Majesty (American Royals, #2)(49)
“I know it’s weird, and a little complicated—”
“More than a little,” Ethan said under his breath.
“But I also know that I don’t feel this way very often.” Only once before, in fact. Nina shoved that thought aside. “I understand if you can’t go there, because of Jeff. But for what it’s worth, I’ve really liked hanging out with you lately. Last weekend…” Nina’s pulse was going haywire. She realized that she was drawing a line in the sand—that they could have gone on pretending that last weekend was a drunken mistake, until now.
She took a deep breath. “I think there’s something here, and whatever it is, I want to give it a shot.”
Was it wrong of her to feel this way about Ethan when she had loved Jeff for so many years?
But that was the thing—she had loved Jeff since they were children, and her love for him had never really matured. It had always been a little girl’s love. Nina had never even questioned why she loved Jeff; she had just taken it as a given.
If she hadn’t been blinded by Jeff in all his dazzling princely glory, she might have noticed Ethan so much sooner.
She felt him shifting, sliding into the middle seat between them. His eyes blazed as if he was searching for something in her face.
Whatever he saw made him reach some decision, because he leaned away. “You shouldn’t want to be with me,” he said heavily. “There’s no need for you to get wrapped up in all my mess. If you only knew…”
“Knew what, Ethan?” she exclaimed, frustrated. “That you’re irritating and insufferable and also smart as hell? That you’re my ex-boyfriend’s best friend, and being with me would violate some kind of bro code? That you gave me the most intense kiss of my life and then went completely silent all week?” Nina clenched her hands tighter in her lap. “I already know all that, and I’m still here!”
Ethan hesitated. Nina could feel the weight of his conflicted emotions, and for an instant, she wondered if she should be worried. Then he leaned forward, and her concerns evaporated.
“I want to try this, too,” he said hoarsely. “No matter how complicated or selfish it is of me to say that.”
He reached for her hand, lacing their fingers. Even in the darkness, Nina could see that he was smiling.
“What?” she demanded.
“The most intense kiss of your life?” he repeated, sounding unmistakably smug.
Nina’s heart pounded against her rib cage. “To be absolutely certain, I’d need another data point,” she said, and now she was smiling, too. “For scientific accuracy.”
“Well, if it’s for the sake of science,” Ethan agreed, and leaned in to kiss her.
Nina stopped worrying about how reckless and wrong this was, or whether it would hurt Jeff, or whether she was making a mistake. There wasn’t room in her mind to think of anything but Ethan.
Unsurprisingly, Sam was summoned to her mother’s study the next morning.
When she knocked at the door, Robert Standish answered. He gave Sam a disdainful nod before settling into a wingback chair. Queen Adelaide—wearing a cream-colored top and a loose scarf, her hair tucked behind her usual crocodile headband—sat behind her desk, scrolling in silent shock through her tablet.
The queen’s study was in the opposite wing of the palace from the monarch’s, a holdover from previous centuries, when couples had married for political alliances and wanted to spend their days as far from each other as possible. It was a smaller, more intimate room, with pale blue wallpaper and delicate furniture. Queen Adelaide, like most royals, still corresponded by hand; Sam saw that her desk was littered with notes, from Sandringham and Drottningholm Palace and Peterhof and the Neues Palais.
“Well, Samantha,” her mom began. “When I planned to leave town this weekend, I certainly didn’t expect that I would have to fly back this morning because lewd photos of my daughter are all over the internet.” She held up her tablet, her voice low and vicious as she read various headlines aloud. “?‘Princess Wet and Wild.’ ‘A Bad Heir Day.’?”
In the photos, Sam’s legs were wrapped around Marshall’s waist, his hands splayed on her lower back. She hadn’t been wearing a bra, and the soaking white halter dress clung to her with all the modesty of a wet tissue. She might as well have been photographed naked, given how little was left to the imagination.
Sam waited for a flush of outrage, but all she felt was a weary disappointment. She’d expected her so-called friends to leak images of her and Marshall. And they had surpassed even her expectations.
“Look at this one!” Her mother brandished the tablet before her like a weapon, her face red with disappointment. “?‘Party Princess Pool Porno.’?”
“That’s bad alliteration. I expect better from the Daily News,” Sam replied, with more levity than she felt. Robert let out an aggrieved sigh.
“Samantha!” Adelaide slammed her fist on her desk, startling all of them. Even the dust motes that floated in the morning sunlight seemed to jump at the noise. “What were you thinking, letting yourself get caught half-naked like this?”
“I was fully clothed!” At least, technically speaking. “Besides, we were only kissing. You know we have plenty of ancestors who did worse—people who had flagrant affairs with ladies-in-waiting or gentlemen of the bedchamber. And they were married!”