“…and then of course she broke it off with him by trying to thrust a letter opener into his ear at her brother’s coronation,” Cilla was saying.
To better bark at him, Cilla clambered into the empty chair next to Gaz. Clive responded by settling into her old spot, smashed up next to me, our thighs touching. It wasn’t unpleasant. He was the Hollywood archetype of a sensitive yet smoldering Brit—wavy jet-black hair, strong jaw, and a voice that was smooth and husky all at once.
“So, Bex, what are you reading?”
“Reading?”
“Studying,” he clarified.
“It’s not in my file?”
Clive smiled. “We only got the juicy bits,” he said, sipping his drink and then licking the froth off his lip in a way that suggested he enjoyed my watching him do it.
“Well, theoretically I’m reading British history, toward my degree at home, but what I really want to do over here is draw,” I said. “I mostly work in pencils, and so much of the architecture here lends itself to dramatic gray and black areas. The arches, the carvings, the gargoyles…”
“Did I hear you say gargoyles?” Gaz interrupted. “That reminds me.” He pointed at the stern brunette. “That is our other floor-mate, Lady Beatrix Larchmont-Kent-Smythe. Otherwise known as Lady Bollocks, because of her initials, and also, she can be a bloody load of it.”
Lacey later described Bea as looking and acting exactly the way you would expect a Lady Beatrix Larchmont-Kent-Smythe to look and act. Her posture is as impeccable as her tailoring, she never loses her keys nor her cool nor so much as a chip from her manicure, and I believe she intentionally waxes her eyebrows so that she always appears to be raising them at you with deepest skepticism. Clive explained that Lady Bollocks was a lifelong friend of Nick’s family, and in fact, as we alternated pints and gin-filled highballs, he turned out to be full of tidbits: that Cilla’s ancestors lost their money in a lusty Downton Abbey–style scandal; that the girl tending bar once had a pop hit called “Fish and Chips” about a memorable weekend with a famous boy band; that two hundred people had money on whether Cilla and Gaz would sleep together or murder each other (he had a hundred pounds on them doing both); and that Joss’s continued enrollment was a mystery to everyone, because she rarely did anything except follow around her boyfriends and make clothes in her room, to the consternation of her pushy father—the Queen’s gynecologist.
“She’s a good enough sort, but we don’t see her much,” Clive said. “Her father requested she be on Nick’s floor, to light a fire under her or some such, and you don’t run afoul of a man who has such, er, sensitive personal information.”
“Keep your friends close, keep the secrets of the Royal Birth Canal closer,” I said.
“Something like that.” His hand brushed my leg again.
“And you’re the person everyone wants to sit next to at a wedding,” I said. “You’d have dirt on everyone in the room and at least two of their relatives.”
“Only two?” Clive feigned shock. “I do want to be a reporter, actually. I like learning about people. My brothers think it’s just an excuse for the fact that I’m afraid of having my ears torn off.” At my quizzical expression, he added, “They play rugby. Professionally. The biggest, thickest clods you’ve ever seen. Cauliflower ears and broken noses and all.”
“So how did you end up on Nick’s floor?”
“My dad was mates with Nick’s dad at St. Andrews,” Clive said. “So we’ve known each other since we were born, same as Bea.”
I glanced at Lady Bollocks. An immaculate blonde with a creamy tan was wresting Nick’s arm from her, to the visible chagrin of nearly every woman in the room and a few hopeful men besides.
“India Bolingbroke,” Clive said, with the precision of a spy. “The new girlfriend. Daughter of Prince Richard’s second cousin twice removed.”
“Good luck to her,” I said. “I think the whole room is out for her blood.”
“We tease him about it, but it’s a bit unremitting,” Clive said. “Last year Nick was with Ceres, the girl whose room you’re taking, but she cheated on him with the polo captain. I think everyone hoped it’d be open season again.”
Nick leaned into India as if she were the only one in the room. It was a technique he eventually told me he developed to freeze out the sensation of being devoured by hungry eyes, two of which, that day, belonged to Lady Beatrix Larchmont-Kent-Smythe.
“She’s like a guard dog, that one,” Clive said, tipping his beer at her.
And then her steely gaze found me. I saluted her comically with my gin.
“Well, nobody has anything to fear from me,” I said, downing the dregs of my drink like a pro. “I’m not here for any of that bullshit. I just want to have fun.”
“Bravo to that,” Clive said. “And when poor old Nick is forced to marry one of these squealing aristocrats, promise you’ll sit next to me, just like this”—he made a point of shifting so that I was half on his lap—“so I can whisper secrets to you.”
“Deal,” I said.
He held my gaze. An excited shiver ran up my spine. I wasn’t there to get married, but I was definitely up for a good time.
And that’s the true story of the day I met Nick: I left the bar with another guy.
Chapter Two
I am one minute older than my twin sister, and she seemed to view that accident of biology as some kind of challenge. If I got As, Lacey got A-pluses. When I hit five foot nine, she was already half an inch taller. She was school president and the head cheerleader, while I was just the softball team’s least-effective relief pitcher (Lacey never understood playing for fun; to her, if you didn’t dominate, it wasn’t worth doing). When our dad had heart problems, we both studied medical textbooks, but she full-on memorized them and decided to go into cardiology—and then, I think, stuck with it mostly because wants to be a doctor looked so impressive next to valedictorian on our graduation program. So as I stared at the mountain of library books on my desk after just one day of term, I wondered what crossed wire had landed me at the very top university in the world when Lacey always had the edge in the Superstar Stakes (even if she was the only one who thought of it that way). My relatively brief settling-in period had ended when the calendar flipped to October, bringing with it the beginning of term—Oxford calls it First Week—and a raft of stern lectures from the academic fellows on the rigors of independent study, a stultifying pile of reading with which I had to be conversant in a hurry, and warnings from Nick’s personal protection officers about acting completely normal yet maintaining constant vigilance. I needed moral support. But Lacey needed dish, and Lacey is good at getting what she wants.
“So how many times have you hooked up, exactly?” she pressed.
“It’s barely even an interesting amount,” I hedged.