16. Ellie
These days of getting to know each other and nights of making love have felt exactly like the visions of marriage I had when I was a girl. Which is singularly terrifying.
This isn’t supposed to be real. I know that. It’s a chance for me to have a baby, and it’s a chance for Cedrick to satisfy his father.
“Don’t fall for him. Don’t fall for him,” I keep telling myself.
When we kissed at the altar two days ago, it put every other experience up until that point to shame. Then, that changed again on our wedding night, when he looked in my eyes and made love to me. And then yesterday, there was the breakfast in bed and the long, sensuous lovemaking sessions that made up the entire day afterward.
He’s the perfect husband. Or he would be, if any of this were real.
Cedrick welcomes me into the kitchen with a raised spatula, eggs freshly finished.
“Good morning, Ellie. Do you want toast?”
Don’t smile too big. This isn’t real. You’re playing house.
“I would love that, Cedrick. It’s like this is becoming a tradition. Don’t you want me to start cooking for you?”
“I guess at some point, we can split it. But I like spoiling you.”
I try not to smile too hard as I make myself look away, but it’s impossible. I know I won’t be able to keep a poker face.
He moves comfortably around the kitchen, putting all of the pieces together for my breakfast and placing it on the table. He sits down with his own plate.
“So, big plans today?” he asks me.
I’m taken aback, trying not to let my disappointment show. I shouldn’t have gotten too used to the idea of us doing things as a unit, so I’m grateful that he’s putting up boundaries, demarcating our lives.
But still, it stings to ask about my life like it’s separate from his.
I take a bite of food to give myself time to appear unfazed. “Nothing in particular. I probably have to start thinking about getting back to my normal life.”
I can’t read his face as I say it. I hope he’ll be proud of how independent I’m being, how much I’m not trying to take over his life.
“Really? I was thinking kind of the opposite. That I’m not ready to go back. I want to enjoy being newlyweds with my new bride.”
My eyebrows perk up, and yet again, I’m trying to disguise my happiness behind a poker face. “Oh, yeah? That would be so nice. Are you sure you’re able to, with work and everything?”
Please say this is happening.
“Oh, yeah, my staff has it all. Especially with the new money coming in from the King, there’s a lot of extra hiring.” He comes closer to me and wraps his arm around my shoulder. He kisses me on the cheek, then nears the corner of my mouth. “I was thinking of maybe having a honeymoon. Like a real one.”
“Are we going somewhere? I don’t want to be too far from…”
“Honeymoon, staycation version.”
I finally allow a huge grin to break through my poker face. “How do you know me so well, when we’ve only really started to spend time together in the last three weeks?”
“Well, three weeks, plus twenty years. Give or take.”
I roll my eyes. “As the palace staff’s awkward child? Don’t exaggerate. You barely knew I existed.”
“Not true. But we can debate that on the road.”
“On the road? Where are we going?”
He shoots me a devilish smile. “I’ll tell you when we get there. You’re all packed. Just, there’s one thing we have to do.”
“Oh, yeah? And what’s that?”
Cedrick gets the same sly grin on his face as he pushes his chair in and gets two intricate bags. One is made of rich, dark blue material, the other a lighter blue, both made of material nicer than anything I’ve ever known.
He starts laughing as he opens the bag more fully for me to look. I rifle through several silk scarves, each more beautiful than the last, and several pairs of oversized sunglasses, along with a few delicate hats and a makeup kit.
“What’s all this for?” I ask.
He opens his own, the dark blue, and starts putting on his own elaborate disguise. “So no one bothers us. And to make things even more fun getting to know each other.”
I shake my head, then run over to the hallway mirror to look at myself in a honey-blonde wig, amazed at the transformation.
I laugh at myself in the mirror. Then I see his image behind me, and I lose it. He’s wearing a false mustache, clear spectacles, and an old bowler hat.
“You’re crazy, Cedrick, you know that?”
“Is that an official diagnosis?”
“Maybe we can ask for different opinions on our trip. Are there any prominent doctors where we’re going?”
“No cheating. I see what you’re doing.”
We get into his vintage Jaguar, pulled in front of the circular driveway of the palace, as the staff loads suitcase after suitcase along with our disguise-satchels.
“How long are we going to be gone for?” I ask, suddenly alarmed.
“However long we feel like it.” He places an arm around my shoulder in the convertible, and I feel like I’m in an old Hollywood movie.
Although I’ve traveled the world as a doctor, in my own country of Solvaria I’ve hardly been outside of Virkas, the capital. I was always too busy with school, and then work.
“Where are we going first? Just give me that much.”
“Fine, fine,” Cedrick answers in mock-resignation, but I can tell he’s excited to share. “It’s one of my favorite places, a villa tucked away in a dense mountain forest with a lake just out back. We’d go there in my childhood every year to commemorate some battle or other. But what I remember is how much fun my brothers and I had running around and disguising ourselves like normal people. We got into so much trouble.”
“What kind of trouble?”
“Well, getting locked out without any way back and not being able to find where we put our clothes or swim trunks. That was an adventure. My father told us we were all disinherited.”
I can’t stop laughing as he tells one story after another, some about daily life in the palace, some about things that happened in the medical clinics, and some about the history of the country he’s finally giving me a chance to explore.
The hills start getting steeper, and I’ve never seen a place like this as we go up the long mountain. “This looks like the Swiss Alps, Cedrick. It’s incredible.”
“Yeah, the Solvarians wanted to hide the beauty of our landscape to maintain it for ourselves. But I always get a pang of jealousy when I see people praising Italy and Spain and France, when our mountains are so much more beautiful. This one time, we received the head of parliament from Switzerland, and… Am I talking too much?”
“What?” I’m shocked he even thinks anyone could get bored. “No, not at all. I love hearing it all.”
He proceeds to tell me about the visiting leader proposing renaming a mountain in his country after the tallest peak in Solvaria, Mount Abatton, where the villa happens to be.
We wander in the car through the cobblestone towns, with Dutch-style cottages and Tudor townhouses, and we wind through the countryside with paddocks full of cows. Families wave at us, as if they know there’s a royal in the convertible just based on the beauty of the car.
We climb up a mountain, and I’m terrified we’ll fall off the cliff. Without thinking, I hold Cedrick’s hand, and he smiles to himself and squeezes it.
“No reason to be afraid. I’ve done this a hundred times.”
“And how many times have you fallen off?”
We both laugh. As we pull up, the staff at the country house, an enormous Tudor villa with barns, silos, and wild gardens, gathers out front, talking excitedly. Some of them wave with huge smiles.
We swim in the lake for two days, just relaxing, reading, and getting to know each other. In the town, we explore shops and restaurants, and he tells me stories about practically each one.
“I opened this store, actually, to sell wares of the people in towns around the world that have our clinics.” He opens the door for me as we step into a shop that looks like it has curiosities from every continent through every century.
“This is amazing, Cedrick. Just amazing.” I shake my head.
“And then proceeds go back into the organization. I got the idea from Margaret, my program director, whose sister had a business selling silk. I went out in the middle of the country, not knowing what to expect, and her silk store was as elaborate as anything I had seen in Solvaria.”
“You should open one in Virkas.”
“I’m working on it. Hopefully, you can help me. When we get back from the different places we’re going.”
We go to Floramor, a town that’s known for its unbelievable plant cultivations, including the most beautiful gardens I have ever seen in my life. “My brothers and I would play hide-and-seek out here. It was glorious.”
We go to the beach villa for a week, and after that, we explore hidden caves in the desert in the eastern parts of the country for a day before arriving at the Vancourts’ historic hidden country house, where the King always escaped to forget about the pressures of royal life for a little while.
I love hearing his stories. I can’t believe I’ve been living in one for the last two weeks of our honeymoon. It’s perfect, and I don’t want it to end. If it stays like this, life with Cedrick could be more incredible than I ever thought.
I really hope it stays like this. It’s been just two weeks since our wedding, and only about a month since we re-met, so it’s not a lot of time to judge things by.
Especially once we add a baby, and with so much we don’t know about each other, there’s a lot that could change in a very short amount of time.