Majesty

by Katharine McGee

  “Of course I have! Just not from a drive-through.” She glanced down, smoothing her dress over her thighs. “We ate at McDonald’s as a family at least once a year when I was a kid. Our press people alerted the tabloids ahead of time, so they could plant photographers at nearby tables. They always used them in that section, ‘Royals: They’re Just Like Us.’ ”

  “Then you haven’t really eaten fast food,” Teddy told her. “Everyone knows it’s impossible to enjoy a burger when paparazzi are watching you eat it.” He was trying to sound lighthearted, but it didn’t quite work. Beatrice wondered if she’d frightened him—if he was coming to realize what he’d signed on for, agreeing to marry her.

  They reached the drive-through window, and a woman with a high ponytail looked up at them. Her eyes widened as she squealed in recognition.

  “You’re Theodore Eaton! The Dreamboat Duke!” When she saw who was in the passenger seat, her face grew even redder. “Oh my god, Your Highness—I mean Majesty—” She sank into a startled curtsy, still holding a container of fries in one hand.

  Normally Beatrice would have acknowledged the woman with a gracious smile. But she was out in a car without her Guard, about to eat a burger without worrying about how unflattering it might look in photos. Actually, no one was taking her photo at all. The prospect filled her with a childish excitement.

  “Really? You think I look like the queen?” she said, and winked.

  * * *

  Later, when he’d dropped her back at the palace’s entrance hall, Teddy cleared his throat. “Before I go, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you,” he ventured. “My parents were wondering—would you come to Walthorpe for a weekend?”

  Visit Teddy’s childhood home. Beatrice was surprised at the flicker of anticipation she felt at the prospect of learning more about him.

  “I’d love to,” she agreed.

  Teddy broke into a relieved grin. “Okay, great,” he said, thumbs looped into his pockets. “Well…I should get going. You need to rest your throwing arm for tomorrow’s big pitch.”

  Oh, right. Beatrice had almost forgotten that tomorrow she was scheduled to throw the first pitch at National Stadium. It was a long-standing tradition in American baseball that the monarch opened one of the first games of the season.

  “You’ve practiced, haven’t you?” Teddy added, at the look on her face.

  “I was just planning on tossing it underhand. I mean, the whole thing is ceremonial. Won’t everyone just want me to hurry up and throw the ball, so the real game can begin?”

  “You can’t toss it.” Teddy sounded horrified. “Beatrice, America judges people based on their throwing ability. As if your first pitch represents what kind of ruler you’ll be.”

  “Great,” Beatrice said darkly. “Now when I throw it in the dirt, I’ll get booed off the field.”

  “We won’t let that happen,” Teddy promised.

  “What do you plan to do, teach me to throw a baseball between now and tomorrow morning?”

  “That’s exactly what we’re going to do. Don’t worry, you’re in good hands,” he assured her. “I was captain of my high school baseball team. And I was the pitcher.”

  “I thought you were captain of your football team.”

  “Yeah, I was that too,” he said easily.

  “What else were you, prom king?” When Teddy didn’t protest, Beatrice threw up her hands in exasperation. “Oh my god, you were. You’re literally Mr. America! No wonder that woman called you the Dreamboat Duke!”

  “Please don’t use that name,” Teddy groaned. “Now come on, we’re wasting moonlight.”

  Half an hour later they were out on the palace’s back lawn. A few moths fluttered nearby, their wings glimmering a silvery purple. The night was cool, but the air had a soft, expectant quality that held the promise of summer.

  With the help of a footman, Teddy had tracked down some of Jeff’s high school athletic gear. He rifled through the box, grinning triumphantly when he emerged with a baseball and a pair of old gloves.

  Pulling on the catcher’s mitt, he headed past her and crouched onto the balls of his feet. “Okay, show me what you’ve got, Bee.”

  She froze. Only two people had ever used that nickname. “Where did you hear that? Calling me Bee, I mean.” She wondered if Sam had told him, or if he’d come up with it himself. After all, it was the first syllable of her name.

  “You don’t like it?” Teddy gave a puzzled frown, and Beatrice shook her head.

  “No, I like it. I just—I haven’t heard anyone say that in a while.”

  Taking a deep breath, she threw the baseball. It veered wide to the right of Teddy’s face. When he tossed it back to her, she held up her glove, fumbling to catch it, but missed.

  “Okay, so you can’t catch,” Teddy said bluntly, as she scrambled to grab the ball from the ground. “But that doesn’t matter, because you won’t have to catch tomorrow. Our problem is that you throw like—”

  “Don’t you dare say ‘like a girl,’ ” Beatrice cut in, and he laughed.

  “Please, I know better. You should see Charlotte’s fastball.” He shook his head. “I was going to say that you throw like you’ve never held a baseball before.”

  Teddy took off his glove and walked back over, to stand behind her. “Let’s try this again: slowly, one step at a time. I’ll talk you through the whole thing.”

  Beatrice hardly dared breathe as his hands settled on her waist.

  “First of all, you’re too far forward.” He put a slight pressure on her hips, turning her, then wrapped his arms around her and closed his hands over hers. Beatrice was suddenly and acutely conscious of every place their bodies touched.

  “Start with the ball at chest level. Now lift your left hand and point toward your target.” As he spoke, Teddy kept his hands on Beatrice’s arms, guiding her carefully through the motions. His breath sent shivers down the back of her neck.

  When she finally threw the ball, it went farther and straighter than it had the first time. “That was better!” Beatrice cried out in triumph, and turned around.

  Teddy’s magnetic blue eyes were fixed on hers. He shifted, and for a breathless moment Beatrice thought he was going to kiss her. Instinctively she tipped her face up—but nothing happened.

  He’s my fiancé, she realized, with a dazed sort of shock. Of course he was, she knew that, yet the knowledge struck her now in a way that it hadn’t before.

  It was as if, all this time, she had known that she was marrying Teddy Eaton, son of the Duke of Boston. But only now did she fully appreciate that she was marrying Teddy Eaton, the man.

  “Yep, that was better,” Teddy agreed, and smiled at her—not the picture-perfect smile she’d seen a thousand times, but a new, disarming smile, unguarded and infectious.

  It was his true smile, Beatrice realized.

  And for the first time since she’d lost her dad, she was smiling her own true smile, too.

  Nina clattered down the staircase of an off-campus house, her flapper dress swaying with the movement. She reached into her purse to check her phone one last time, in case any of her friends were ready to leave the party, too.

  And, Nina admitted to herself, in case she’d heard from Ethan.

  They’d been texting all week. At first they were just coordinating logistics for their journalism project, but the conversation had quickly spun out from there. Now they checked in daily, even if it was nothing but a distracting emoji sent during class.

  Texting was the easy part. When they were texting, Nina felt certain that she and Ethan weren’t doing anything wrong; they were just old friends who’d happened to reconnect at college. When they were texting, she could control her responses down to the last comma.

  It was when she saw Ethan in person—the day they’d grabbed lunch after class, or the af
ternoon they’d studied together at the library, passing a bag of Swedish Fish back and forth as Ethan hummed along to some song on his headphones—that everything felt muddled.

  Nina still hadn’t told Sam that she’d started hanging out with Ethan. She’d meant to…but when she’d gone to the palace yesterday, Sam had announced that she and Marshall Davis were in a fake relationship, which was such startling and confusing news that Nina couldn’t think about anything else.

  “I don’t like this,” she’d warned, when Sam explained her plan. “Making Teddy jealous is a terrible reason to go out with someone. And has Marshall considered what the tabloids will say about him, once you announce your so-called relationship?”

  Nina’s skin prickled at the thought of all the vile things people had written about her. Sure, Marshall was wealthy and noble, so he wouldn’t get the “tacky commoner” or “she’s a nobody from nowhere” comments that had chased Nina. But he would still be a person of color publicly dating a member of the royal family.

  Sam’s expression had softened at Nina’s words. “We talked about that, actually. Marshall told me he’s okay with it.”

  “Then he doesn’t realize how ugly it’s going to get,” Nina had snapped.

  It wasn’t just about Marshall, although Nina did think he’d signed on for more than he’d bargained for. Nina was also worried about her friend.

  Sam was incapable of doing anything halfway. She threw her whole heart into every decision she made, and it usually ended up hurting her. Pretending to date Marshall could only cause her pain.

  Nina’s thoughts were interrupted as a group of rowdy, jostling boys spilled out the doors of Rutledge House. Ignoring their laughter, she slid her phone back into her purse, only to pause at the sound of her name.

  “Nina—hey!” Ethan detached himself from the group and crossed the street to meet her. He took in her outfit and smiled. “I should have known you’d be at Gatsby Night. You can’t resist the chance to live out a novel.”

  Nina shook her head, causing her feathered headpiece to slip lower on her brow. “Actually, I don’t like The Great Gatsby all that much.”

  “Really?”

  “Jay plans his entire life around Daisy, and she’s not even that great!” Nina exclaimed. “What kind of relationship is that? In real life, no one would make the person they loved social climb to prove their worth.”

  A shadow darkened Ethan’s eyes, but he just glanced down the road. The streetlamps cast pools of lemony light on the pavement. “Are you waiting for someone?”

  “Actually, I was just heading home—”

  “Let me walk you.”

  Before she could say anything, Ethan was jogging back over to the group of guys. “I need to walk my friend home,” she heard him say, and for some reason the term startled her. But why should it? She and Ethan were friends. What else could they be?

  They started back toward the freshman dorms in a companionable silence. The familiar spires and faux-Gothic towers of campus always looked slightly different at night. Nina would catch herself noticing details she’d never seen before—a weeping stone angel, a wisp-thin row of trees—and wondering if they’d always been there, or had only sprung to life now that the sun had set. She hugged her arms around her chest, surprisingly glad that Ethan had come with her.

  He glanced over, catching the motion, and picked up his pace. “Are you cold?”

  “Yeah,” Nina said, though she felt something else, too: a subdued, half-eager feeling that she didn’t dare examine closely.

  Ethan’s phone buzzed, breaking the silence. When he glanced at the screen, a funny expression—excited and uncertain and wary all at the same time—flickered over his features. He declined the call, then typed out a quick text, holding the phone so Nina couldn’t see it.

  “You can take that if you want,” she felt the need to say, but Ethan shook his head.

  “It’s fine.”

  Something about his tone made Nina wonder if the call had been from a girl—if Ethan had planned to see someone else tonight, and instead was here with her. It was a strange, but not unpleasant, thought.

  They reached the entrance to Nina’s dorm. This was the very spot where Jeff had kissed her, the night they were spotted and the photo ended up in the tabloids.

  Pushing those memories aside, Nina fumbled in her purse, just as Ethan’s stomach emitted a loud growl.

  “You hungry?” she asked, laughing.

  He gave an unselfconscious shrug. “I could eat.”

  “Thanks for walking me home.” She pushed open the door to her entryway, and to her surprise, Ethan followed her inside, heading up the stairs in her wake.

  “What kind of pizza do you like?” he asked, tapping at his phone. His eyes sparkled with mischief, in a way that almost reminded Nina of Sam.

  “It’s okay, I don’t want any,” she said unconvincingly.

  “Pizza isn’t a want; it’s a need.” Ethan paused, his gaze searching hers. “Unless you want me to go.”

  Well…friends were allowed to late-night eat together, weren’t they?

  “Pizza sounds delicious,” she amended. “Mushroom, please.”

  He let out an indignant breath. “It’s a pizza, not a salad. I’ll get pepperoni.”

  “If you weren’t going to listen, why did you bother asking?”

  “Because I assumed you had better taste than to want vegetables. Fine,” he compromised, “we’ll do half and half.”

  Nina unlocked her door. Ethan immediately went to sit in her desk chair, tipping it back onto its hind legs. He glanced around her room, his eyes resting on each detail in turn—the collage of photos above the bed, the lip balms and pens scattered over her desk—as if he was trying to figure her out. Nina suddenly longed to know what conclusions he’d drawn.

  “It’s funny,” Ethan mused. “Of all the people we knew, you were the last one I expected to come to school here.”

  Nina climbed onto her bed, pulling a blanket over her lap. “Really?”

  “I guess I always thought you’d go to school far away. Out of the country, even.” Ethan sighed. “Sometimes I wish I had.”

  “It’s not too late. You can do a semester abroad somewhere,” she pointed out.

  “But in the meantime, I’m still here, still…” He gave a shrug, as if to say, Still tied up in the lives of the royal family.

  “Where would you go? London?”

  “Why do you assume that? Because I wouldn’t need a foreign language?” At Nina’s guilty look, Ethan chuckled. “I’ll have you know, I do speak Spanish.”

  “So, Salamanca?”

  Ethan’s eyes slanted away, as if he wasn’t quite certain he wanted to share this. “Actually,” he mumbled, “if I studied abroad, I always secretly wanted it to be in Venice.”

  “Venice?” Nina blinked, startled. “That’s where I’ve always wanted to go.”

  “Because it’s the city of romance?”

  “You’re thinking of Paris.” She leaned onto one hand, tracing the waffle pattern of her blanket. “I’ve always been fascinated by Venice. The whole city is sinking, settling down into the water one centimeter at a time. There’s nothing anyone can do to stop it, so they just keep going about their business as normal. As a tourist you feel lost in it all, but it doesn’t really matter because every road in the city leads back to the piazza. And eventually you’ll find your way back there, to sit at a café and watch the sun set over the water…”

  “I didn’t realize you’ve been to Venice,” Ethan said slowly, and Nina felt her face grow hot.

  “I haven’t. I’ve just read about it.”

  A knock sounded on the door: their pizza delivery. Nina answered it, then turned back to Ethan, the box in one hand. “You might as well sit over here,” she surprised herself by offering.

&nbs
p; “Sure.” Ethan flopped easily onto the bed, then shifted so that he sat facing her, the pizza box balanced picnic-style between them. Nina almost groaned aloud as she bit into her slice.

  “I told you that you wanted pizza.” Ethan sounded inordinately pleased with himself. He’d already inhaled his first slice and was grabbing a second.

  Nina tried, and failed, to conceal her amusement. “I hate to contribute to your oversized sense of self-importance, but yes, you were right.”

  She hadn’t expected it to feel so natural, sitting here with Ethan, on her bed.

  “So,” he asked, “why didn’t you go to school in Venice, if you’ve read so many books about it that it sounds like you have been there?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe…” This was hard to admit, but Nina forced herself to say it. “Maybe I was being cowardly. I’ve never traveled that far from home before.” She folded her pizza over on itself so she could take another bite. “It’s okay. Venice isn’t sinking all that fast; it won’t have changed much by the time I get to see it.”

  “But that’s not the point of studying abroad,” Ethan argued. “You don’t go to Venice because it’s changing; you go because you would change, living there. When you came home you would see everything in a new light. You would notice things—and people—that you hadn’t paid attention to before.”

  There was a significance to his words that made Nina wonder if he was talking about the two of them. If he noticed her, now, even though he hadn’t before.

  She set the half-empty pizza box on the edge of her desk. “That was…surprisingly profound, for a late-night pizza conversation.”

  “Pizza and philosophy, my two specialties.” Ethan grabbed her pillow and placed it behind his head, then leaned back with a contented sigh.

  “You can’t steal my pillow!” Nina cried out.

  “I need it more than you do. My head weighs more,” he argued. “It’s full of beer and profound thoughts.”

  She tried to pull at the corner, but it didn’t budge. “A gentleman would never do this,” she scolded, laughing.