American Royals (39 page)

“The law might seem outdated and ridiculous to you, but there’s wisdom in it,” her father maintained. “Why do you think so many of our forefathers married foreign princesses? It wasn’t just to seal political treaties. It was because no one else was capable of taking on this job. No one else, aside from the children of other monarchs, had been raised since
infancy
to lead millions of people.”

“You’re underestimating Connor,” Beatrice tried to say, but her voice broke.

The king wiped at his eyes. “Beatrice, I’m trying to protect you both. Even if it
was
possible for you to marry Connor, it would be a mistake. Someday, when he realized just how much he’d given up for you, he would regret this choice. He would come to hate you for it—and worse, he would come to hate himself.”

Beatrice couldn’t move. She felt utterly transfixed by her father’s words.

“But … I love him,” she said again.

“I know.” Her father’s hand tightened around his glass. “If it’s any consolation, you aren’t the first monarch to face this kind of sacrifice. Plenty of kings who came before you gave up someone they loved, to satisfy the demands of the Crown. Myself included.”

His words didn’t sink in right away. When they did, Beatrice’s gaze snapped up.
“What?”

“I loved someone too, before your mother.”

Her blood hummed with shock. The only sound was the quiet popping of the fire.

“Who …” Beatrice’s lips felt dry and cracked.

“She was a commoner.”

“What happened to her?”

“I haven’t seen her in a very long time,” he said gravely. Beatrice was too distracted to realize that it wasn’t a complete answer.

Her father had been in love when he was young, and had given up that love to marry Adelaide. Beatrice tried to imagine letting go of Connor like that: never seeing him again, never knowing if he’d eventually moved on, married someone else. Her heart twisted in anguish at the thought.

“Beatrice, I know you love your Guard now, but the kind of love you’re talking about—it doesn’t last.” The king paused to cough before continuing. “Your mother and I weren’t in love when we first married. We
fell
in love, day by day. Real love comes from creating a family together, from facing life together—with all its messes and surprises and joys.” He sighed. “I know you don’t love Teddy now, but I also know that if you marry him, you’ll come to love him. In a real way.
That’s
the kind of love you can build a future on—not whatever you feel right now for Connor.”

Beatrice sat there in silence for a while, staring blindly at the fire. Her mind spun with everything her father had told her.

“No,” she said at last.

The word fell like a stone into the silence.

The king’s head angled toward her. “What do you mean, no?”

“I mean that I don’t accept this. You might believe in this law, might think that it somehow protects the Crown, but I refuse to be bound by it. I’m not like you or Aunt Margaret.” A new stubbornness glinted in her eyes, and she stood up.

Her father grimaced. “Beatrice, please don’t say things like that.”

“Why not?” Her words gained momentum, avalanching faster and faster in the white-hot heat of her anger. “I have spent my whole
life
chasing this idea of perfection—trying to be the perfect princess, perfect daughter, perfect future queen. And for what?”

The king’s eyes were glassy, the blood drained from his face. “For America,” he said, and coughed again.

“Is
America
going to love me the way Connor does? Listen to my secrets and kiss me good morning and tell me my dreams are worth chasing? All I’ve ever done for America is give and give and
give,
and still America wants more! When will it ever be enough?”

Beatrice had never in her life spoken like this. The words unlocked some astonishing new part of her—as if she’d opened the door to her suite and found that it contained more rooms than she’d ever imagined, all shimmering with possibilities, just waiting to be explored.

“Maybe things would be easier if I did walk away!” she said hotly. “Let the law strip me of my titles and remove me from the succession—I don’t care. Let Samantha be the first queen instead!”

Beatrice knew she was lashing out like a cornered animal, that she didn’t mean what she said. Or … did she?

She thought of Samantha, blazing through the ballroom as confident as an empress.

What if Beatrice
wasn’t
queen?

Her father stared at her, his features twisted into a grotesque mask of horror. “Please, Beatrice …”

That was all he got out before he lifted a hand to his chest, seized in a fit of coughing.

And kept coughing.

The flash of Beatrice’s anger rapidly dissipated as she watched her father double over, his hands braced on his knees. His face was reddening, his eyes squeezed shut, his coughs louder and more ragged. A chill of foreboding chased its way down her spine.

“Dad!” She grabbed a bottle of water from the side table, trying to pour some into his mouth, but it didn’t work; the water just dribbled uselessly over his chin.

The king slumped down, to fall on his hands and knees.

“Help! Someone help! It’s the king!”
Beatrice sank onto the carpet next to him. She realized dimly that her gown was splattered with bright red blood—her father’s blood, which he was coughing up, and she could do nothing at all to help him.

It was only a matter of seconds before his security stormed through the doorway, but those few seconds were the longest of Beatrice’s life. Everything seemed to dissolve into a panicked, multicolored haze. All Beatrice could hear was the ragged, uneven sound of her father’s breath. The prongs of her tiara dug mercilessly into her skull.

“Dad—it’s going to be okay, I promise. I’m right here,” she said brokenly, her hands on his shoulders, until one of the security team gently pushed them away. She kept talking as the EMTs arrived to load him onto a stretcher.

This was all happening too fast. Beatrice felt a scream building inside her but forced herself to bite it back; or maybe she was biting her tongue, because she felt blood in her mouth, edged with the metallic taste of fear.

“I’m so sorry,” she kept saying over and over, as if it were a prayer. “Stay with me, Dad.
Please.
”

Daphne blinked, slowly waking. Through her windows the sky was a leaden gray, streaked with the first dim lights of dawn.

Next to her, his breaths soft and even, lay Ethan Beckett.

She sat up abruptly, hugging her creamy satin sheets to her chest as her room—her
mistake
—snapped into dizzying focus. Her dress lay in a disheveled mound of tulle on the floor, alongside the shoes she’d kicked off, and scattered pieces of Ethan’s tux: a reproachful trail of evidence, reminding her what they had done. Again.

Ethan stirred next to her, but stayed asleep. For a moment Daphne let her eyes drag over his form: his long torso, his muscled shoulders, the shadow of his lashes on his cheekbones. His hair curled at the nape of his neck. She remembered how, just hours ago, her hands had been tangled in that hair, her head tipped back as she swallowed a moan. Daphne winced at the memory.

If only she could rewind it all like an old-fashioned cassette tape, or better yet, yank the tape out altogether and punch a series of holes through it.

She didn’t understand the current of desire that pulsed between her and Ethan, in spite of what happened last time, or maybe because of it. Maybe what she and Ethan did together had forged some dark bond between them, as if they were heroes—or rather, antiheroes—who’d ventured together to the underworld, and now their fates were forever intertwined.

No.
Whatever this was, Daphne had to break it off, now.

Ethan must have felt her eyes on him, because he blinked slowly awake. “Hey,” he murmured, with a yawning smile, and reached to pull Daphne back down toward him. She ducked from under his arm and scooted back.

She hated him for looking so sexy right now, warm and rumpled and creased with sleep.

“Ethan, you need to leave.”

He let out a breath and sat up. “Let’s at least talk about this.”

“There’s nothing to talk about.”

He shook his head defiantly, almost defensively. “Daphne, that’s twice now that you and I have thrown ourselves at each other. I’m not saying I know what it means, but don’t you think we owe it to ourselves to figure it out?”

“As far as I’m concerned, nothing happened. We’re going to put this behind us, just like we did before.”

Except that last time was much, much worse.

Ethan held her gaze steadily. “I can’t keep pretending that nothing has happened between us.”

“Nothing
should
have happened between us. We can’t do this to Jeff!” Daphne hissed, startled into calling him by his nickname for once.

“We’re not doing
anything
to Jeff,” Ethan argued. “Look, last time we had plenty reason to feel guilty. But this is completely different—you’re not dating him anymore. I refuse to act like this was some drunken mistake.”

The gray light had crept farther into the room, touching an old music box atop the high-topped vanity where Daphne’s jewelry gleamed. Thrown over the back of her desk chair was a delicate black scarf that Jefferson had given her, after she once mentioned that she wished she had one, for all the cocktail parties they attended in cold weather. That was the kind of boyfriend Jefferson had been. The type who remembered stray comments and acted on them. Or at least, who sent one of his family’s assistants to act on them.

“Jefferson is your best friend, and I dated him for almost three
years.
This …” Daphne gestured angrily around the room, indicating the rumpled sheets, the pieces of clothing scattered like debris in the aftermath of an explosion. “This has to stop.”

“You’re seriously telling me that last night meant nothing to you?”

He had her trapped. She couldn’t admit that it meant nothing. Not after she’d slept with him twice, when she’d never slept with Jefferson in all their years of dating. But she refused to be bullied into saying anything she might regret. She refused to verbalize feelings that she should never have had in the first place.

The silence stretched to breaking point. Ethan lifted an arm as if he was going to reach for her, then seemed to think better of it.

“You’re lying to yourself,” he told her. “Pretending that this is only physical, that it means nothing, when we both know that’s not true.”

For a split second, Daphne let herself imagine what it would feel like to say yes. To tell Ethan that she chose him. To fall back into the warm circle of his embrace, let him keep looking at her in that charged and magical way.

Their reflections glared at her from the mirror on her wall: Ethan staring at her with those glittering dark eyes, Daphne’s gaze darting back and forth with indecision. Both their figures were cast in a ghostly blue glow. It was coming from her phone, Daphne realized, which was blowing up with messages. She reached over to grab it off her side table.

Her home screen was covered in dozens of tiny bubbles. They were all alerts labeled BREAKING NEWS, their level of panic steadily increasing as the night had progressed.

His Majesty the King has been admitted to the ICU at St. Stephen’s Hospital ….

His Majesty is on life support, having suffered a coronary thrombosis. There is no current update on his condition. His family is with him at this time ….

The king, in the
hospital
?

Daphne’s heart rate spiked as her fear and uncertainty kicked into overdrive. But so, too, did her decades of training.

This was drastic, earth-shattering,
devastating
news, and Daphne had missed it because she was in bed with the wrong boy. She sent up a silent prayer of thanks that her parents hadn’t already stormed into her room to tell her.

“The king has been hospitalized,” she told him, in a crisp, no-nonsense tone. “You really need to leave. Take the back staircase; otherwise my parents might see you.”

She stepped out of bed and stalked over to her closet, where she picked out an outfit: a demure cardigan and dark-wash jeans, a cross necklace on a silver chain, suede booties. Did she have time to wash her hair, or should she just pull it into a low ponytail?

“What are you doing?” Ethan asked, watching her movements.

A detached sort of calm had settled over Daphne’s shoulders. The things she’d been thinking just two minutes ago, about her and Ethan, now seemed like the wildest and most outlandish impossibility. “I’m going to the hospital.”

“To be with Jeff.”

“He needs to be surrounded by the people who love him right now.” Daphne lifted her eyes to Ethan, as unruffled as if they were old friends saying hello across a garden party. “I assume I’ll see you there, later.”

Ethan stepped out of bed and began to get dressed, his movements angular and vengeful. A muscle worked in his jaw. Daphne watched his expression shift rapidly from disbelief to hurt to anger.
Good,
she thought. Anger was the safest. Anger she knew how to handle.

“Fine, Daphne.” Ethan’s shirt was half buttoned, his jacket thrown over his arm, his shoes knotted at the laces and held in one hand. “If that’s how you want things to be. I’ll leave you to enjoy your victory the way you want to. Alone.”

His voice was eerily quiet. “Because that’s what you’ll be if you choose him, you know.
Alone.
Even if you get what you want someday, and have a ring on your finger and a crown on your head and a big elaborate title before your name. There will still come a moment when everyone else leaves the room and it’s just the two of you. You, and a prince who hardly knows you at all. I hope it’s worth it.”

The plaintive echoes of that word—
alone, alone, alone
—seemed to chase after her, long after Ethan had shut the door.