American Royals

by Katharine McGee

  She made a concerted effort for a while—looking up at Michael through lowered lashes, laughing at his jokes even when they weren’t funny—but her heart wasn’t in it.

  “Sam, can I talk to you for a minute?”

  Beatrice had come to stand behind her, uncharacteristically alone.

  “Of course,” Sam replied, curious. She followed Beatrice to a corner of the colonnaded terrace, behind a towering spray of white peonies in a cut-glass vase. A young man in the uniform of the Revere Guard shadowed their movements, eventually settling along the edge of the ballroom.

  “What happened to your other Guard? The tall, dreamy one?” Sam didn’t recognize Beatrice’s new security detail.

  “Connor?” Her sister let out a strange breath that was almost a laugh, her voice higher-pitched than normal. “He’ll be back. He was just on temporary leave.”

  Something was different about Beatrice tonight. The moonlight struck living sparks from the prongs of her tiara, cast a pale glow over her face. She looked softer and more beautiful than Sam had ever seen her.

  Beatrice glanced around their surroundings, making sure no one could overhear. Then she leaned in close. “I’m calling off the engagement,” she said abruptly.

  “What? But—why?”

  “You were right; Teddy and I aren’t in love. We shouldn’t make this kind of commitment, not when there are other people out there for us. People we could fall in love with,” she added, with a significant glance toward Sam.

  “What about everything you said, about how you need to get married before—” Sam stopped herself from saying before Dad dies, but Beatrice understood.

  “I’m going to talk to Dad tonight, as soon as I can get a minute alone with him. I know he won’t be thrilled,” she admitted. “But hopefully he’ll come to understand.”

  Sam glanced back toward the ballroom. At all those hundreds of people, who’d come to celebrate the love story of Beatrice and Teddy.

  “You’re sure?” she whispered. The wind howled in her ears, drowning out the laughter and gossip of the party. “You’re really going to tell the world that you’ve changed your mind?”

  Beatrice shook her head with an irrepressible smile. “Who cares what the world thinks? The only people whose opinions should count right now are our family’s and Teddy’s.”

  It was such an un-Beatrice answer that Sam could only blink, speechless.

  The wind tugged more insistently at the skirts of their gowns, pulling the pins in their hair. Still neither of them moved.

  “I can’t believe you would do this for me,” Sam managed at last.

  “I’m doing this for us. There’s so much that you and I can’t control about our lives, being who we are, but there’s no reason we should have to make this kind of sacrifice.”

  That was when Samantha knew.

  “You’re seeing someone else,” she guessed.

  The expression on Beatrice’s face—surprise and nervousness at being caught out, but most of all a bright, beaming excitement—was confirmation enough.

  “Promise me you won’t say anything until I’ve talked to Dad.”

  Sam wanted to take her sister’s hands and squeal in excitement. To think that careful, duty-bound Beatrice had been carrying on a clandestine love affair. “Who is it? Anyone I know?”

  Beatrice’s smile faltered. “You’ve met him, yes,” she said slowly.

  “Is he here tonight?”

  When Beatrice nodded, Sam glanced breathlessly back toward the party, wondering which of the young men inside was her sister’s secret boyfriend.

  “It’s not going to be easy,” Beatrice said hesitantly. “This guy … he isn’t as eminently suitable as Teddy.”

  “Few people are.” Sam tried to make a joke of it.

  “He’s a commoner.”

  Sam blinked in shock. Now she understood why Beatrice had asked all those weird questions about Aunt Margaret. She wanted to know what would happen if she couldn’t stomach marriage to any of the young men on their parents’ list. If she followed her heart instead.

  “I know,” Beatrice went on, reading Sam’s expression. “It’s less than ideal. What can I do?”

  “You’ll figure it out. Just … one step at a time. Focus on getting out of your engagement with Teddy first, before you try to get into another one.” Sam tried to sound encouraging.

  She had no idea how her sister was going to manage something as utterly unprecedented as marrying a commoner.

  Beatrice sighed. “I’m not really looking forward to sharing the news with Dad. Or with the media. I wonder what the protocol is, for breaking off a royal engagement. Has that even happened before?”

  “Oh, sure!” Sam exclaimed. “In the nineteenth century more weddings were called off than actually took place. It happened all the time when political alliances shifted.”

  “Great. I’ll tell Dad we can look back at Edward I’s broken engagement as a precedent.” Beatrice gave a strangled laugh, then fell silent. “The people are going to hate me for a while.”

  “Maybe,” Sam conceded. “Or maybe they’ll be proud of you for knowing your own mind, and being brave enough to put a stop to all of this.”

  Beatrice nodded, though she didn’t seem convinced.

  Sam’s eyes drifted back toward the ballroom. “Does Teddy know yet?”

  She remembered Teddy’s remark when he told her that Beatrice had proposed: You can’t say no to the future queen. He would never have been able to break their engagement himself—not with the fate of his family, his entire community, on his shoulders.

  But if Beatrice called it off, there was nothing the Eatons could say in protest.

  Sam’s sister shook her head. The golden light from the party played over her profile, gleaming on one of her earrings, casting the other half of her face in shadow. “You’re the first person I’ve told.”

  She might be overstepping, but Sam had to ask. “Could I be the one to tell him?”

  “I thought he deserved to hear it from me …,” Beatrice began, then seemed to change her mind at the expression on Sam’s face. She smiled with unmistakable relief. “Come to think of it, maybe you should be the one to tell him. Isn’t it the maid of honor’s job to handle wedding complications?” She said it lightly, as if calling off the wedding of the century was nothing more than a garden-variety complication.

  Sam threw her arms around her sister. “Thank you.”

  And despite her efforts to avoid Teddy all night, despite the fact that she’d just spent the last ten minutes out here on the terrace, Sam realized that she knew exactly where he was.

  He stood near the edge of the dance floor, surrounded by a semicircle of well-wishers. Sam beelined toward him. She felt suddenly like she was floating, like an infectious fizzy joy had lifted her off this planet altogether and she would never come back down.

  Teddy glanced up in surprise. He clearly hadn’t expected Sam to seek him out tonight. Neither had she, until now.

  “Beatrice wants to see you. I think to take more photos,” she announced loudly. Then she angled her head away from the crowd, so that only he could read her lips. Coatroom, five minutes, she mouthed, and sashayed away before he could question her.

  He was there in four.

  She’d been pacing back and forth in her anxiety—well, pacing wasn’t the right word given the confines of the space; she could only take one step in each direction. She kept thinking of the last time she’d been in here with Teddy: at the Queen’s Ball, back when she’d still been the heedless girl who chugged a beer in a coat closet. Back when all she’d known about him was his name and the warmth of his smile.

  “I shouldn’t have come.” Teddy stood uncertainly in the doorway.

  “What are you, a vampire that needs to be invited over the threshold?” Sam tugged him inside, shutting the door behind him. “It’s okay, I promise.”

  “Sam, no.” He retreated a step, his hand already on the doorknob. His code of honor s
truck Samantha as something rare and fine, a remnant from a previous century.

  “Beatrice is going to break off the engagement.”

  Sam was alert to his response, so even in the darkness she saw Teddy’s stunned, wide-eyed expression. He let his hand fall slowly from the door. “What?”

  “She’s calling off the wedding,” Sam said again.

  “Did she tell you why?”

  “Because she loves someone else.”

  “Ah,” Teddy breathed. “I thought she might.”

  “You … what?”

  He shifted his weight, causing the lush furs behind him to rustle and sway with the movement. Sam forced herself to stay still, though every atom of her body buzzed with his nearness.

  “There were times when Beatrice got a distracted look on her face. And I knew she must be thinking of something else—or someone else,” Teddy said slowly, and shrugged. “She never smiled like that about me.”

  “Teddy …” If only there were a light in here—she needed to see him better, try to figure out what he was thinking.

  “Not that I blame her,” Teddy went on, his voice rough and unreadable. “Since I was doing exactly the same thing.”

  He was talking about her—wasn’t he?

  It took every ounce of Sam’s self-control not to venture closer. “So you aren’t disappointed?”

  “Honestly? I feel relieved. And happy for your sister, that she’s found someone she loves. She deserves that.”

  The cloakroom was very quiet, as still as the sumptuous furs that hung around them. Sam felt hyperaware of every inch of darkness that separated her from Teddy.

  His voice cut through the silence. “What happens next?”

  “Beatrice is going to talk to our dad tonight, tell him her decision. Then I’m sure they’ll get Robert involved, figure out the best way to break the news—he’ll probably make you do another interview, or maybe a press conference. And you’ll have to give back all the presents stacked in that room. And cancel next weekend’s cake tasting,” Sam added, in that nervous rambling way of hers. “I was really looking forward to that.”

  “Samantha. I meant what happens next for us.”

  Sam swallowed. She felt suddenly like she’d melted, like she was nothing but lightning encased in skin.

  “Last time we were here, you said that you refused to take orders from me.”

  “That depends on the order.”

  “Well, I was hoping that you would kiss me, but since I can’t command you, I guess I’ll have to—”

  Her next words were silenced as Teddy lowered his mouth to hers.

  It no longer seemed to matter that Sam couldn’t see him—that he was darkness, and she was darkness, and darkness swirled all around them. Because everything in the world had narrowed to that single point of contact. To the searing feeling of Teddy’s mouth on hers.

  She hooked her arms around his shoulders and yanked him closer. Teddy reached under her curls to cradle the base of her neck, his other hand slipping around her waist. Sam’s breath caught in her throat. They stumbled back onto the furs, and Teddy knocked his head against a shelf, but not even that broke apart their kiss.

  “We should get back,” Teddy whispered at last, his breath warm in her ear.

  Sam nipped one last time at his lower lip, just because she could. She felt rather than saw him smile against her skin.

  “If we must,” she said dramatically, and forced herself to step back. She was dangerously close to dragging Teddy up to her bedroom, no matter the consequences.

  “Sam.” Teddy ran a hand through his hair, a shadow against the dark. “I’m sorry for the way this all happened. It hasn’t been especially fair to you.”

  “It hasn’t been fair to any of us.” Sam thought of Beatrice, cornered by their dad into proposing when she didn’t really mean it.

  “I like you,” Teddy said baldly. “In Telluride, I kept wishing that I could hit pause—keep spending time with you, learning more about you. What I’m trying to say is, you deserve better than this. Than hiding with me in a coatroom.”

  His words warmed her. “I do wish it was a bit more spacious,” she teased, but he didn’t take the bait.

  “I just … I would hate to cause problems for you, with your family.”

  Whatever happened, Sam knew that she and Beatrice would be in it together. “What about you and your family?” she asked, deflecting.

  Teddy heaved a quiet breath. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I hope we can figure something out. If we don’t, I guess I’ll learn what it’s like to lose everything.”

  “Not everything. You’ll still have me.”

  Sam felt for his hand, and Teddy gripped it hard.

  “We’re going to have to give people time, you know,” he said. “Neither of us comes out looking very good here. I’ll be the guy dating his ex-fiancée’s sister, and you’re the maid of honor dating the former groom.”

  “They’ll get over it eventually. Stranger things have happened when it comes to royal weddings,” Sam declared, with more confidence than she felt.

  “Such as?”

  “Louis XIV had an affair with his brother’s wife. Henry VIII married his brother’s wife.” Sam laughed. “You’ve also got the medieval king Hardecanute—that means ‘Tough Knot’—who died of drunkenness at a wedding feast. I’m serious,” she insisted, at Teddy’s skeptical look. “He literally drank himself to death!”

  “I believe you.” Teddy was clearly fighting back his amusement.

  “Are you laughing at me?”

  “Never,” he said quickly. “I’m just thinking about how difficult it’s going to be, being with you. Difficult and unpredictable and never, ever boring.”

  She flushed in pleased self-consciousness.

  “Okay—why don’t I go out first, and then you wait a couple of minutes, just in case. Meet me near the bar?” Teddy suggested.

  Sam nodded as he slipped out the door. Only a few seconds had passed before she darted out into the hallway, the hem of her dress dragging on the floor as she caught up.

  “Oh—Teddy!” she cried out, with studied nonchalance. “I’m so glad I ran into you!”

  “I thought we agreed that you were waiting a couple of minutes,” he whispered, though he was grinning.

  “Let me have my way, just this once.”

  “I have a feeling it’s never going to be just this once with you,” Teddy answered. “Though I have to say, I’m okay with it.”

  DAPHNE

  Daphne was chatting with the Countess of Cincinnati when Nina ducked past the doors to the ballroom. She looked pale and slightly shaken, though she wasn’t crying. Daphne felt grudgingly impressed by that.

  She watched Nina cast one last lingering glance over the party, as if committing it all to memory, then leave in a swish of gray glass beads.

  Daphne looked over at her mother, flush with victory. Rebecca had been right after all: the way to break them up had always been through Nina, rather than Jefferson. Rebecca met Daphne’s gaze and cut her eyes meaningfully toward the prince.

  But Daphne wasn’t about to rush. The last thing she wanted was for Jefferson to feel pursued.

  It wasn’t until the night was winding toward a close—the crowds at the bar thinning, the dance floor slowing down—that she went to find him.

  Jefferson was, predictably, in the Reynolds Room: a small chamber down the hall from the ballroom. Its windows were lined with persimmon drapes, a massive couch curled up before them like some great sleeping animal. In the corner stood a built-in bar. It was rarely staffed, though on one occasion Daphne had seen the king himself back there, mixing martinis.

  The prince sat on a gleaming barstool, his body slumped forward, his elbows propped on the bar. An expensive bottle of scotch lay before him. There were shelves of crystal tumblers along the wall, but tonight it seemed like the prince had dispensed with the niceties and was drinking straight from the bottle.

  Daphne pulled
the door shut behind her, and the sounds of the party were rapidly cut off.

  Jefferson barely glanced up at her arrival. “Oh, hey.”

  “Rough night?” she asked sympathetically, undeterred by his tone. She’d always been able to charm Jefferson out of a maudlin drunk mood. “Looks like you could use a friend.”

  “What I could really use is a drinking buddy.”

  Daphne pulled herself onto the barstool next to him. “Where’s Samantha? She was a fantastic drinking buddy in Telluride.”

  She saw Jefferson’s flicker of recognition. “That’s right. Weren’t you two taking shots?”

  It was nice to know that he still couldn’t look away from her, even if he wanted to. “Who, me?” Daphne asked, with false innocence. She kicked off her rhinestone-studded heels and hooked her feet over the lower rung of the barstool. “What are we drinking?”

  He slid the scotch toward her, something challenging in his attitude, as if he didn’t really expect her to join in.

  “Cheers,” Daphne said lightly. The bottle felt heavy in her hand. She took a long sip, then set it on the bar, slowly and with some style.

  Now she had the prince’s attention.

  “Everything okay?” Her gauzy champagne-colored dress cascaded around her as she leaned forward. In that moment, Daphne knew, everything about her seemed soft and angelic, from the pale curve of her neck to her rose-colored lips to her fingernails, painted a translucent pink.

  Jefferson heaved a sigh. “You’ve probably heard, but Nina broke up with me tonight.”

  “No,” Daphne breathed. “I hadn’t heard.”

  He shot her a curious glance. “She said some pretty weird things about you, actually. She accused you of sending the paparazzi to her dorm, to break the story about us.”

  Daphne let her mouth fall open in a perfect O of shock. “I had no idea that you guys were dating. Let alone what dorm she lives in,” she said, with a confused laugh. “Besides, I would never do something like that. You know how much I hate the press.”

  “That’s what I told her. But … where would Nina get an idea like that?”

  Daphne sensed his uncertainty. And she had known this was coming—that Nina would fling accusations about her to the prince. Which was why she’d come prepared.