“And I’m going to do whatever I can to help,” Nick replies in an infuriatingly calm voice. “But it’s going to take time. Maybe a few days. I do have a life in addition to being your tech nerd, you know. I made plans with Regina tonight.”
“Cancel them. I need you on this full time until we know for sure.”
“It’s still three weeks until the wedding, and Jeffrey’s on his way to Rinderland now. We’re going to get it sorted, Andrew. You just need to relax. Go for a run or a swim or something and leave me alone. I’m trying to work. And then I’m going out with Regina. The end. Goodbye.” And then he hangs up on me, making me wish we were still living in the middle ages when a future king could reasonably expect his brothers to do what he told them to do.
Or else he’d throw them in the dungeon.
Making a mental note to have the sauna Nick enjoys turned into a dungeon, preferably with a few hungry rats living in the walls, I stalk inside and change into my running clothes in record time before pounding back down the stairs.
For a moment, I hesitate at the door leading to the back garden and the trails beyond, wondering if I should ask Lizzy/Sabrina if she’s in the mood for a run, too. But the fact that I have to call her two names in my head makes me so angry I shove my buds into my ears and take off at a sprint across the grass.
An hour later, I’m covered in sweat and so exhausted my knees are shaking, but my run hasn’t brought me the peace it usually does.
Dinner with the family is another exercise in torture—fighting to pretend I’m not starving while watching Lizzy/Sabrina eat grilled salmon and make increasingly comfortable conversation with my mother.
Mother clearly likes her. And Nick likes her. Even Jeffery, who doesn’t like anyone, seems to tolerate her and is actually open to having Sabrina as a sister-in-law instead of Elizabeth.
But if she’s Sabrina, she’s making a fool of not only me but also everyone I care about.
I can’t let myself enjoy her company any more than I have already.
Not until I know.
I call Jeffery’s cell first thing the next morning, but he doesn’t answer, so I make an excuse to leave the palace, visiting the offices of the various charities receiving state funds and chatting with their directors. I have dinner at one of my favorite Japanese restaurants, determined to stay away from the castle—and my fiancée—but the sushi doesn’t taste as delicious as usual, and by the time I return home at eight, I’m desperate for conversation with someone who won’t call me “your highness.”
And whom do I want to talk to the most?
Not Nick, not my mother, not Greta, who no doubt has a fistful of things that need attending to since I’ve been out all day. No, I want to head down to Lizzy’s room and ask if she wants to have a drink with me in the library and play some chess after.
I bet she’d be brilliant at chess.
She already has me in check.
Instead, I take my scotch to my rooms alone, pass out in my reading chair, and dream of kissing my fiancée again.
And then of doing more than kissing her.
I wake with a troubling hard-on and a bad attitude that follows me through another day of pretending to be too busy to make time for Lizzy, aside from a quick lunch, during which I regret my decision to eat like a savage like few things I’ve ever regretted in my life.
I’m tired of all the pretending—mine and hers.
As a handful of days pass and the morning of the engagement ceremony arrives with no good news from Nick and no news at all from Jeffery—he’s running into more roadblocks to gaining access to the Rochat estate than expected—I realize I have to take things into my own hands.
I have to find out the truth before the ceremony.
It isn’t a marriage, obviously. I can still call off the wedding at any time, but in the five hundred years that my family has been taking part in the traditional Gallantian engagement, the ritual has led to a marriage every single time—aside from once in the fourteen century, when the bride came down with the Black Death and died.
In this day and age, Lizzy isn’t likely to come down with the plague, and I don’t want her to die. I just want to find out if she really is who she says she is.
And this time, I have a foolproof plan.
Bright and early on the day of the ceremony, I wake her with a phone call. She answers with a sleep-husky, “Hello,” that makes my pulse beat faster.