Chapter 11
Eleven
“Okay, Adam,” Lauren said, standing at the podium the next morning for their press briefing. The weekly sessions had been
somewhat of a hit with the British media—it was one of the first times there had ever been a sense of having the slightest
amount of consistent control over coverage about the royal family. “As I’m sure you know from your many, many years doing
this job, seemingly without a promotion as far as I can tell, we do not comment on any of the family’s personal lives. Ever.
And that includes the Duke of Exeter.”
“But there are photos of him with a blond woman—”
“And?” Lauren teased him. “Were they talking? Breathing the same air? Please, Adam, don’t waste our time here. If there’s
a story, I’ll make sure you have the right one, but until then—” She made a “zip it” motion across her mouth.
Adam glared at her. He had not checked in with her again about his dig for information on Jasper’s financial problems, but
she had no doubt there would still be some stupid Dispatch headline the next morning.
She wasn’t surprised that everyone was trying to cobble together stories on the duke after his wildly successful Singaporean state dinner and children’s hospital visit, and the number of TikTok edits Violet kept sending her was starting to approach harassment.
(Not that Lauren didn’t watch every single one of them.
For work purposes.) One paper even sent a drone out over his old sheep farm in New Zealand to get shots of, perhaps not surprisingly, a huge group of bored sheep.
Lauren laughed when she saw the pictures and wondered which one was Sweater Weather.
She hadn’t seen Jasper since Singapore. She wasn’t sure if that was a conscious decision on his part, but either way, it was
probably for the best. She wasn’t sure what exactly she felt about him, but she knew that it wasn’t nothing.
And it terrified her.
She was positive, though, that the kiss in Singapore had been a moment of terrible judgment on both of their parts, and she
needed to put some space between them, which was why she sent Harriet out with the duke on his latest outing to meet volunteers
raising money for the London Ambulance Service charity, and then said a quick prayer that Harriet wouldn’t accidentally send
him to an early grave.
“Okay, final question!” Lauren said. “Please, if possible, could it be about any of the topics I briefed you on at the beginning of this session? That would be much appreciated.”
There was silence, and Lauren sighed. “Well, I look forward to all of your headlines about our array of World Book Day reading
initiatives we have lined up next month. I’m sure they’ll be very informative.”
She grabbed her notebook and was about to head back to her office when Oscar stepped in front of her. She had forgotten how
much taller he was than her five-foot-four self and found herself looking at the perfect knot in his tie.
“Well, hello,” she said. “Fancy seeing you here.”
He smiled at her. “I did have a question for you, actually, but I assumed you wouldn’t want me asking it in front of this lot.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the other journalists starting to file out of the room. “Not sure how you feel about personal questions at work.”
“Not great, actually,” Lauren said. “The last thing I need is James or Eugene thinking that I’m using work time as personal
time.”
“Oh, you know Eugene loves a good snit,” Oscar said. “It keeps him young.”
“Well, he’s going to be Benjamin Button at this rate,” Lauren replied, picking up her bag. “So, if you had to ask me a personal
question at work—”
“Which I am absolutely not going to do, of course.”
“Of course. But if you were?”
Oscar glanced at his watch and pretended to think. “Well, I did hear something—not from today’s press conference, of course,
but from a different source—that you need twenty-four hours’ notice before making dinner plans.”
“Which you would never do at work,” Lauren added.
“Absolutely not,” Oscar said. “I’m a rule follower, you know that.”
Lauren snorted to herself, remembering his hand in her hair, the two of them pressed up against the wall at Annabel’s back
in November. She wasn’t quite sure what the rules had been that night, but neither she nor Oscar had been following them,
that much she knew.
“Well, even if you were asking me out to dinner tonight, I couldn’t go anyway. I have to run some errands, and I’ve already
put them off for way too long.”
“Well, then, maybe you need some help. Is it dry cleaning? Food shopping?” Oscar pretended to shiver in happiness.
Lauren couldn’t hide her smile this time. “You’re good,” she said.
“Well, I’m assuming that the twenty-four-hour rule doesn’t apply to casual errands,” he said, returning her smile.
“You know,” she said, “you actually could be a really big help to me tonight.”
“Great,” he said. “I love helping.”
“No, you don’t.”
“No, not really. Did I guess right, though?”
Lauren paused. “Not exactly.”
“Just for the record,” Oscar said, “I hate you.”
She turned and grinned at him. “When was the last time you were in a TK Maxx, anyway?”
“With my mum when I was like seventeen. Why do they have a random section selling suspicious-looking foods?!”
They were standing in an extremely long line, considering it was 7:00 p.m. on a Friday night, each of them holding a huge
bag of autumnal-themed decor from Lauren’s failed Thanksgiving celebration.
“Please don’t take this the wrong way,” Oscar started to say.
“Oh, this should be fun,” Lauren said.
“But you never struck me as the kind of person to buy an entire load of holiday-themed . . . crap.” He glanced into the oversize
plastic bag. “Is that a cushion of a pumpkin wearing sunglasses?”
“Probably,” Lauren said. “And I’m not that kind of person.
I just was super homesick and momentarily panicked about the holidays and spent way too much money as a coping mechanism, which is why we’re returning all of this.
And I’ve been putting it off for ages. And then you swooped in and so graciously offered to help me!
” She batted her eyes at him. “My hero. Plus,” she added, “it would have been a pain to carry all this here by myself.”
“Yes, a real highlight of my day,” Oscar replied, but he looked more bemused than annoyed. That changed, though, when Lauren
reached around him toward the clearance section, stocked with post–Valentine’s Day goodies, and plucked a headband from the
pile. It had two spiral wires connected to shiny pink hearts, like a bug’s antennae.
“These are cute!” she said, holding them up so he could see them, and Oscar winced.
“If you put those on my head . . .” he warned her.
“Oh, who do you know in here anyway? I think they’re perfect.” She raised them toward him, and when he didn’t protest, she
slipped them over his head. “You’re adorable.”
“No offense, but no grown man wants to be referred to as ‘adorable.’” He opened his phone and looked at himself in the camera,
then groaned.
“Pretty sure there’s a pumpkin pair in one of these bags somewhere if you want to switch them out.”
“I feel like I’m in one of those stupid made-for-TV movies that my mum watches.”
It was so fun to rile him up, Lauren realized, to catch him off guard from his normal buttoned-up ways, to get him excited.
She felt like a kid playing tag on the school playground. “Fine, fine,” she said. She slipped them off his head and onto hers.
“What do you think? Do they make my eyes pop?”
Oscar looked down at her with something like fondness, his eyes warming up as he reached out to smooth her hair back. “Okay,
you do look adorable,” he said.
Lauren’s smile faded into something a little different, a little more vulpine, and she suddenly wished she hadn’t tried so hard to be cute and flirty and put her little twenty-four-hour notice rule in place.
Because right now, she was pretty sure she would have followed him anywhere and done anything.
“Next!” one of the many cashiers said, holding up a red flag, which Lauren decided was just a coincidence and not a warning
from the universe to pump the brakes.
“Hi,” Lauren said as she and Oscar staggered up to her.
“How did you even get this home with you?” Oscar asked as he dragged his bag.
“I need to return all of these items, please,” Lauren said, ignoring him, then produced a crumpled receipt from the bottom
of her purse, smoothing it out on the counter before handing it over.
“What is the reason for your return?” the cashier said, looking less than thrilled. “I can only give you store credit as it’s
been well over the return period.”
“Well, I bought it because my mom was supposed to come out and visit me for Thanksgiving, and I was slightly panicked, so
I did some stress shopping, but then she ended up canceling because of a listeria outbreak, so I’m returning them now.”
“I meant, like, are any of these items defective?”
“Depends on who you’re asking,” Oscar muttered, and Lauren gave him a gentle kick.
“No,” she said. “Just need them out of my house. But,” she added, then motioned to her antennae headband, “I will take these.
Somebody I like told me I look adorable in them.”
By the time they left the store, the sky was dark and the streets were packed with people heading in all directions. “So much easier to walk without carrying an entire pumpkin patch,” Lauren said. “But thanks for your help, seriously. I would have had to get an overpriced taxi or something.”
“Well, I’ll add it to my list of special skills,” Oscar said, pulling on a pair of gloves. “Are you heading home?”
“Yeah, just down to the High Street Kensington station,” she said, gesturing toward the tube entrance that was a few blocks
away.
“I’ll walk you,” he said. “I’m going that way as well.”
The station looked crowded as they tapped their cards at the turnstiles and headed down the steps and to the end of the platform,
away from the milling people and Friday-night tourists. “So,” Oscar said as Lauren glanced down the track to see if she could
see the train’s headlights.
“So,” she said, turning back to him. “Thanks again.”
“Of course. I also wanted to ask you, how late do you normally eat dinner?”
“Um, pretty late? I think?”
“Well, it’s seven fifty-five now,” he said, tapping at his watch. “And I have five minutes left to ask you to dinner at eight
o’clock tomorrow night. And if you don’t want to go, then I have five minutes to try to change your mind.”
That seventh-grade-crush feeling was back in force.
“Well, you better hurry up and ask me,” she said. “The clock’s ticking.”
“Lauren, I would love to take you to dinner tomorrow night at eight p.m.” He paused before adding, “Why do I feel like I should
be down on one knee right now?”
“Bite your tongue,” Lauren said. “Dinner in an actual restaurant, right? Not, like, Nando’s?”
“Lauren, I’m trying to impress you here. Of course we’re not going to Nando’s. No shame against it, though, I could murder a quarter chicken and Peri-Peri fries right now.”
“And you’ll pick the place? I don’t have to figure it out?”
Oscar frowned. “What sort of idiots have you been dating? How low is the bar?”
“Story for another time,” she said. “Anyway yes, I would love to go to dinner at an actual restaurant of your choosing. With
you.” She picked up his wrist and glanced at his watch. “Two minutes to spare. Anything else you want to ask me?”
Oscar paused, and suddenly his eyes weren’t teasing at all, and it felt like they were the only two people on the platform,
and Lauren had to catch her breath.
“Just one thing,” he murmured. “Do you promise that you’ll wear these?” He reached up to tweak one heart antenna, and Lauren
shrieked.
“I forgot I had them on!” she cried, taking them off her head. “Why didn’t you say anything?”
They were both laughing now, and as the train started to pull in, Oscar reached for her arm and pulled her in close, kissing
her cheek. Lauren could feel the stubble on his skin, chilled from the cold night air, and smell his shampoo and his soap.
“I told you,” he said as he pulled away. “You look adorable.” He squeezed her arm as he started to take a step back. “Get
home safe. I’m not even going to ask you to text me because I know how that’ll go.”
“Wait, are you not . . . ?” Lauren gestured toward the train as it stopped at the platform.
“This isn’t my station,” he said, then lifted his hand in a wave. “See you tomorrow. I’ll text you the place.”
She watched him even after she was onboard, looking out the condensation-covered window.
He didn’t leave until the train was pulling away, and Lauren watched as he took the stairs two at a time, a spring in his step, a lightness in him that she had never seen before, but she knew how it felt, because she was feeling that exact same way, too.