_RelleLebby_
She came to Bangkok to plan someone else's fairytale. She never expected to stumble into a palace with teeth.
Mariah Arledge is methodical, disciplined, and exceptional at what she does. As a junior coordinator for one of the world's most exclusive luxury wedding firms, she has one assignment: support the lead planner through a high-profile royal wedding at the palace of the Sriphotong family. She is not there to make enemies. She is not there to cause disruptions. She is certainly not there to fall into the orbit of Crown Prince Kasem Sriphotong, the most dangerous man in any room he enters.
Kasem is everything the press both worships and fears. Charismatic. Reckless. Ruthless when threatened. Beneath the carefully tailored image of a crown prince who will one day rule, there is a man shaped by pressure, violence, and secrets the palace has spent years burying. He does not like Mariah. He does not like what her presence unsettles. He wants her gone.
She refuses to go.
What begins as open hostility and sharp-edged confrontation pulls them into something neither can name or stop. But the palace is not a romantic backdrop. It is a machine. And the people inside it have spent lifetimes learning how to destroy quietly.
There is a woman who has been circling Kasem for years, beautiful and calculating, who will not accept that her influence over him is slipping. There are secrets embedded inside palace walls that were never meant to surface. There is a loyalty structure so rigid that loving the wrong person is treated as treason.
And Mariah is already in too deep.
BENEATH THE LOTUS THRONE is a dark, emotionally consuming royal romance set against the opulent and treacherous world of a Thai royal dynasty. It is a story about obsession, survival, the cost of love inside systems built to crush it, and what happens when two people who should never have touched each other cannot let go.
©️ _RelleLebby_// R. L.