“His mistress?” I supplied.
“I didn’t realize until the end of that sentence that it was somewhat insulting to you,” Nick said. “Let me try again. Ahem. This room is where the Duke of York housed, ah, the guest he might most wish to visit in the middle of the night, for a variety of respectable reasons, one of which is her advanced taste in hosiery.”
“Of course,” I said. “But that still doesn’t solve the problem of your grandmother not wanting us to defile a royal bedchamber.”
“I thought of that,” Nick said smugly. “Being as this is a guest suite, it isn’t a royal bedchamber at all. In fact, it’s a wickedly unpopular bedchamber because it’s haunted. We’d be doing it a service.”
“Giving it a reason to live,” I agreed. “Or giving the ghost a reason to pretend to live.”
“Quite selfless, really.”
“Sexual philanthropy.”
“Fancy term. Now you’re just showing off for the ghost,” he murmured, lowering his mouth to mine and sliding my sweatpants to the floor. If the ghost was scandalized by what happened next, he certainly never complained.
Chapter Two
But why haven’t you met them?” my mother asked, picking up the white and mint-green teacup and jerking her pinky finger impatiently out to the side, as if scolding herself for it not being innate. “It’s suspicious, Rebecca.”
It was a reasonable question, and not unexpected: Almost a year had passed since I woke up to find Freddie in my bed instead of Nick, and I still hadn’t encountered anyone else in the Lyons family beyond that old, unofficial—and still secret, even to my parents—dustup with Richard. Mom and Dad, in fact, had flown over with the express purpose of meeting the esteemed Prince Nicholas, and yet there were no current plans for me to have a sit-down with the opposite side. Certainly, there were reasons for this; royal life always came with reasons, almost all of them Reasons, some of them even typed up and filed in a manila folder. But as much as I swore I didn’t need family dinners at Balmoral to validate my relationship, I couldn’t help being stung by the math: A thousand days without a handshake was hard to explain, even to myself, and absolutely not something I wanted to psychoanalyze during a ritzy high tea.
“I can text Nick and tell him you aren’t comfortable meeting him without knowing his intentions,” I offered, dropping a cube of brown sugar into my exotic blend. “We can really draw a line in the sand, if that’s what you want.”
Mom patted the neatly curled ends of her silver-streaked bob. “We cannot be so rude,” she said imperiously.
“Not when she packed special steam-powered hair curlers,” Dad said.
Mom swatted him. “Appearances matter,” she said, tugging at her tweedy Chanel suit jacket. “And Nick needs to know we take this seriously. I just don’t want him treating Bex like Ms. Right Now if she thinks he’s Mr. Right.”
“Oh God. Please don’t quote some decades-old Cosmopolitan that you found at your hairdresser,” Lacey said.
“I suppose next you’re going to tell me I gave him the milk for free,” I said.
“I am an extremely modern woman,” Mom said defensively. “I use text messages and the Skype and everything. That doesn’t mean I can’t be concerned.”
“Come on now, Nancy. Nick seems like a good guy,” Dad said, patting her arm. “And Bex is no slouch. She has my keen eye for reading people.” He winked at me over the tea sandwich dwarfed in his large hands. “I am sure everyone’s intentions are good.”
Mom blew on her tea, frowning, not having heard a word. “Isn’t his mother even the slightest bit curious about you?”
Another eminently fair question, and one that I treated as rhetorical, because I had no answer. Nick and I had talked about almost everything else: how he’d lost his virginity (to Gemma Sands, at fifteen, about ten minutes after feeding the giraffes at her father’s wildlife preserve), how he got the scar on his chin (Freddie clipped him with a polo mallet), that he had a recurring nightmare about one of his grandmother’s porcelain soup tureens. Emma, however, was inhospitable territory. The times she’d come up organically, Nick either changed the subject, or clammed up completely. I wanted to draw him out, to be there for him, but was afraid it would come off like prying. So I let it go.
But I was tired of telling him eccentric bits and bobs about my own family—how Dad helped Lacey build a working model of an intestine for our high school science fair, or the way Mom buys a new summer and winter suit each year for the purposes of being buried in seasonal attire, should the worst happen—that I had to qualify with, You’ll see when you meet them. To his credit, Nick was delighted when I suggested an introduction, and immediately had his people book Mom and Dad a suite at The Dorchester—one of London’s poshest old hotels, and the one the Queen most trusted for discretion. So far, my family had enjoyed a great visit. We traipsed around the Tower of London, hopped the train to Hampton Court, even took a boat ride on the Thames—all the lively touristy stuff that I couldn’t do with Nick. Dad made it his mission to eat in as many of the ubiquitous pubs with Arms in the title as possible, and sought out an antiques shop on Kensington Church Street that kept all the most fabulous items under the floorboards, hidden from view except to those with a large enough wad of bills. Dad claimed he just wanted to investigate, but left with a walking stick concealing a sword, and an old leather book that was actually a hiding place for a lady’s gold-and-ivory-handled pistol. Never mind what he thought he was going to do with any of them. We ribbed him about it the whole week.
Still, the prospect of this day hung over me the entire time. Our tea was a strategic prelude to make sure Mom felt properly civilized, and my dad properly fed and watered. The Dorchester’s Champagne high tea is as elegant as its marble-floored lobby dining room, which was infused with the gentle tinkling of utensils on fine china. Down the way a piano player tapped out “I Dreamed a Dream,” eyes closed, head bobbing in deepest passion.
“Nothing like a song about a dying hooker to wash down your scones,” I said.
“Bex, be regal,” Mom said. “For once. Please.”