by Avery Wilde
“We should go,” I said.
Keira nodded. “Thanks for this. It really made my day,” she said. “Maybe on another day you could show me your crown jewels.”
“Oh, well, they’re kept on display in the Tower of London,” I said.
Keira sidled up to me and kissed me, gently cupping my crotch and squeezing. “Not the crown jewels I was talking about, darling.”
I grinned, letting my hands roam across her body. “I see. Well, those are on permanent exhibit in my bedroom.”
“I remember.”
“But you’re welcome to view them any time.”
“Now?” Keira suggested, squeezing harder and getting the response she’d wanted.
“Now is good.”
“But not here.”
I nodded. “Even I don’t think we should do it on the old throne. You’ve got to draw the line somewhere...”
Chapter 22
Keira
Although the decision I’d made in the tower room about telling the Queen of my pregnancy had been made under the influence of Andrew’s sweet behavior, I still knew it was a good idea. The bottom line remained the same as ever: she had to find out sometime.
“I think she’d be okay with us getting married,” Andrew said as he sat on my bed the following morning.
I arched an eyebrow. “Well, that was a very romantic proposal....”
He grinned. “Sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant that I know my mother seems like a slave to tradition and all that, but she’s pretty progressive as monarchs go. And of course she likes you. It’s the pregnancy that might be a little bit of an issue, but a marriage would certainly help to smooth that over in her eyes. I realize that doesn’t exactly sound romantic at all, but there it is.”
I nodded. It was the twenty-first century, but royalty tended to work about a century behind everyone else. More to the point; where royalty were concerned, everyone else suddenly started working a century behind as well. It was a strange thing about the British public that, while they were perfectly happy to have children outside the sacrament of marriage, the idea of a member of the royal family doing it could generate the sort of horror usually associated with declaring war. When the royal family were involved, common sense went straight out the window and a lot of people started caring about stuff that they usually didn’t care about. It was as if someone had decided that the price for living with royal privilege was that you had to live by a set of different rules to everyone else—rules that were probably considered a bit draconian in the nineteenth century, let alone the twenty-first.
How the Queen herself might feel about her eldest son getting a maid pregnant was almost unimportant—her job was to represent the British people, and if they were pissed off, then she had to be. It was also her job to protect the institution and the succession, and these events might put both at risk. Our baby would be heir to the throne, but how could an illegitimate baby be a legitimate heir?
On balance, everything would be so much easier for the family if I wasn’t around.
“I could…” I started to speak before hesitating for a second. There’d been a dark thought clouding my mind for a while now, whenever Andrew brought up the idea of marriage, but I hadn’t wanted to voice it until now. “We don’t have to get married if you don’t really want to. I could just hide out somewhere.”
“What?” Andrew looked horrified.
“I don’t want to cause you or your family any problems,” I continued. “And I don’t want you to feel like you have to marry me one day because…” I laid a hand on my belly, “because it’s the right thing to do. The honorable thing to do. That’s not what I want.”
Andrew silenced me with a finger pressed softly against my lips. “Keira, I love you, and there are a thousand reasons for that. I want to marry you; not just one day, but one day soon. Not because I feel like I have to, not because I think it’s the right thing to do, not because I think that baby needs a father, but because if I don’t then I know my life will always be incomplete. Without you in my life, there will always be something missing from it. It’s taken me years to find what I now realize has always been the missing part of me, the thing that made me a proper person, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let it go now for any reason. Listen,” he looked me dead in the eyes, “I have no idea what my mother’s going to say, how the media is going to report this or how the public are going to react. And I won’t say those things aren’t important, because, whether we like it or not, they’re going to have a big effect on both our lives. But just because they’re important, doesn’t mean they matter in the end—they can’t change how I feel and they won’t change two simple facts: I love you and I want to marry you. I don’t know the circumstances in which it’s going to happen or how hard it’s going to be, and I don’t know if it will be at St Paul’s or a registry office, but I want to marry you. And—in case I haven’t mentioned it already and because I can never say it often enough—the reason I want to marry you is because I love you.”
My eyes widened, and a smile spread across my face as his words sank in. I’d been acting so silly. Of course I knew he loved me, and that was the main reason he’d brought up marriage; not just out of family duty or honor. I’d been experiencing some rather wild mood swings recently, brought on by hormone changes from my pregnancy, and they’d taken my mind to a dark place on occasion, but as usual, he’d reassured me, and I knew he’d always be here for me for all the right reasons.
“Good speech,” I said.
“Off the top of my head, as well.”
“Really?” I smiled. “Sounded like you had it ready.”
Andrew shrugged. “Well, I spend most days thinking about how much I love you so it comes pretty naturally.”
I put my right hand on top of his. “I love you too, Andrew.”
“Is that it? I don’t get a speech? What the hell?” he joked. “All the effort I went to, and I don’t even get a speech...”
“I’ll show you what you get.” I kissed him.
We broke apart, and Andrew grinned. “I suppose that’ll do instead.”
He kissed me, and I felt my worries melt away. It was likely that all this was going to go badly; there would be arguments, shouting, angry people, accusations and ugly headlines. But we had each other. And right now it felt like as long as we had each other, we could face anything and everything that the world could throw at us.
“How should we tell your mother about the baby?” I asked when we’d finally broken apart.
“I’ll go and speak to her now,” he said.
“I’ll come with you, if you want.”
Andrew shook his head. “Best if I do it alone. I’ll see you afterwards and let you know how it went.”
He stood up and smoothed down his shirt, and I anxiously picked at a fingernail. “Good luck,” I said, my voice shaking a bit.
He leaned down and put his hand on my chin, tilting it up. “I don’t need any luck,” he said. “I already have you…and that means I have all the luck in the world.”
I was about to respond when he opened his mouth to speak again. “Screw it. I was actually going to wait for a better moment to do this, but…well, I don’t think I can wait any longer,” he said.
With that, he got down on one knee in front of me, holding out a small velvet ring box. My hand flew to my mouth, and he grinned up at me.
“I know we’ve been talking about marriage a lot, even just a few minutes ago, and you already know I want to marry you…but I thought you deserved a real proposal. I actually arranged to have this made for you the other week, and they just so happened to finish it today,” he said. “I know now isn’t the best time to be doing this, but I wanted to officially ask—”
I cut him off by practically leaping onto him. “Oh my god…yes!”
“You didn’t even give me a chance to ask you properly!”
“Oh. Sorry,” I said, my cheeks turning red as I sat down again, affecting a de
mure air. “You were saying?”
“Keira Valencia…will you marry me?”
“Hmm…I’ll have to think about it.”
“Too late, you already said yes a moment ago, you cheeky minx,” he said with a cheeky grin, and my face felt like it might split in two from my own smile as I watched him slide the ring onto my finger.
He was right in what he’d said earlier—maybe this wasn’t the most opportune time for this to be happening, given our uncertainty as to how his mother would react to my pregnancy, but that didn’t mean we couldn’t have a moment of happiness to share in the commitment we were making to each other. This ring on my finger symbolized something wonderful; it made it that much clearer that no matter what happened from this moment onwards, we were really in this together, and there was no going back now. I was his, and he was mine, and whatever the future held…we’d be here for each other.
Always.
Chapter 23
Andrew
I was officially an engaged man, and I’d never been happier.
I wished I could shout the news from the rooftops, but there was still the matter of telling my mother about Keira’s pregnancy first. Although my mind was made up on what to do in any given eventuality, and although I was resolute in how this confrontation would end regardless, my stomach still felt a little weird as I headed down the hall. I wasn’t entirely sure what it was that I was worried about. What was the worst that could happen? No one liked to be shouted at by their mother, but at the same time, no one had ever died from it. I was a grown man, and anything she said to me would just roll off me like water off a duck’s back. In the end, one way or another, I would be with Keira, and that was all that mattered.
Except, of course, that it wasn’t.
Being with Keira was my absolute top priority and nothing was going to dissuade me from doing so, but that didn’t mean that I didn’t love my family. I’d had my differences with them over the years—some their fault, many mine—but I still cared about them. We were an odd family, but that was sort of inevitable in the circumstances, and our oddness drew us together rather than forced us apart. I knew that since I’d met Keira, I’d become a different person. A better person. More to the point, I’d become the person my mother had wanted me to be all my life. But it had taken me so long to become that person that she’d obviously long since given up believing that it might ever happen. She wouldn’t believe that the decent, committed version of me actually existed, and she still saw this as just an act or a phase I was going through that would shortly be replaced by the more familiar womanizing jackass. I didn’t like to look back at that period of my life now, and I could understand my mother’s reticence in believing me, but I needed her to; I needed her to see what I’d become and be grateful that I’d finally got there. I wanted her to be proud of me.
Of course, even if she was proud of me for the man I’d become, that didn’t mean that she’d be proud of me for the situation I was now in. Convincing her that Keira’s pregnancy was a good thing would be an uphill struggle, but again, it was one I wanted to make. I couldn’t wait to be a father, and I wanted her to be just as excited about being a grandmother.
It had taken me far longer than it took most to out-grow my wild adolescence, but now I craved family life, even in the odd little family that I had. I’d be with Keira no matter what, but another thing that excited me was the tantalizing possibility of more—of us all being one happy family. I wasn’t afraid of what I might lose; I was afraid to dream of what I might gain, just in case it slipped through my grasp.
As I headed towards the private office where I knew my mother would be, I imagined her potential reactions and arguments at each point, and I mentally answered them until I thought I’d covered every potential scenario and had a response for anything that might go wrong.
In the event, I was about as wrong as it was possible for a person to be.
“Andrew.”
I turned at the voice from behind me and found my brother there, smiling an unpleasant smile. It was possible that Michael was one of those unfortunate people who always looked evil when they smile, whether they were evil or not, but I knew this particular smile very well: it meant that Michael had won. What he’d won, I had no idea, but given my current mission, Michael’s presence was a profoundly disconcerting one.
“Hi, Michael. I’m just going to see Mother, so if you don’t mind…”
“I was on my way to see her too.” The smile remained fixed on his face.
“Would you mind if I go first?” I asked. I was sure this conversation was going somewhere, but I was determined to keep it light and casual if I could.
“I think she’ll be more interested in what I have to say,” said Michael, with the sly demeanor of a James Bond villain. “Unless you’d like to stop me, that is.”
This game-playing and pussy-footing around the point was fast becoming wearing for me. “Look, do you want to stop acting like a cock and say what you have to say?”
Michael looked a little irritated to have had his moment stolen, but he recovered himself admirably and reached into the pocket of his jacket to produce a handful of photos. He’d obviously seen us and taken them from a distance when we thought we’d been sneaky enough to not get caught, and the pictures featured Keira in her maid uniform, skirt hitched up around her waist as I pounded into her. Seeing as the pictures had been taken from a distance, they were a bit grainy, but they were still clear enough to identify exactly who it was in them.
Michael grinned as he saw my face. “We already know you’ve been sleeping with the maid, seeing as you told us about your little ‘relationship’. But the public doesn’t know yet…”
“And?”
“You got her pregnant, didn’t you?”
That he wasn’t supposed to know, and my face must have betrayed my shock because Michael’s smile widened to a leer of satisfaction.
“I knew it. The future ruler of Great Britain conceived outside of wedlock with a servant—disgraceful. What would Mother make of that? What would the press? What will the public?”
I said nothing. There was a lot that I wanted to say, mostly of the four-lettered variety, but I knew that Michael was building to something. In the event of him ever needing another career, Michael had a great future as a super-villain, stringing out his taunting of the good guy for long enough to allow him to concoct an escape plan.
“How did you find out about the baby?” I asked through gritted teeth.
He waved one of the photos at me. “I’ve been following you two to get pictures like this, and I overheard you talking about it yesterday. So how much would it be worth for that information not to reach the press?” he asked. “After all, you can’t exactly deny it; not when I’ve got these photos.”
“What the hell do you want, Michael?”
Michael’s eyes flared. “What I deserve, dammit!”
“A kick in the nuts?”
“Very funny,” he replied. “You never deserved to be King. You’ve always squandered the opportunities that were yours simply because you happened to be born first! You’ve neglected your duties, treated the people with contempt…”
“I know.”
Michael was brought up short by the unwanted and unexpected interruption. “What?”
“I said: I know.”
“I know what you said!” he snapped. “The ‘what?’ was supposed to allude more to ‘what do you mean by that?’”
“I mean that you’re right. I’ve done all that you said and more, and I probably don’t deserve to be King. But that’s the way the system works. And, for the record, I know you fulfil all your ‘duties’, but I’m not sure you’re that much better of a person than me. Neither of us is worthy to succeed our mother.”
“Well, one of us is going to, and it’s going to be me!” Michael said, getting back on track. “You’ll give up your right to the throne in favor of me. If you don’t, then I will be going to our mother with these pictures and w
ith some information pertaining to you and your little trollop. Then I’ll be going to the press with the pictures, and I’ll inform them of her pregnancy. Imagine what the tabloids will say about her for years to come. It’ll ruin her. So what do you think of that, big brother?”
I burst out laughing.
“Why are you laughing?” Michael asked. He’d clearly had a picture in his mind of how this confrontation was going to proceed, and now that picture was being irritatingly warped by my reaction.
“I’m laughing,” I said, struggling for a breath, “because it’s funny! You actually think that I would care about becoming King?”
Michael’s face made it clear that he couldn’t imagine anyone not caring about being King.
“I never cared about being King!” I said. “I’ve never cared about anything much until recently. And now that I’ve finally found something that I actually care about, you think I’d suddenly start caring about the thing that I never cared about in the first place? You can’t see why that’s funny?”
Michael jumped, now clearly worried that he’d somehow broken my mind.
“I’ve found someone I love, Michael!” I continued. “There’s only one thing I care about as much as I care about Keira, and that’s what’s inside of Keira. You think I’d want to keep this from the press? That I’d be ashamed? That’s the funniest thing of all! I’m proud, you little idiot! I’d shout it from the rooftops if I could! In fact—this afternoon I might do just that. I’m in love with a beautiful, brilliant woman and she’s pregnant with my baby, and I couldn’t be happier or prouder! And if there is anyone in this castle, in England, in Britain or in the world who doesn’t understand that, then I pity them. And that’s the funniest thing, Michael, although also kind of sad. You’re threatening me with something that makes my life worth living. I really hope one day you get to understand that. Happiness isn’t in a crown, little brother.”
“You’re just saying that because you lost already!” By now, Michael was furious. He obviously thought that he was the one who was in the right; he was the one who held all the cards, he should be the one dictating terms. Instead, I’d owned up to my shortcomings and then proceeded to instruct him on why love was more important than royalty. Most frustrating of all was the fact that Michael seemed to have got exactly what he wanted, but I’d taken the fun out of it.
