American Royals (18 page)

Then Connor forcibly broke away.

“Beatrice,
no.
” The kitchen seemed to vibrate with what he’d said.

She took a step back, crossing her arms to hide their sudden shaking. “I’m sorry. Just—forget I ever said anything.”

She began to sweep past him, but his next words stopped her cold.

“You think I don’t want this too?” Connor’s voice was ragged. “God, Bee, it’s all I’ve thought about for the better part of a year! So many times I’ve marched up to my commanding officer, to tell him that I need to be reassigned, because I care about my charge
too much.
Because it’s a torment, being around you when I can’t be
with
you. But then, every single time, I turned away at the last minute.”

He was still so close, his mouth dangerously near hers. “Apparently I would rather be around you like this, would rather chaperone your
dates
with Lord Theodore
Eaton,
than say goodbye to you forever.” He gave his head a bitter shake. “Clearly I have a bit of a weak spot when it comes to you.”

Beatrice’s heart seized and skittered in her chest. “You think this has been any easier on me?”

“Easy enough, given that you’ve been going out with Teddy Eaton!”

“I told you, there are
no
real feelings between us! I’m only dating him because my parents asked me to!”

This time, Connor finally seemed to register her words. His blue-gray eyes were veiled.

“This is still impossible,” he insisted, his fists clenched at his sides. “Beatrice, you are completely off-limits to someone like me. I work for your father. I’m your
Guard.
I swore a sacred, unbreakable oath that I would protect and serve the Crown to my dying breath.”

“I know.” She, too, was bound by a sacred oath.

“Your family would never allow it,” he added. As if she needed another reminder.

It struck Beatrice that none of them were the masters of their own fates. Not Connor or Teddy and especially not her. Any decisions she had made in her life were an illusion—the choice of what gown to wear, what charity to sponsor—a selection between two equally limited options.

She had never, ever chosen for herself before. Not when it came to anything that mattered.

“Let’s just put all this behind us,” Connor said, very formally. “As soon as we get back to the capital, I’ll request my reassignment.”

“No.”

Beatrice was surprised by the vehemence of her own response.

“You can’t leave,” she said hoarsely. “Please, Connor. You have no idea how important you are to me. You’re the only one in my life who makes me feel like a real person.”

At his confused look, she fumbled for the words to explain. “Until I met you, I never knew what it felt like, for someone to look at me because of
who
I am, not
what
I am. I can’t bear to lose you,” she said baldly.

Connor swallowed. “I would never do anything to hurt you. But, Beatrice, I can’t promise that you won’t come to any harm. That you won’t get hurt, if you get involved with me.”

“I’m
already
hurt.” She felt tears pricking at her eyes. “I never get to make my own choices. I have always put my family first—my
country
first—and it costs me, every single day of my life. But losing you … that’s not a cost I’m willing to pay.”

Connor brushed back a loose strand of her hair. Before he could lower his hand, Beatrice had reached up to cover it, cupping his fingers around her cheek. His skin felt rough and callused.

“We shouldn’t be doing this,” he said again.

“We aren’t
doing
anything yet.” She lifted her gaze to meet his. “If you’re going to break the rules, Connor, then go ahead and break them.”

He gave a familiar half smile at her words, then bent down to claim her mouth with his own.

Beatrice rose on tiptoe, her lips parted. Connor’s hands slid from her face to settle gently around her waist. She tipped back against the stone island in the center of the kitchen, and Connor leaned forward in response, the warmth of him settling against her. He kissed her slowly, with a hushed sense of wonder that bordered on awe. As if he didn’t fully believe this was happening either.

Kissing Connor felt terrifying and familiar all at once, like returning home after a lifetime of being lost.

At some point the stone counter was digging into her hips, and Beatrice shifted. Connor seemed to take that as a signal to pause. “We should probably … um …,” he said, in a questioning tone.

Beatrice’s eyes darted instinctively toward the couch. No way was she ready to take this into the bedroom.

Seeing that look, and knowing what it meant, Connor turned off the stovetop—at least one of them was remembering not to burn this place down—and scooped Beatrice into his arms as if she weighed nothing at all. He carried her toward the couch and set her delicately back on the cushions, never breaking the kiss the entire time.

Outside, the snow tumbled ever faster toward the ground; a fringe of icicles hung along the top of the windowsill. Beatrice felt like she had stepped inside a snow globe that someone had shaken. She prayed that the little white flakes never settled, that she could stay here forever, outside time itself.

“I’m scared.” Connor whispered it so softly that she thought she’d misheard.

“You? I thought you were too arrogant to be scared.”

“There’s the Beatrice I know.” He gave a wry smile, then let out a breath. “But I
am
scared. I’m scared of losing you, of somehow hurting you. Most of all I’m afraid of failing you.”

Beatrice shifted her weight so that she could look into his eyes. “I’m scared, too,” she admitted. “At least we can be scared together.”

The fire burned on before them, untended.

Samantha was at the chairlift’s loading station with Teddy and Jeff, humming a disjointed melody under her breath, when Jeff’s phone fell out of his pocket.

“Sorry!” he exclaimed, ducking off to one side to collect it. Before Sam could react, the chair had whirled around the central rotary toward them—leaving her no choice but to ride up with Teddy.

He turned toward her as if to say something, but Sam angled deliberately away from him. It wasn’t her job to entertain him just because his
real
date hadn’t yet arrived. She kept staring out at the mountain, onto which she couldn’t wait to be set loose.

Sam had woken that morning to a world of drifting white: white clouds shivering into snow, white wind whipping everything around them. She’d hurried into her snow gear and headed downstairs, where a few family members were already gathered.

Jeff jumped to his feet at her arrival. “We’ve gone interlodge! Both highways are closed, 145
and
the pass from Red Mountain.”

“Which means that Beatrice is still stuck in Montrose.” The queen’s eyes drifted uncomfortably to Teddy, who was at the kitchen table, eating a homemade breakfast sandwich on a bagel. “If the roads aren’t open again by the afternoon, she’ll miss the party.”

Sam wasn’t particularly worried about whether Beatrice made it to the New Year’s Eve celebration. Her eyes met Jeff’s; they were both grinning with a complicit excitement.

Interlodge was every skier or snowboarder’s dream condition: when it had snowed so much that the roads closed, but the mountain remained open. Snowfall in itself wasn’t enough to shut down a ski resort, only severe winds, which made chairlifts unsafe to operate. Interlodge therefore meant unbelievable snow,
plus
having the mountain mostly to yourself—because the road closures kept anyone else from skiing, except the people already in town.

“In that case, we’d better get going.” Sam headed toward the mudroom to pull on her boots and jacket, then grabbed her snowboard, which was covered in stickers and decals. “Who’s coming?”

Sam’s eyes were on her dad, who normally lived for days like this, but he just shook his head. “I’ll let you kids have the mountain to yourselves this morning.”

He said it cheerfully, but Sam couldn’t help noticing how completely tired he looked. There were fine lines crinkling around his eyes, and a new slump to his shoulders.

She glanced over at Nina, who gave an apologetic smile and held up a thick fantasy novel. “I might stay home. Besides, I’ll only slow you down on a day like today.”

Then, to Sam’s horror, Teddy jumped in. “I’d love to come, if you don’t mind.”

“Sure,” she said, after a beat. She couldn’t think of any reasonable way to get rid of him.

They’d started on the Gold Hill chutes, making their way steadily across the mountain. Sam had to grudgingly admit that Teddy was a very good skier. She couldn’t shake him off her tail even if she tried—and she had been trying, all morning.

“We’re heading to the Revelation Bowl, right?” Teddy attempted now.

“Jeff and I are,” Sam said stiffly. “You can rip-cord out on some easier blacks before the hike. Otherwise you’ll have to walk along the ridge for the last five hundred meters carrying your board. Or in your case, skis,” she added pointedly. She’d always found skiers so … conventional.

“I can handle it.” Teddy gave a bold smile. “Unlike you, I learned to ski on terrain that’s
actually
difficult. The icy, unforgiving, set-an-edge-and-hope-you-don’t-die runs at Stowe.”

Sam winced in mock sympathy. “East Coast skiing? I’m sorry you had to suffer through that.”

“Sam!” Jeff hollered from the chair behind them. “Revelation, right?”

Sam twisted around; her brother was sprawled out on the chair, one leg kicked up onto the seat while the other dangled below, still fixed to his board.

“Absolutely. Race?” she called out in reply.

“Dare?”

“You’re on.”

Teddy glanced back and forth between them. “Have you and Jeff always used that kind of twin-speak?”

“You think that was twin-speak?” Sam scoffed. “That’s just lazy ski-lift talk. When we were kids Jeff and I communicated in complete gibberish. It drove our nanny nuts.”

Teddy smiled beneath his wool neck gaiter. The tip of his nose had gone red from the cold. “Did I misunderstand, or did he just challenge you to a race?”

“Jeff and I always race down Revelation Bowl. The winner gets to make the loser complete a dare.” She chuckled. “Last year after I won, I made him freeze Daphne’s long underwear out in the snow overnight. She was
furious
the next day.”

They were above the tree line now; the landscape raced along below them in an unbroken sheet of white.

“I’ve heard the ski team at King’s College is surprisingly good given that they aren’t in the mountains.” A smile ghosted Teddy’s lips. “Granted, it
is
East Coast skiing, but you could still look into it.”

“Why does everyone always assume I’m going to King’s College?” Sam struggled to check her irritation. “Who knows, maybe I won’t go to college at all.”

“You don’t mean that,” Teddy countered, with surprising conviction.

She gave a disinterested shrug. “What’s the point, for someone like me?”

“
Someone like you,
meaning one of the most influential people on the planet? Someone who actually has the power to make the world a better place?”

“You’re confusing me with my sister. Which is understandable, given that you’ve made out with both of us.” Sam ignored Teddy’s sharp inhale. “Beatrice is already part of Cabinet meetings, is helping to set the national agenda and negotiate treaties.
She
has power, not me.”

The wind picked up, swaying the chair lightly back and forth. Teddy raised his voice to be heard over it. “Don’t you realize that millions of people look to you for inspiration? You have such a unique position, Samantha—you can use it to drive people to action, to spotlight issues you care about—”

“You’re talking about
advocacy,
not policy-making or governing,” she cut in. “Which means being a glorified cheerleader. Throwing a bunch of fancy parties and asking people to donate to my cause of the week? I don’t think so.” That was the type of thing
Daphne
wanted to do with her life. Not Samantha.

“It’s more than glorified cheerleading if it causes real change,” Teddy countered. “Or what would you rather do?”

Sam started to deliver some flippant, incisive comment, to mock Teddy for his starry-eyed idealism—but the truth came out instead. “I don’t know what I want to do. I don’t even know what I would be
good
at.”

“Maybe if you went to college, you would figure it out.”

Suddenly they were lifting the safety bar and sliding out onto the windswept peak. Sam snapped out of her board and lifted it onto her shoulder, not waiting for Teddy, who had pulled a nylon strap from his jacket pocket, to loop his skis behind him like a backpack.

She wordlessly started along the ridge, following the icy footprints etched into the snow by previous skiers and snowboarders. To her left, every several yards, wooden stakes were anchored in the snow with red DANGER tape looped between them—not that the tape would do anything to help, if someone slipped. Past the tape, the mountain fell off in a sheer vertical drop.

At last they reached the top of the Revelation Bowl: a wide expanse of snow that funneled off the side of the mountain. Sam reached to unzip her jacket, feeling warm from exertion. The sun had finally dispersed the clouds. She tilted her face upward, letting its rays kiss her brow.

“You ready to lose?” Jeff asked, still breathing heavily. He flashed her his usual cheeky grin.

“Bring it on.” Ignoring Teddy’s quiet presence behind her, Sam strapped back into her snowboard. Then she edged over the lip of the slope and dropped in.

The air whipped at her, tore mercilessly at her clothes. Knee-deep powder flung itself to each side of her board in a spray of white. Sam felt like she’d been stagnant every minute that she wasn’t on her snowboard—that only now when she was falling off the side of a mountain was she alive again.

Jeff had shot ahead, and she felt Teddy nipping at her heels, the whoosh of his skis a softer sound than the boards’ loud carving. Sam curled her ankles and threw her weight forward with more blind force than usual, as if spurred on by what Teddy had said. What right did he think he had, to pass judgment on her?

Her board slipped out from beneath her.

Once, at five years old, Sam had tried to escape her private instructor and barreled straight down the mountain. She ran out of snow, skidding across twenty meters of mud before she crashed into a bush. When Ski Patrol finally dug her out, she’d lost two teeth and was grinning ear to ear.

Sam felt that way now. She was careening ever faster down the slope, trying desperately to slam her back foot onto her edge—

She flew forward, hitting the snow with a thud and tumbling head over heels downhill. The world was reduced to a spinning whirl of white.

She curled her body in on itself, waiting until everything finally fell still.

“Sam!”

To her surprise, the voice wasn’t Jeff’s, but Teddy’s.

He grabbed her elbow to pull her upright. “Are you hurt?”

“I’m fine.” Sam fumbled for her board in the drifts and fastened herself back in, one foot at a time. She felt suddenly embarrassed—not for falling, but for the reason it happened. Because she’d been thinking about
Teddy.

“Congratulations,” she forced herself to say, looking down the mountain at Jeff. “It would appear that I owe you a dare.”

Wrapped in a fluffy white towel, Sam padded toward the indoor hot tub, which was built into the side of the house, bordered by floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out over the mountains. There was an outdoor hot tub too, of course, but Sam’s every muscle felt sore, and she didn’t want to keep running out into the cold to reset the jets.

She turned the corner, only to realize that she wasn’t alone.

“Oh—sorry. Never mind,” she said hesitantly.

Teddy stood, shaking his head. “Please, don’t let me scare you off. There’s plenty of room.”

It was true; this hot tub had been designed to accommodate fifteen people. But wasn’t it a little weird for her to be out here alone, with the guy her sister was dating?

Then again, Sam realized, she hadn’t heard Teddy mention Beatrice’s name all weekend.

She reluctantly dropped her towel and lowered herself into the water. She was wearing a bright fuchsia one-piece, which technically might not qualify as a one-piece at all given how many cutouts had been strategically sliced into it. It was the kind of thing she couldn’t wear in the summer, because the tan lines it left were too weird.

“Besides, you probably need the hot tub more than I do, after that wipeout,” Teddy went on, and ventured a smile. “Has Jeff decided on your dare yet?”

“Not yet. He’ll have to come up with something really great, because this opportunity won’t come along again. I don’t usually lose to him,” she boasted.

Teddy chuckled. “As long as you guys don’t freeze my long underwear.”

“I can’t make any promises.”

Sam drifted so that her back was over one of the jets. She forced herself to look out the window, because otherwise she would be staring at Teddy—at his muscled arms, the fine line of stubble along his jawline. Steam curled around his hair, making it a little darker than usual, the color of fine-spun gold.

“Samantha.” Teddy cleared his throat. “I’m sorry for what I said earlier. I was out of line.”

“No, you were right.”

Sam was as shocked by her answer as Teddy seemed to be. She glanced down at the surface of the water, biting her lip. “Unlike Beatrice, Jeff and I have no defined role or purpose, no job we’re being trained for. We just … exist.”

Teddy shook his head. “Sorry to break it to you, but you aren’t boring or lazy enough to
just exist.
”

Sam felt curiously grateful for his words. And perhaps it was the sympathetic glow of his eyes, or the delicious warmth of the hot tub, but she felt lulled into admitting the truth. “That isn’t the only reason I’m dragging my feet about college,” she said slowly.