Majesty

by Katharine McGee

  Seeing Sam’s expression, Beatrice stepped forward. The great volume of her gown moved with her, its hem hissing smoothly over the floor. “Is something wrong?”

  “Marshall. We…got in a fight before the wedding.”

  Beatrice put her hands on her sister’s back, giving her a gentle push. “Well then, what are you waiting for? He’s probably still here.”

  * * *

  Sam rushed through the sea of people flooding the halls. Now that Robert had confirmed the wedding wasn’t taking place—at least, not today—the guests seemed eager to get outside, as if they still didn’t quite trust that the palace was safe. When Sam didn’t see Marshall in the crowds, she stumbled out onto the front portico.

  And there he was, about to step into one of the palace’s courtesy cars.

  “Marshall!” She hurried forward, still wearing her narrow-cut ivory dress. “I need to talk to you!”

  His head darted up at the sound of her voice. “Sam, no.”

  There was only one thing for her to do.

  Sam ran around the front of the car to the driver’s side. She hoped she wasn’t visible to the flocks of people gathered outside the palace gates, murmuring confusedly about the wedding.

  “Get out,” she commanded the chauffeur.

  “Your Royal Highness, I’m sorry, but I can’t.”

  Sam drew herself up taller, adopting the imperious, queenly tone she’d heard Beatrice use. “That was a direct order.”

  Startled into submission, the driver stepped out of the car. The keys were in the ignition, the motor already rumbling.

  Sam looked up in time to see Caleb hurtling down the front steps of the palace in pursuit. “Sorry,” she called out, before getting in the car and throwing her foot on the accelerator.

  “Sam!” Marshall shouted from the backseat. “What are you doing?”

  She tore down the front drive, reaching to frantically adjust the mirrors. Marshall tried to throw his door open, but Sam had enabled the child lock.

  “Buckle your seat belt,” she informed him. “We’re going for a drive.”

  Technically Sam didn’t have a license; she’d never passed the parallel parking section of the driver’s test. She was only allowed to drive her Jeep—which she’d lovingly named Albert—on the country roads near Sulgrave, and only if her car was at the center of a formation, with a black security vehicle in front and another behind.

  Driving in the capital, without her Guard, was definitely illegal. But it was too late to worry about that.

  Sam whipped around another corner. Metro stops and colored pennants passed by in a blur. She wasn’t really sure where she was going except that she wanted to get as far from the palace as possible.

  “Sam, you have to pull over!”

  “I just wanted to talk,” she said reasonably, as if it were totally normal for her to commandeer one of the palace vehicles.

  Marshall let out a huff of protest. “I have nothing to say to you.”

  “Good, because you’re not the one who’s going to do the talking. You’re going to listen.” Sam’s hands tightened over the wheel as she blasted through a yellow light. The windows were tinted, so no one could look through and realize that the wild driver speeding down Cumberland Street was next in line to the throne.

  “Look, it’s true that I had a crush on Teddy,” she admitted. “I kissed him last year at the Queen’s Ball, before he even met my sister.”

  In the rearview mirror, she saw Marshall grit his teeth. “This isn’t exactly helping,” he pointed out, but Sam forged ahead.

  “When Teddy got engaged to Beatrice, I felt…angry, and rejected. I’m not proud of this, but I asked you to start dating me out of spite. Because I wanted to hurt Teddy as badly as he’d hurt me.

  “Then you and I started acting like a couple, and at some point I stopped thinking about Teddy altogether. I really like you, Marshall, and it killed me that we were pretending. Before I met you, I never gave any thought to the guys I hooked up with. It was always just meaningless—”

  “Still not helping,” he cut in, and she winced.

  “What I mean is, things with you are different. So different that it scares me. Last weekend in the carriage…” They pulled up to a stoplight, and she risked a glance back at Marshall. “I thought we had agreed that it wasn’t fake anymore. That we meant it.”

  “That was before I knew you were using me to get your sister’s fiancé!”

  “I didn’t want him!” Sam burst out. “You have to understand, I never actually wanted Teddy. I just wanted him to choose me over Beatrice.”

  “You’re not making sense,” Marshall insisted, though his tone was slightly less caustic than before.

  “I’ve always been jealous of Beatrice.” Sam kept her eyes straight ahead; they were somewhere in the financial district now, monolithic office buildings rising up on either side of the road. “I fixated on Teddy, because it was easier to think about him than the fact that Beatrice is the future queen and I’m the useless one.”

  “You’re not useless,” Marshall said heavily.

  “I would say that I wish I could take it all back, but that’s not true,” she concluded. “Because if I hadn’t asked you to fake a relationship with me—no matter how messed-up my reasons were—I would never have realized that I want to be with you for real.”

  There was a protracted silence. Sam swallowed. It would be okay, she told herself; at least she’d tried.

  Then she heard the click of Marshall unfastening his seat belt. He braced a hand on the front seat and began climbing up over the central console.

  “Seriously?” Sam veered wildly into the other lane, just barely managing to avoid colliding with a taxi. A chorus of angry horns shouted at them.

  “Sorry.” Marshall lowered himself into the passenger seat. “But if we’re really having this conversation, then I need to be able to see your face.”

  “I—okay.”

  “Sam, did you really mean everything you just said?” he asked.

  She darted a fearful glance over, but couldn’t read his expression. “Of course I meant it,” she told him. “I’m done with pretending, or performing. And I understand if you can’t forgive me. I just…I needed to say all of this, before you ran off to Orange and I never saw you again.”

  Marshall turned to look out his window. For a heart-wrenching moment Sam thought he was done with her; and she steeled herself to say goodbye.

  “Pull in there.” He gestured to a blue sign down the block that read PUBLIC GARAGE.

  “What? Why?”

  “Because,” Marshall said, and now there was a note of frustration in his voice, “I can’t kiss you properly while you’re driving, and we already went through this in the carriage, and god help me, why do we keep having these conversations in moving vehicles?”

  It was the worst driving of Sam’s life. She cut across a lane of traffic, then bumped over a curb as she pulled into the garage—driving only with her left hand as her right reached hungrily for Marshall. She found a spot on the second level and pulled in diagonally, wrenching the car into park and killing the engine.

  They were both out of their seat belts in an instant. The car’s interior lights dimmed, and the parking garage was shadowed, but the darkness didn’t slow them down. Sam leaned so far in to Marshall that she was almost in his lap, throwing her arms around his neck to hold him tight. “Oh my god,” she whispered, laughing, “where are we?”

  “I really don’t care,” Marshall replied, leaning over the central console to kiss her.

  His hands tangled in her hair. Sam made a pleading, anguished sound low in her throat, a sound she’d never heard herself make before. She grabbed Marshall’s shoulders and pulled him impatiently forward—

  The car’s horn blared, loud and angry, into the interior o
f the garage.

  They broke apart, laughing and breathless and utterly unselfconscious. Sam glanced up and saw that Caleb was standing behind the car, his arms crossed. He’d clearly tailed them in one of the other palace cars. His jaw was set in what he probably thought was a stern expression, but Sam saw the amused fondness beneath.

  She shifted, and the seams of her ivory dress dug into the side of her body. She wondered, suddenly, what came next.

  For months her attention had been fixated on this day. First because she’d resented Teddy and Beatrice, and then because it had become a deadline—because she and Marshall had only ever agreed that he would be her wedding date, and she hadn’t known what would happen once the wedding was over.

  “So…we’re okay?” she asked, because she needed to hear him say it aloud.

  “We’re okay.” Marshall shook his head, his eyes dancing with amusement. “I can’t be angry about your ridiculous quest to make Eaton jealous. Not when it’s the reason we found each other.”

  Relief flooded Sam’s chest. “What now?” she asked. How did you start dating someone for real, when your entire relationship had been for show? Did you have to rewind all the way back to the first date?

  Marshall glanced over as if he heard the thoughts swirling through her brain. He reached out a hand and Sam took it, lacing their fingers.

  “I was thinking, do you want to come back to Orange this summer?” he asked. “There’s so much we still haven’t done—I want to take you hiking and to the beach in Malibu, and Rory says she wants to hang out. She’s a big fan of yours,” he added, and smiled.

  Sam’s heart lifted, but then she remembered the promise she’d just made.

  “Actually…Beatrice wants me to do a royal tour for her. To take over the one that she and Teddy were supposed to go on.”

  She’d revealed more than she’d intended to with that statement, but she knew she could trust Marshall. He nodded, not pressing her for details.

  “Of course you should go,” he agreed. “But your tour will pass through Orange, won’t it?”

  “I think so.” If it didn’t, Sam thought, she would just have to add a few tour stops.

  “Then I can’t wait to show you around.” Marshall’s eyes glinted with mischief as he opened the passenger door. “In the meantime, can you switch spots with me? Don’t take this the wrong way, but you’re a terrible driver.”

  “I know,” Sam agreed. “When we cruise to Malibu, you can be the one to drive.”

  Marshall laughed at that, bracing a hand on the console as he pulled her into one more rushed, rough kiss.

  “What was that for?” she asked, a bit dazed, when they broke apart.

  Marshall looked at her as if it were obvious. “Because you’re you, Sam, and I’m completely crazy about you.”

  Because you’re you. She was struck by the utter simplicity of it.

  “I’m crazy about you, too, Marshmallow.”

  He made a sharp sound of protest. “Marshmallow?”

  “I thought it was time you had a nickname of your own.” Sam smiled at him. “Don’t let it go to your head.”

  Nina clattered down the steps that led to the palace’s back lawn. A few dozen yards away, at the end of a flagstone path, stood the royal family’s garage. Technically Nina wasn’t allowed inside, but no way could she face the front driveway right now, filled with outraged guests and bewildered drivers and anxious crowds pressing against the front gates.

  She knew how to get into the locked closet where the valets kept the keys. And Sam wouldn’t mind if Nina borrowed her car.

  “Nina, wait up!”

  She stumbled at the sound of Ethan’s voice, though she shouldn’t have been surprised. Of course he’d found her; he, too, knew all the exits from the palace, knew exactly how she could get out when she felt cornered and trapped.

  When she didn’t turn around, he began running down the stone steps after her. “Are you okay?” he called out, with unmistakable concern.

  She planted a heel and whirled around, her hair flying into her eyes. “Just leave me alone!”

  Ethan blinked. She hated him for looking so gorgeous in his tuxedo. Sunlight caught the deep purple-black of his hair, which curled a little at the base of his neck. “What happened?”

  “Daphne happened! Your secret girlfriend or ex-girlfriend or whatever she is! By the way, she’s the one who told that reporter about us.”

  “I know,” Ethan said quietly. Nina felt a momentary rush of satisfaction that he believed her—unlike Jeff, who’d refused to hear a word against Daphne—but it quickly evaporated.

  “Please, let me explain.” Ethan hurried down the remaining steps toward her. “Don’t run away because Daphne scared you.”

  “Scared?” Nina repeated, stung. “I’m angry as hell, and I feel betrayed. Don’t make the mistake of confusing that for fear.”

  Ethan faltered, chastened. Sunlight fell over the planes of his face, caught the amber flecks in his eyes. She swallowed, wishing she didn’t have to ask this next question.

  “Did you ask me out only because Daphne told you to?”

  He was silent for a moment, then gave a quick, pained nod. At Nina’s expression, he rushed to explain.

  “Look—Daphne did ask me to flirt with you. She worried that if you spent too much time around Jeff, you guys would get back together. So she wanted me to run interference. But, Nina, I never—”

  “Why would she ask you?” Nina cut in. “What made her think that you would do what she said? She claims you’ve been in love with her for years!”

  Ethan closed his eyes. “I was in love with her for years.”

  He’d whispered the words, yet Nina heard each syllable as if he’d shouted them. She flinched away, horrified. “How could you ever have feelings for Daphne? She’s awful!”

  “She’s done a lot of awful things,” Ethan agreed, and Nina couldn’t help noticing the way he’d shifted her wording.

  She was seized by a nauseating sensation of déjà vu. This was exactly what had happened at Beatrice’s engagement party, when she’d tried to talk to Jeff about Daphne. Except this time it was almost worse, because Ethan knew what Daphne had done, and still he was defending her.

  “Nina, please don’t blame me for things that happened in my past. It isn’t fair,” Ethan protested. “I’m not proud of my original reasons for hanging out with you. But everything is different now! I’m different!”

  “If you spent time with me just because Daphne said to, then you aren’t that different at all.” Outraged pride flamed in Nina’s cheeks. “How can you possibly have loved her?”

  “I thought we were the same—”

  “Because you both move people around like pieces on your own personal chessboard?”

  Ethan winced, stuffing his hands awkwardly into his pockets. “Because we were both on the outside, and wanted in,” he said miserably. “I saw Daphne’s energy, how single-mindedly she went after the things she wanted. It’s the same determination that I’ve always had. Or used to have,” he added, more softly. “Nina, you know how much I’ve always wanted to belong.”

  “So when Daphne asked you to ‘run interference’ ”—Nina angrily lifted her hands to make air quotes around the phrase—“why did you agree? You didn’t stop to think that I’m a real person, with feelings?”

  “First of all, I never thought it would go this far, okay? I figured I would hang out with you a couple of times, just to prove that I had. I hardly knew you back then—the only thing I remembered about you was that you could be a know-it-all.” Ethan gave a helpless shrug. “But you surprised me, Nina. You weren’t at all what I thought you were, and I kept wanting to know more about you.”

  Nina hated the way her mind kept sifting back through her memories. How many of them were real?

  She c
rossed her arms, feeling cold despite the sunlight. “That night when you walked me home, and we kissed,” she heard herself say. “Was Daphne the one who called you?”

  “I—yeah,” Ethan admitted. “It was Daphne.”

  Nina tugged at her neckline, wishing she could get out of this prison of a dress. “So you were thinking of her the whole time.”

  “I was thinking of you!”

  At the raw urgency in his tone, she fell silent. Ethan swallowed and continued.

  “I was thinking that I don’t deserve you,” he said quietly. “Nina, I’m not as confident as you. I wasn’t able to grow up alongside the royals without always feeling like I was less than they were, like I had something to prove. I guess I thought that if I kept moving, kept focusing on the next thing—the next AP class, the next scholarship, the next upward rung in my ladder—eventually I would climb high enough.”

  “Climb where?” she exclaimed. “What did you want, Ethan?”

  “I wanted to feel like I deserved things. Like I had earned them myself, and had just as much right to them as everyone else.” By everyone else, Nina knew he meant Jeff.

  “But, Nina, you make me feel like I do deserve things. Not because of what I’ve accomplished, but because of who I am. I’ve never had anyone look at me the way you do—like you actually like me, as I am now, without excuses or complications,” he added. “You make me want to be a better person, just because I’m with you.”

  Nina’s heart was straining against her ribs. She glanced away, to where the leaves in the orchard flashed a brilliant gold in the sun. The fragrance of the apples mingled with the heady, earthy scent of last night’s rain.

  “How long?” When she saw Ethan’s confused look, she clarified. “How long were you obsessed with Daphne?”

  “A long time,” he said bluntly. “How long were you obsessed with Jeff?”

  She stiffened. “That isn’t fair.”

  “Maybe not. But, Nina, don’t you see? You and I belong together! No matter how foolish this is, no matter how many years we spent chasing other people, we found each other in the end. Please,” he added. “Don’t hold my past against me. You’re the one that I want. Not Daphne.”