of his adult life that isn’t a transaction or a photo opportunity. For Olivia, he’s just a captivating man with a strange aversion to being photographed. The anonymity has an expiration date, and both of them know it — which only makes every stolen normal moment burn brighter.

Part 2: The Scandal Breaks

Secrets at Nicholas’s level don’t keep, and when the press connects the dots, the fairy tale detonates. Overnight, Olivia — a private citizen who never asked for any of this — becomes the most photographed woman in two countries. The coverage is merciless: her past excavated, her motives questioned, her worthiness debated by strangers. The palace machine, embodied by the formidable Queen and her advisors, moves to contain the damage, and containment looks a lot like elimination: pressure on Nicholas to end it, whispers that Olivia is unsuitable, the full weight of a centuries-old institution brought to bear on a graduate student.

Nicholas’s narration — witty, self-aware, increasingly anguished — carries the book’s emotional turn. He has been trained since childhood to put Wessco first, and the training holds: he wavers, he compromises, he tries to have both the crown’s approval and Olivia’s love. Olivia, meanwhile, gets the story’s clearest-eyed arc. She didn’t fall for a prince; she fell for a man, and she’s being asked to pay a prince’s price for it. Her dignity under siege — refusing to be either victim or villain in the tabloid narrative — is what makes her a match for him.

Part 3: Duty Versus Love

The middle of the book is a pressure cooker. Nicholas is paraded through ‘suitable’ alternatives — aristocratic women who understand the job description — while Olivia is frozen out, dissected, and offered the royal version of a consolation prize: disappear quietly. The Queen’s position isn’t villainous so much as institutional; she genuinely believes the monarchy’s survival requires sacrifice, and she’s made those sacrifices herself. This is what elevates the book above standard royal fantasy: the opposition has a point, which makes Nicholas’s choice genuinely hard.

Nicholas’s growth is the slow, painful shedding of passivity. He has spent his life being managed — by advisors, by expectations, by the crown itself — and loving Olivia forces him to do the one thing princes are rarely taught: choose, openly, and accept the consequences. His grand romantic gestures matter less than his political ones: the moments he spends royal capital defending her, defying protocol, insisting that the monarchy serve people rather than the reverse. Olivia, for her part, must decide whether she can love not just Nicholas but the life that comes with him — the fishbowl, the duty, the loss of ordinary.

Part 4: The Modern Fairy Tale

The resolution refuses the easy fantasy. Nicholas doesn’t abdicate in a grand romantic gesture — that would be another kind of running away — he stays and fights to modernize what ‘prince’ means, with Olivia beside him as partner rather than ornament. The Queen, confronted with a son who will not be managed and a country that turns out to love the love story, bends where she once would have broken. The scandal that was supposed to end them becomes, paradoxically, the making of them: a couple forged in public fire, with nothing left to hide.

The ending earns its swoon because both leads paid for it. Nicholas chose love without abandoning duty — redefining duty instead. Olivia chose an extraordinary life without surrendering her ordinary self. Their partnership becomes the book’s thesis: the best monarchies, like the best marriages, adapt or die. (Their story’s ripple effects — and the scene-stealing younger prince — continue in Royally Matched.)

Characters

1. Nicholas Pembrook — The hero: Crown Prince of Wessco — dutiful, witty, privately rebellious — who must choose between the crown’s script and his own heart.

2. Olivia Hammond — The heroine: an American graduate student and waitress whose wit, independence, and refusal to curtsy make her the prince’s perfect disruption.

3. The Queen — Nicholas’s formidable mother/grandmother figure of royal authority — not a villain but the embodiment of institutional duty.

4. Prince Henry — Nicholas’s younger brother — gruff, guarded, and clearly hiding depths (his story follows in Royally Matched).

5. Logan St. James — Nicholas’s loyal best friend and fixer, whose own complicated heart gets its turn in Royally Endowed.

6. Ellie Hammond — Olivia’s younger sister, whose arrival in Wessco sets up future complications.

6 Main Key Lessons and Concepts

1. Core Message: Duty without love is just obedience. Nicholas’s arc argues that institutions — monarchies, families, traditions — survive by adapting to human hearts, not by crushing them.

2. Purpose: Emma Chase wrote a royal fantasy for readers who want the tiaras with the teeth: all the wish-fulfillment of a prince romance, grounded in real questions about privacy, duty, and what power costs the people who hold it.

3. Audience: Royal-romance devotees, reformed-rake fans, and Tangled readers following Chase into a new world. Anyone who ever dreamed of the prince — and wondered about the price tag — will be satisfied.

4. Foundational Insight: Anonymity was Nicholas’s aphrodisiac because it was his freedom. The book suggests we all perform versions of ourselves for our ‘kingdoms’ — jobs, families, reputations — and love is the rare place we’re allowed to abdicate.

5. Supporting Ideas: The press is a character with its own appetites; institutional opposition can be principled rather than evil; a partner should be a co-ruler, not an accessory; and modernizing tradition beats either blind obedience or dramatic abdication.

6. Practical Implications: For readers: notice where in your life you’re performing duty at love’s expense — the job, the family role, the reputation. Nicholas’s courage is portable: choose openly, pay the price honestly. For writers: study how Chase makes the Queen formidable without making her a villain — worthy opposition creates worthy choices.

Quotes

“She didn’t curtsy. In three decades of being bowed to, no one had ever just… not. I was doomed from that moment.”

— Nicholas on meeting Olivia — the commoner who treated him like a man and ruined him for royalty.

“A crown is just a hat that never comes off. Until her, I never realized how heavy it was.”

— On the burden of constant public identity, and what Olivia’s normalcy revealed.

“You don’t get a private life when you’re public property. You get secrets, and secrets always invoice you.”

— Nicholas on the cost of royal romance — and why the scandal was inevitable.

“I didn’t fall in love with a prince. I fell in love with a man who happened to be trapped in a palace.”

— Olivia’s clear-eyed distinction, and the standard she holds Nicholas to.

“A modern king doesn’t choose between love and duty. He makes duty big enough to hold love.”

— The book’s thesis, delivered at the climax of Nicholas’s transformation.

Conclusion

Royally Screwed succeeds because it takes the royal fantasy seriously. The tiaras and palaces are here, but so are the paparazzi, the protocols, and the genuine moral weight of choosing love when a country is watching. Emma Chase’s prince isn’t a fairy-tale prop but a man — funny, flawed, and finally brave — and Olivia is his match in every way that matters, refusing to be either rescued or sidelined.

For readers, the craft lesson is in the opposition. Notice how the Queen is never reduced to a wicked stepmother; her arguments for duty have real force, which is what makes Nicholas’s defiance meaningful rather than merely romantic. The best love stories don’t give their heroes straw enemies — they give them real ones, and let love win anyway.

The final takeaway is Nicholas’s: the traditions worth keeping are the ones that can bend toward human happiness. Whether your kingdom is a country or a career or a family expectation, the question is the same — will you perform the role, or will you rewrite it? Take notes on that. Even princes get to choose.