by Ashlyn Kane
Flip probably shouldn’t. He had the distinct impression that tequila shots were the territory of frat boys and those who wished to be frat boys. But at some point in the past week, he’d gotten swept up in Brayden’s enthusiasm. If he was going to give it up tomorrow, he wanted to indulge tonight.
“All right. How does this work?”
Sven had disappeared back to wherever he came from. Brayden took a salt shaker and a small canister of cinnamon from his jacket pocket—Flip silently vowed never to tell Bernadette—and lined them up next to the plate. “North American or European style first, do you think?”
Flip considered. “The lemon will taste extra sour after orange, so North American first, to be as objective as possible.”
“Excellent choice.” Brayden poured a generous amount in each glass. “So the order for the North American tequila shot is take the salt, drink the tequila, bite the lemon wedge. But you can’t just dump salt in your mouth. You do it like this.” He brought his hand to his mouth, licked a stripe across the back of it, and upended the salt shaker over his damp skin.
Flip sucked in a sharp breath.
Brayden looked up through his eyelashes. “What, too uncouth for you?”
Flip had a sudden flash of Braden licking the back of his hand like that if he hesitated too long, and the back of his neck went hot. He copied Brayden’s actions almost defiantly.
“Now, in fairness,” Brayden said, demonstrating how to hold the lemon wedge in the hand with the salt, “this tequila is way too good for this kind of treatment. But they didn’t have any of the paint-stripping kind from my youth, so we’re improvising.”
“Because you’re so ancient,” Flip said dryly.
“My tequila days are many years ago now.” Brayden handed him one of the shot glasses, his expression daring Flip to disagree.
“People years?” Flip queried blandly.
Brayden snorted, and they both had to catch themselves before they had a repeat of the ice cream shop meltdown. “Shut up. Okay, are you ready?”
Probably not. Flip clinked his glass against Brayden’s. “Bottoms up.”
“You’re a menace,” Brayden said, pink-cheeked, and Flip realized the double entendre.
The salt on his tongue made his mouth water, but the tequila went down warm and smooth. The lemon, though, puckered his whole face until he had to shake his head to clear it. “Ugh.”
“Whew,” Brayden agreed and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “All right, well, I’m awake now. Your turn. How do we do this the European way?”
Flip spread the cinnamon sugar on the plate, rimmed the glasses, and poured the shots. “There’s no licking involved, I’m afraid.”
“I bet you’ve never done a body shot, huh?” Brayden sighed.
Flip almost dropped the bottle. He’d seen Brayden mostly naked, after all, and he was seeing him again now in his imagination, laid out on his back with a line of salt on his stomach—
No. He turned to hand Brayden his drink. “A gentleman doesn’t kiss and tell.”
“You’re not missing out on much. They’re mostly just messy.” Brayden threw back the tequila, hummed thoughtfully, and took his time with the orange. “I like that better. It wouldn’t work half as well with crappy tequila, though.”
Flip agreed and tried not to think about how getting messy with Brayden might not be so bad.
BRAYDEN would happily have spent the entirety of the evening in that back room with Flip, either shooting tequila or shooting the shit, but he knew they couldn’t. He made sure they exited the room one at a time—he could only imagine the field day the Lyngria tabloids would have if someone thought the crown prince had snuck out of the party for a quickie—and resigned himself to an evening of schmoozing and maybe another dance with Flip if he got lucky.
Unfortunately it turned out he had made the dangerous mistake of underestimating his fake boyfriend’s mother.
“Brayden,” she said smoothly as she glided over to him not twelve seconds after he left the storeroom, leaving him almost certain that she’d seen Flip exit a minute before him and that she 100 percent thought they’d been boning. “There you are. I’ve been hoping for a dance.”
Shovel talk! It’s a shovel talk! Abort! Abort! shouted Brayden’s hindbrain. But what was he going to do, run screaming from the queen at her own party? That seemed rude.
Dear Lord, if she’s going to murder me, please ask her to make it quick. Amen. “Of course,” he said, offering his hand and hoping his French accent wasn’t too provincial. Speaking with Bernadette was one thing; this was royalty. “Do you fox-trot?”
Queen Constance did, it turned out, fox-trot, and while Brayden didn’t enjoy dancing with her as much as he had with Flip, she also didn’t scoop out his liver with a rusty spoon, so he was calling it a win.
On the stage, one of the current scholarship students was belting a lively show-tune-type number, and Brayden easily led the queen through the steps. She didn’t offer much in the way of conversation until they were halfway through the dance, but perhaps she’d been lulling him into a false sense of security.
“You’re an excellent dancer,” she commented as he swung them expertly to avoid a collision with a skilled pair of dancers. “When did you learn?”
“Kindergarten, more or less.” He navigated them through an easy spin. “My grandmother had a dance studio, and I used to go there after school. Grandma figured I might as well do the lessons too.”
The queen tilted her head. “A shrewd woman.”
“She would take that as the highest compliment.”
She smiled. “How are you settling in this evening? You seemed out of sorts earlier.”
Ma’am, I was flat-out shitting my pants. He chose his words carefully. “To be honest, meeting Flip’s parents, who happen to be the queen and prince consort of a European country, and then being introduced to the rest of said country as their crown prince’s boyfriend was kind of a lot to handle in five minutes.” The song had come to the key change. It would be winding down soon, but not soon enough to get him out of this. “I should have agreed to meet you earlier, when he asked.”
“Why didn’t you?”
Shit, he shouldn’t have ad-libbed. Now he had to come up with an answer.
It shouldn’t have surprised him that the truth fell out. “Deep-seated commitment issues.” Fuuuuuck. No more drinking tonight. “It’s a long story. But I’m glad I’m here now.”
“Hmm,” said Queen Constance. “Me too.”
Oh God, she knows everything, Brayden thought, but fortunately the song ended, giving him an opportunity to escape. He bowed, and Her Majesty curtseyed and thanked him for the dance.
Brayden had sworn off more alcohol tonight, but he needed to do something with his mouth that wasn’t talk, so he wandered to the outskirts of the room, found a server with tiny plates of some unrecognizable hors d’oeuvre, and took three of them to the first unoccupied table he found.
He was halfway through the second hors d’oeuvre—some kind of fish egg with cheese on toast? With capers? He had no idea, but it was delicious—when he realized that, in fact, he wasn’t alone.
“Oh my God,” he said automatically in English before switching to French. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t see you there.”
The blonde girl in the corner couldn’t have been more than ten, and she was pushed as far into the corner as possible, as though she were becoming one with the wall. “It’s okay,” she said. “I’m used to it.”
Brayden pushed his plate toward her. “You want one of these? They’re weird but good.”
She looked like she wanted to say yes but thought she shouldn’t—fair, since she didn’t know Brayden from Adam. But eventually hunger won out and she pulled the plate in front of her. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” Brayden glanced around. Where was this kid’s guardian? Did nannies attend things like this? Or maybe they just posted security at all the exits and that was that? Or, shit, maybe she was
one of the scholarship kids. Somehow that was even more horrifying. “So. Why are you sitting in the corner?”
She picked a caper off the top of the sandwich thing and ate it. “Why are you?”
Ouch. This girl knew where to aim. “There are a lot of people here that I don’t know. And the people I do know are important and busy.”
Another caper. “Me too.”
“Well,” he said philosophically, “now we know each other. I’m Brayden.” He held his hand across the table.
She looked at him suspiciously and then wiped her hand on a linen napkin and shook. “Clara.”
Clara—Princess Clara? He decided it would be impolite to ask. “Nice to meet you, Clara.”
She ate another caper. He wondered if she’d deconstruct the entire thing and eat it in components, or if maybe she only liked the capers. “I saw you dancing with Flip. You’re a good dancer.”
That answered his question, mostly—if she was leaving the prince off Flip’s name, it was probably because she didn’t think of him that way. “Thank you. I had a lot of practice, starting when I was even younger than you.”
Clara considered the remains of the hors d’oeuvre and then took a bite of what remained more or less assembled. When she had swallowed, she fastidiously wiped her hands again. “Are you Flip’s boyfriend?”
“Uh… yeah. I am.” Had Constance delegated the shovel talk to the nine-year-old? That seemed especially devious. Brayden had agreed to this charade without realizing it would entail lying to children. “Is that okay?”
She finished the last bite and wiped her hands yet again. “You’re not like his other boyfriends.”
What did that mean? Brayden looked down at himself, self-conscious. He thought he’d cleaned up nicely, but maybe he’d forgotten to tuck in a middle-class label somewhere. “Oh?”
“They didn’t dance like you. And they followed Flip around all night.” Was Brayden supposed to do that? He really didn’t want to do that. “And they only wore black and white.” She said this last as though it disgusted her, and Brayden realized her dress matched his vest.
“You sound like you didn’t like them very much,” he said carefully.
Clara shrugged one bony shoulder. “They were okay. But Flip likes you better.”
Brayden swallowed around a suddenly dry throat. “Oh? What makes you say that?”
“Because you are better.” She started ticking things off on her fingers. “First there was Armand. He’s going to be a duke. But he didn’t smile, and he smelled like cheese.”
Brayden took a moment to be fervently glad he’d remembered extra deodorant. “He sounds serious.”
“He didn’t even have fun at Midsummer. Midsummer is when you get to drink elderflower wine and dance in the heather fields and stay up all night. And he talked to me like I was a baby. I was seven and a half!”
Nodding seriously, Brayden agreed, “It sounds like Flip is better off without him, for sure.”
“After that, he didn’t have a boyfriend for a long time. And then he met Adrian.” She inflected the name with the linguistic equivalent of an eye roll as she ticked him off on her fingers as well. “Aunt Constance said he followed Flip around like a lost duck. Do ducks really get lost?”
“I don’t know. Maybe some of them do.”
“Adrian smiled a little bit. More than Armand, anyway. But he was so boring. He didn’t like anything except going to the beach. At least Armand liked cheese.”
“Maybe too much,” Brayden reminded her.
“Liking cheese is not the same as smelling of it.” Clara pushed the empty plate to one side and leaned closer over the table as though to better examine him. “Now there’s you.”
“Now there’s me,” Brayden agreed, trying not to show fear. Curiosity, though—there was no help for that. “Why do you think Flip likes me better?”
“Because he smiles at you.” He would have bet that if they’d been talking in English, she would have added duh. Brayden was torn between relief and disappointment at this simple answer, which didn’t reveal much, but then Clara went on. “And he looks at you when he thinks you’re not looking, like now.”
Alarmed, Brayden moved his head to look, but Clara stopped him with her hand on his arm. “No, don’t turn. He’ll be embarrassed. Anyway. He always dances the opening dance with Aunt Constance, but tonight he danced with you. And he took you for ice cream.”
Brayden felt a little faint. “He told you about that?”
“It’s our spot,” Clara said. “He promised he would only take special people there. So he must like you a lot.”
Brayden had gone into the evening certain that no one would seriously believe Brayden thought he could be an appropriate suitor for a crown prince. And now here a nine-year-old had laid waste to his careful rationale. “Well,” he said, and if it came out a little strangled, Clara had a pretty small sample size to compare it against. “I’m glad.” Then, desperate to change the subject, he asked, “Do you want to dance?”
Clara’s pleasant, open face shuttered. She frowned at the tabletop. “I don’t know how.”
Finally something Brayden felt equipped to respond to. “Then you’re in luck, because it just so happens that I am a fantastic teacher.” The orchestra was playing a leisurely waltz—boring under most circumstances, maybe, but perfect for a beginner. He stood and bowed, offering his hand. “Milady. Might I have this dance?”
For a second she looked at him, her lips pressed together in a tight line. Then she stood up and put her hand in his.
Brayden suspected Clara might have some musical training, because she had no trouble at all finding the beat. She watched with intent focus as Brayden demonstrated the natural step—first his part and then hers.
“The grip will be a little weird since I’m just a smidge taller than you, but we’ll improvise.” He put his hand on her shoulder instead of beneath it. “Ready to try?”
She pursed her lips in thought and then gave a decisive nod. “Okay.”
“Count with me, then. We’ll go on zero.” Brayden counted down from nine, giving her three measures to get the rhythm. Then they were off, not exactly flying but not doing too badly either. Clara moved gracefully, though she was a bit quicker on her right than her left—a little practice would close that gap.
“You’re doing great,” Brayden said, noting a couple who appeared to have imbibed a little too freely heading in their direction. “We’re going to try it going the other way now, okay? Or we’re going to get run over.” He indicated with his head.
Clara’s eyes widened. “Okay.”
He didn’t want to push his luck by adding a leg cross on the fly, so he improvised a reverse step. It would have been perfect, except the drunk couple had sped up and changed course too. One of them bumped into Brayden hard enough to send him careening into Clara, though he managed to avoid doing her a worse injury than stepping on her toe.
“Oh my God,” the woman who’d bumped into them said. She looked mortified. “I’m so sorry. Babe, I think maybe we should sit the next couple out and drink some water. Can I get you anything?” She directed this last to Brayden and Clara.
“I’m okay,” Brayden said, hoping his protégée wouldn’t be discouraged by their setback. “Clara?”
She shook her head that she didn’t want anything, and the couple left.
“I’m sorry I stepped on your foot,” Brayden said. “Even good dancers can’t always avoid a collision if there’s alcohol involved. Don’t drink and dance. Are your toes okay?”
Clara looked at him as though he’d grown a second head. Then she smiled like the sun coming up and lifted the hem of her dress.
When she was standing, the hem went nearly to the floor. Now, though, Brayden could see that her left leg ended in a prosthetic just below the knee.
He shook his head and offered his hand once more. “Well, if your toes aren’t hurt, do you want to try again?”
FLIP watched from across the room a
s Brayden sat down at Clara’s table and struck up a conversation. He ached to join them, but he couldn’t. Though the scholarship facilitator had taken over emcee duties, Flip had compatible people to introduce—dancers and choreographers, musicians and conductors, actors and directors—and hands to glad. Still, he did his best to move in that direction. Maybe he could steal Brayden for another dance. If not, at least Clara would regale him with her observations from people-watching.
He had made it halfway there when they got up to dance, and Flip stopped listening to the person he’d been speaking to. His aunt happened to be walking past, and he touched her arm as she went by and pointed discreetly to the lesson.
His conversation partner turned to look as well as Flip’s cousin Clara took her first turn on the dance floor in Brayden’s capable arms. Flip wanted to tell them to turn away and let her have this moment, since no one else seemed to be paying attention. But he didn’t want to be rude.
“She’s not bad for a first-timer,” Flip’s erstwhile companion commented.
Flip was still trying to pick his jaw up off the floor. Aunt Ines clutched his arm hard enough to bruise. “Did you put him up to that?”
He shook his head, not taking his eyes off them. “That’s just… Brayden.”
Ines dug her fingers deeper when the heiress and her husband got too close and then knocked into Brayden, pushing him into Clara. Flip’s stomach knotted too. But the drunken couple ambled off, leaving—
Clara raising the hem of her dress to show her leg, beaming.
Ines sniffed. Flip wanted to sit down.
How was he supposed to pretend to end things between them when all he wanted was to begin something real?
“That’s a good man,” Ines said a few furious blinks later.
Flip couldn’t disagree.
By the time he made it over to their table, the dancing seemed to have finished, and he interrupted a lively conversation about the merits of skiing versus snowboarding. Clara almost looked willing to entertain the idea of switching when she saw Flip.
“Flip!” She flung herself at his waist. “Brayden taught me the waltz.”
