Chapter Nine
Back then
The footman closed the door behind him, and Caroline crossed the drawing room.
“Hello, Tristan.” She stopped a polite distance from him, her hands clasped at her waist. “Just to make sure we’re both absolutely on the same page.
We’re not going to be in a relationship.
If we tried, we’d end up very unhappy with each other in the long run, I think. So we should be just friends.”
Tristan blinked at her.
He’d taken four steps into her Clarence House apartments, and he was still in his coat. The bouquet meant for her was in his hand, swaddled in tissue paper and tied with a length of grosgrain ribbon that the florist had spent an alarming amount of time selecting.
“Yeah?” he said. “Well. I wish you’d told me that before I spent three hundred and fifty pounds on this bouquet.”
He held it out to her. Caroline took it on instinct, then gave it the briefest of glances. She looked fucking incredible. Her auburn hair sat loose around her shoulders, and her green silk shirt brought out her hazel eyes.
“Why would you spend that on a bouquet, Tristan?” Caroline’s brows drew together. “For a woman who gets handed flowers constantly?”
“I—”
“I got eleven bouquets at my hospital visit in Hackney this morning. People hand them to me, and then my aides take them. Then they go straight in the boot of the car and get redistributed to whatever hospice or hospital is nearby.”
“Where’s this bouquet going then?”
“Pride of place. I’m sending some books to a children’s group home tomorrow, so this’ll go with that. I think the carers would love this brightening up their staff room.” She set the bouquet down on the console table beside her. “What else have you got, then?”
“What do you mean?”
“In your repertoire. What was the next move? What would you bring me now that you know me?”
Tristan improvised. His real next move was a private viewing at the Wallace Collection, which he suspected wouldn’t be up to her standards.
“I don’t know,” he said. “A brace of quail?”
“Perfect.” She smiled at him properly for the first time since he’d arrived. “That would have been interesting. And that’s exactly why I invited you to the petting zoo, and why I told you to come for dinner tonight. Because you’re very interesting, Tristan.”
Tristan quirked an eyebrow at her. “So you didn’t do that because of your uncontrolled sexual attraction to me?”
“Tristan, you are a very beautiful man. And for me, that’s a problem.”
He kept his face neutral. Some version of that line had been following him around since he was twelve, when a casting director had described him to his mother as having a face that would either make him a star or get him cast as a bullying victim for the next ten years.
At nineteen, he’d spent most of a feature film in a pleated skirt and a blonde wig, playing a guy infiltrating an all-girls’ boarding school, and the studio had marketed the poster on the strength of how convincingly he’d pulled it off.
“Come through,” Caroline said.
She led him down a short corridor lined with watercolours of horses, and through into a kitchen that was nothing like he’d imagined a Princess’s kitchen would be.
It was warm, low-ceilinged, with a scrubbed pine table at the centre and a window above the sink that looked out onto a brick wall.
A small lamp had been left on over the hob, and on the table sat a build-your-own burger station.
There were two stacks of brioche buns, a tray of beef patties resting under cling film, a glass dish of caramelised onions, sliced tomato, lettuce, gherkins, three different cheeses, and a small flight of mustards arranged in ascending order of heat.
“To honour your American roots,” Caroline said, gesturing at the spread, “and to show that I hold no personal grudge over the way your country treated my ancestors during the War of Independence.”
That got a real laugh out of him. “Caroline, this is genuinely the best apology for a shock friend-zoning that I’ve ever received.”
“I should hope so. I had the kitchens mince the beef twice.”
He shrugged out of his coat and slung it over the back of a chair. The patties were the wrong shape. They were thick, neat, palm-pressed rounds, and they’d been seasoned in advance, which was the real crime. He picked one up and held it out to her.
“Caroline. I’m going to need you to trust me on something.”
“Go on.”
“This is not a proper burger.”
“They look perfectly burger-shaped to me.”
“They’re an inch thick. A proper smash burger is paper-thin, with crispy edges, and lacy bits hanging off the side.” He set the patty back down. “Have you got a spatula? A heavy one? And a hot pan.”
She produced a cast-iron skillet and a fish slice from a cupboard, and Tristan got the hob going. He showed her how to roll the meat into loose balls, how to drop them onto the screaming pan, then flatten each one with the slice until it sizzled and spread.
“That’s the Maillard reaction,” he said. “That’s the whole point of this. It’ll make the burger taste absolutely amazing.”
Tristan nudged her in front of the pan. “Your turn. Don’t be polite to it. Lean into the patty.”
Caroline took the fish slice in both hands and brought it down on the meat.
“Harder,” Tristan ordered.
“I’m pressing as hard as I can.”
“Really put your shoulder into it, Caroline.”
She shifted on her feet and pressed more aggressively. The patty hissed and flattened into a thin, ragged disc, the edges already crisping black-brown against the iron. Caroline laughed and leaned into it harder.
“There you go.”
By the time they sat down with two plates between them, Caroline had stacked her bun with two patties, all of the cheeses, the caramelised onions, gherkins, and a stripe of the hottest mustard. She held it up and assessed her pile’s structural integrity.
“This,” she said, “is an obscene amount of burger,” before biting in. A drip of grease and mustard ran down the heel of her hand to her wrist. Her eyes closed and she made an undignified noise into the bun.
They ate in silence. Tristan worked his way through the first burger, and Caroline wasn’t far behind him. They grinned at each other.
He let her finish before he set his half-eaten second burger down and wiped his fingers on a piece of kitchen paper. “Caroline. Why am I really here?”
She finished her mouthful and reached for her water. “I wondered when you’d ask.”
“I appreciate you telling me outright that we weren’t going to be a thing, by the way. That was very efficient.” Tristan folded the kitchen paper into quarters. “But you didn’t bring me here just to crush my heart under your heels. You’re not the cruel type. So, what do you actually want from me?”
Caroline looked straight at him. “I’m surrounded by the same people, Tristan.
We all went to the same schools, we sleep with each other, and we end up marrying each other.
I can’t be with a man in our approved circle without looking him up in Debrett’s to check he isn’t a cousin of some sort.
It’s deathly. You’re the first interesting outsider I’ve met in a very long time, and I think we could be quite useful to each other. ”
“Useful how?”
“You want to raise your profile, and I want to keep my brother off the scent of the man I’m currently in a serious relationship with.
There’s a version of this where we’re seen out together a few times.
Nothing serious. Just enough that the British press gets hold of it and you’re suddenly the American Disney Kid who’s caught the Princess Royal’s eye.
Your phone starts ringing again. And for me, James fixates on you instead of my actual man. ”
“Caroline. Are you sleeping with the help?”
“Don’t be vulgar.”
“You literally just told me you were.”
“I told you I was sleeping with someone. You added ‘the help’.” She bit a gherkin in half. “Though, in the interest of full disclosure, he is technically staff. He’s also the son of a baron, and he went to Eton. His name is Benton.”
Tristan’s eyebrows went up. “Benton. As in, James’s Benton.”
“Yes, that one.”
“The one who looms behind him at all his appearances and looks like a disapproving heron?”
“That is a remarkably good description of Benton, yes.” Caroline reached for another gherkin. “Now do you understand my position?”
Tristan stared at her. “You’re shagging your brother’s Private Secretary.”
“I am conducting an entirely adult relationship with a man who happens to work for my brother, at this particular moment, yes.”
“And James doesn’t know.”
“James can’t know. Not yet.” She sighed.
“Tristan. You don’t know what a Private Secretary is to a monarch.
It’s the most intimate professional relationship in the institution.
Benton is in James’s pocket from seven in the morning until the red box is signed off at night.
He knows what James eats, who James rings, what James shouldn’t be photographed wearing.
He knows things about James that I, as his sister, am not cleared to know.
And James trusts him absolutely, which is rarer than you’d think. ”
“Okay. This might be a stupid question. But you’re a grown woman, and he’s a grown man. Why don’t you just tell your brother you’re seeing Benton and let the chips fall?”
“Because I’m a Princess, Tristan. I can’t just do whatever I want.”
“You literally have a palace.”
“That’s owned by the State!” She scowled. “Every man I’ve ever been seen with for longer than an hour has had his finances investigated, his exes contacted, and his school records pulled. If I tell James about Benton tomorrow, then that’ll destroy his relationship with the man who keeps him going.”
“Right.”
“So no. I can’t just do whatever I want.
I can do about twenty-five per cent of what I want, on a good day, with a following wind.
The rest of the time I do what’s permissible, which right now means a strategic flirtation with a squeaky-clean Disney Channel alumnus who can absorb some scrutiny on Benton’s behalf. ”
Tristan grinned. “You really know how to make a guy feel special, Caroline.”
“I’ve already called you a very beautiful man, Tristan.
Don’t be so needy.” Her gaze turned pleading.
“If James found out that the man he relies on to manage every minute of his life had been quietly removing his sister’s knickers for the last seven months, Benton would have to resign.
James would feel betrayed by the both of us at once.
And I’d have to start again with someone who didn’t know which side of the bed I sleep on. ”
“That’s a spectacular mess,” Tristan breathed, awed by the sheer soap-opera level of fucked up he’d just listened to. “How are you planning to get out of it?”
“Benton needs to extract himself from the job. Cleanly. Find a successor, train them up, brief them through a full Commonwealth tour rotation, and then resign on perfectly respectable grounds. Once he’s no longer working for my brother, we can be entirely above board.
James will sulk for a fortnight, then he’ll come round, because at the end of the day he wants me happy more than he wants his diary run by the man he’s used to.
But that whole process takes time, Tristan.
Six months. Possibly nine. And until it’s done, James can’t have so much as a whiff of it. ”
She picked her burger back up. “So that’s where you come in.”