Nick must have seen this play across my face. “I know,” he said softly. “Two deployments in a row is a lot. If you need me, just say the word.”
I wanted to, so badly. But when I looked up at him, I saw every crestfallen face when he told me Richard had denied his requests to join up, and every hurt expression when the media made fun of him for it.
“No,” I said. “You should go.”
“It might not happen,” he hedged.
“Nicholas.” It was Eleanor, calling to us from across the room. “They’ve waited long enough,” she said, pointing toward the public. “Time to give them what they want.”
Nick turned to me, a question on his face. I thought of Lacey storming away. I thought of my father, gone, and my mother, moving on; I thought of the Bex who’d climbed fences and never wanted to answer to anyone, and I thought of the Bex who’d lain in bed with Nick and daydreamed about living as a public couple, loving each other loudly, planning a wedding that would be wholly ours. I wanted to feel engaged, and not just like a girl wearing a very big ring. I wanted my best friend back. But there were two people I loved more than anything who’d been scrambling for a purpose. I couldn’t satisfy one of them, but I could help the other.
“I’m fine.” I took his hand. “I’ll be fine.”
I put the brightest smile I could conjure onto my face, and apparently I nailed it, because the pictures of us waving at the window convinced Aurelia Maupassant and most of the world that we were as deliriously untroubled as they wanted us to be. And as I gazed upon thousands of racegoers holding up cameraphones, shouting at us joyously, I floated outside myself and saw a person who was learning for the first time what it was like to belong, not just to someone else, but to something much bigger than herself.
Chapter Five
TROUBLE IN PORTERDISE?
Bexzilla Wants Nicky to Love Her More Than Britain, worries XANDRA DEANE
Posh and Bex are having problems: Our exclusive sources reveal Prince Nicholas now regrets his impetuous proposal to his brash Yankee bride.
In addition to helping her sister cash in with a book deal, Rebecca Porter, 26, apparently tried to disrupt Nicholas’s career. The Prince, 27, may report for a second tour of duty aboard a Royal Navy frigate, and allegedly the American Porter is enraged that he, unlike she, sees the value in an honest day’s work.
“He tried to explain that it’s for his country, and she screamed, ‘Well, it’s not my country,’” says an insider. “She was furious. Thought tasting wedding cakes was more important. Nick was appalled. I should think he wants to get away.”
At least the tantrum rumours explain what it is that Rebecca does all day.
There are few things as horrifying as realizing the Daily Mail is even marginally correct about your personal life. Lacey’s book was not, to my knowledge, still in play; then again, after Ascot, we were barely in contact. The press had stopped photographing her walking to Whistles, so the only proof I had that she was even still in England was when I would come home and find she’d used her spare key to raid my closet. But when it came to Nick, though Xandra Deane had turned the volume up to eleven and had pertinent facts wrong, emotionally she was on the correct frequency.
A bare ten days after Ascot, with not nearly enough nights together in between, Nick went off on the HMS Pembroke until the New Year. It felt cruelly ironic that a frigate sharing a name with the place that brought him into my life was now sailing him right out of it. I’d wanted to be strong, but when I found out how fast he’d be leaving, my tear ducts overruled me.
“Shit, I’m sorry,” Nick said, searching for a Kleenex, then giving up and handing me a napkin that had been on the coffee table. “You did say you were all right with this, Bex.”
“I know. I hate that I’m crying.” I curled my legs under me on the couch and hugged a throw pillow to my chest. “It just hit me how much I miss having you here. You and Paint Britain are the two things that make me feel the most like myself, and you’re both gone.”
“Then go back there,” he said.
I blinked. “But Marj and Eleanor said I had to stop working.”
Nick shrugged. “Don’t listen,” he said. “I wouldn’t.”
“Since when am I allowed to say no?” I said. “Where were you with that advice a couple of months ago?”
“If you recall, I didn’t know about it until after you’d already resigned,” he said. “I agree it’s not ideal that I can’t be here all the time, and I wish I could, but it’s a fact of life in the Navy. Someday, I’ll be in your hair constantly. But I must serve the country if I’m meant to lead it, and if I quit now, everyone will say I’m no better than Edwin, hoovering up taxpayer money.”
“I know,” I told him. “I do know. I just keep imagining you off on a ship, and me at home juggling babies you only see three times a year. I wish I’d thought everything through, is all.”
He sat back a little. “Or what?” he said. “You wouldn’t have agreed to marry me?”
“No, of course not. I just…” I blew out my cheeks. “I don’t know what I mean.”
I’m not sure why I didn’t just tell him point-blank that I felt stranded. And in the wake of Nick’s departure, it started nibbling at me that maybe we had been as impetuous as Xandra Deane claimed. We’d careened into each other’s arms after my father died, and the ensuing tide of emotion had carried us here and dumped us and ebbed. Nick’s sense of duty is part of what I love about him, but I should have fought for more time by his side to get assimilated before I lost him to it, and communications to the HMS Pembroke were too irregular to talk through the questions that tortured me in the middle of the night. When could I say no to The Firm? Did I have the leverage to fight for myself? When was he going to take this promised desk job? Where would we live? What about our theoretical children? When was I expected to have one? And how would it make friends, if we were boxed in by a gated-off palace? Cruelly, the person who really could’ve understood was Nick’s mother, physically sitting alone in Cornwall but mentally out of reach.