An empty glass jangled under my nose, snapping me out of my reverie.
“Oi, I said, do you want another?” Joss asked, apparently repeating herself. “I can’t think where our waitress has got to.”
“I’d better not,” I said, standing up and teetering in my heels. I was not getting any better in them, no matter how hard I tried, and the Raspberry Berets weren’t helping. “I’m chugging mine too fast as it is. I’m going to sneak into Tony’s office and use his bathroom.”
I spotted Nick looking at me again, and stretched a little so that my shirt rode up for his benefit. He completed his Oxford degree at the end of my time there, but I’d still had a year to go at Cornell, so I’d returned to the States as planned and spent a confined, hormonally challenging semester doubling up on credits in order to earn my diploma early—in aid of hustling back across the pond, finding a job that would keep me there, and resuming having real sex with my boyfriend instead of the phone variety. Our reunion had come right on schedule in January, about a month after I graduated, at the hands of a Hallmark equivalent called Greetings & Salutations that wanted new artists to revamp its line of sympathy cards. I never asked Nick to pull strings to convince someone I was worth the work visa, but I also never asked if he’d done it anyway, and he probably had. We were incapable of making decisions that weren’t guided by our libidos, and the months I spent back in the States were torture. So I grabbed the first smudge of a flat I could afford, in a shady end of London’s artsy Shepherd’s Bush, and just like that we were a we again.
Well, in private, anyway. Richard was very peeved when Nick and I got together—I heard his father through the phone loudly calling me “the crass American mess”—so he kept trying to foist the more suitable India Bolingbroke on his son at official functions, especially while I was conveniently stashed away at Cornell. Around Thanksgiving, when we’d survived our first year together (and about five months long-distance) with no sign of stopping, Nick finally refused to attend anything unless Richard backed off—and then a day later, the paparazzi nabbed a shot of India crying her way out of Clarence House. SICK OVER NICK? the Evening Standard had wondered. INDIA BOLINGBROKEN: She Gave Back the Ring! the Mirror screamed. After that, we agreed we shouldn’t provoke the press anew, and drag her back into the crossfire, by sharing our relationship with the world. Not yet. But keeping such a huge secret took an army—specifically, our coterie of Oxford friends. Even Clive. He’d bounced back from the breakup by turning himself into our unofficial press strategist, and when he wasn’t busy expounding on how the truth about Nick and me would scandalize England’s approximately eighty-two million daily newspapers, he reveled in showing off his connections to London’s bouncers by brokering our covert entrances and exits from their nightclubs. And inside the clubs, in front of the crowd’s curious eyes, Nick and I kept up our pretense, flirting with other people and never touching each other. The charade was sexier than I’d expected, and made it that much hotter when he snuck into my flat at the end of the night.
I found Tony’s office door and punched in the code—1999; he was nothing if not committed. Ten minutes later, I heard a light tapping on the bathroom door.
“Just a sec, I’m washing up,” I called out.
“I can’t wait that long.”
Nick squeezed in and slammed the door, a bottle of vodka dangling from his hand. In seconds, his mouth was on mine, the liquor dropped and forgotten as we tore at each other. I bumped against the sink, and he lifted me on top of it.
“I can’t believe this old tank top was so effective,” I joked when we came up for air.
Nick retrieved the vodka and took a nip. “Anything you wear is effective,” he said, tugging my shirt over my head. “When I saw that idiot talking to you, I couldn’t…”
His voice got muffled as he went for one of my ears. I laughed and wrapped a leg around his waist, pulling him to me.
“Couldn’t what?”
“Aha,” he said, his right hand closing around the flag pin he’d given me, which—as part of an ongoing game—I’d hidden right in the center of my bra. “Someplace nice and direct this time. I like it.”
I tipped his face up so our eyes met. “Couldn’t what?” I repeated with a slow smile.
Nick flashed a wicked grin as he unclasped my bra. “I told you. I couldn’t wait.”
“What if someone catches us?” I asked, even as I reached for his belt. “Won’t they notice we’re gone?”
“Let them,” Nick said. “I haven’t seen you all day and I’m going mad.”
Thirty-five minutes and one mildly bruised tailbone later, we were sweaty and spent, and the ill-advised vodka made it urgent that I go home. Unfortunately, a large contingent of paparazzi was outside, waiting for a glimpse either of Nick, or a certain redheaded actress from Neighbours (who’d most likely called them herself). So Tony threw dark glasses and a purloined hat onto Cilla and had Clive smuggle her out while shouting loudly about recent Neighbours plot points, distracting the photogs long enough for me to pour myself into the back of Nick’s waiting car and camouflage myself on the floor under a chunky dark blanket—where I promptly conked out, my cheek pressed ingloriously against the mats. I awoke just as Nick was tucking me into the most glorious of beds, explaining with a grin that he’d brought me to Kensington Palace because hauling me up into my flat would’ve made him and Stout look like they were hiding a dead body. It was my first time bunking in Kensington, thanks to Eleanor’s strict policies about unmarried couples sharing royal bedchambers, but I was too groggy to register it; I barely got out a thank-you before I collapsed back into sleep.
The next morning, I awoke facing a robin’s-egg blue wall, the weight of a body next to me on the bed.
“I thought your grandmother didn’t approve of sleepovers,” I said, closing my eyes and rolling over to spoon him.
“Yes, but I was in the mood for a proper pillow fight,” came an unfamiliar voice.
My eyes flew open and I screamed, whacking at the man lying next to me with my fists before leaping out of bed.
“Who the hell are you?” I spat, before taking in the familiar-looking person lounging on the bed in front of me, all mussed ginger hair and ratty track pants, rubbing his arm where I’d cracked him. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen another human being laugh so hard.
Nick burst in, panicked. “Bex! Are you all right?”
He stopped when he saw his guffawing brother, the infamous Prince Frederick of Wales, rolling on the bed and clutching his chest with mirth.
“I should’ve known,” Nick said, affecting what looked like a full-body eye roll. “What are you even doing here? I thought you were in Somerset.”
“I’m on leave for a bit,” Freddie said. “As far as you know. I shouldn’t discuss classified details with a half-naked civilian standing right there.”
If Freddie thought this would make me blush, he miscalculated.
“Don’t worry, I’m not interested in your secrets,” I told him. “I am interested in punching you again, though, for scaring the hell out of me.”