Chapter 4 #3
“Are we sure that this isn’t about just showing that I’ve moved on from my ex-wife?”
Lauren paused before replying, “Your Highness, if this trip on Thursday goes as planned, nobody’s going to be thinking about
your ex-wife at all.”
The duke paused, then turned and gave her a small smile. “Finally. An answer I like.”
“First engagement today!” Joy proclaimed the following week as she strolled into Lauren’s office, where she had been busy going over the minutes from her last press briefing and sipping a very hot and very strong tea she had made for herself in the office kitchen.
“This tea,” Lauren said by way of response, “is kind of making me want to forsake coffee, which is a sentence I never thought
I’d say.”
“That’s how we get you,” Joy said, plopping down into a chair. “First coffee, then you’re forsaking your country. All part
of the master plan.”
Lauren grinned as she turned back to her laptop. “What’s up?”
“Aren’t you excited about your first engagement?” She made grabby hands toward Lauren, who immediately slid over the open
bag of Maltesers she had on her desk.
“Yes, my first engagement. Yay. Woo. So excited.” Lauren glanced down at the itinerary she had printed out just in case she
lost connectivity on her phone. She had triple-checked all the addresses, phone numbers, and confirmations the night before,
but she still worried that something could go awry. “Did you hear that they’re sending James to escort me?” she asked, reaching
for the bag of chocolates.
“Noooooo,” Joy said. “Why? They don’t trust you?”
“Eugene doesn’t want me to go alone,” Lauren said, brushing her chestnut-brown hair out of her eyes and regretting the curtain
bangs that she had cut herself right after she left the White House. At least they were finally long enough to tuck behind
her ears. (And never again would she take bang-cutting advice from an eighteen-year-old TikTok influencer.) “I can tell you
James isn’t happy about it either.”
Indeed, he hadn’t been. “What?!” he had screeched as soon as it was suggested in their weekly alignment meeting. “What is the point of hiring someone, Eugene, if I have to do their job along with mine?”
“I never thought I’d say this, but I agree with James,” Lauren had replied.
Eugene had just shaken his head. “Lauren’s too new. We need someone who knows the ins and outs of these things. Imagine something
going horribly wrong and we don’t have boots on the ground?”
“You will have boots on the ground!” Lauren had protested. “Me, you have me. And I have boots. Beautiful ones! There hasn’t
even been a single crisis from my very first press briefing.”
“You will find,” Eugene had replied, “that being with a member of the family outside of these walls can sometimes be a little . . .
unpredictable.”
Harriet had leaned over toward Lauren, smelling like a blend of fabric softener and Vicks VapoRub. “He’s thinking of the runaway
alpacas,” she’d whispered.
Lauren had blinked. “The what nows?”
“Two years ago. Alpaca farm with the Duke of Hereford,” Violet had said without looking up from her phone. “There was a jailbreak.
Fur was literally flying. There aren’t enough lint brushes in the world for something like that.”
“Were the alpacas okay?” Lauren had asked.
Violet had shrugged. “Guess so. We were too busy trying to shield poor Richmond. He has terrible allergies to, we discovered
that day, alpaca fur. Ugh!” she muttered as she tapped angrily on her phone. “All these people commenting ‘FIRST!’ on every
post. You can’t all be first, bloody imbeciles.”
Eugene had just raised an eyebrow at Lauren, who had enough self-awareness to know that avoiding stampeding alpacas was not on her list of skills and talents. “Fine,” she’d said. “Me and James, joined at the hip.”
“Always carry some Claritin, just in case.” Harriet had smiled at her, then patted her arm. “Never hurts.”
Back in Lauren’s office, Joy laughed at the story. “I bet he mentioned the alpacas,” she said.
“You know about that?”
“Everyone knows about that!” Joy replied. “It was all over the internet. The man was literally running for his life while
sneezing his head off, eyes all puffy and red.” Joy chuckled a bit to herself. “The memes were hilarious. May he rest in peace.”
“Wait, that’s how he died?!” Lauren gasped.
“Not from that!” Joy laughed. “Old age. A year later.”
Lauren covered her eyes and sighed. “I’m beginning to understand why Amelia quit,” she said.
“Oh, buck up,” Joy said. “These engagements write themselves, you said so yourself. The Duke of Exeter is a handsome man doing
a good deed, and everyone wins in the end.”
“Where were you during yesterday’s comms meeting, by the way?” Lauren asked.
“Well, I’m glad you asked,” Joy said. “I was upstairs at the keeper of the privy purse’s office waiting for a meeting we had
arranged to discuss budget allocations for a number of DEI initiatives I would like to get activated next year, including
a potential Pride Day event that I proposed in an email that, as of now, only two people have responded to.”
Lauren felt a twinge of guilt. “I’ll respond right now,” she said, opening her mail app.
“No, no, it’s fine,” Joy said with a sigh. “No offense, but I need all the higher-ups to respond. And in any case, ol’ keeper never showed for the meeting, so I lost an hour of my very valuable time.”
“I’m sorry,” Lauren said. “I’m assuming his assistant never reached out to reschedule?”
Joy just tapped her nose before standing up. “Anyway, go crush it today. Live your dreams! Make your own destiny!”
Lauren smirked as she grabbed her coat. “Is this the part where you tell me not to do anything that you wouldn’t do?”
“You must be joking.” Joy stopped in the doorway. “Lauren, my love, I am a divorced woman who this year became closer to forty
than I am thirty. I have an eight-year-old son whose obsession with Pokémon is taking over my life. You should do everything I wouldn’t do. Literally everything. Go live life for me, please. I beg you.”
“Pokémon’s cute, though,” Lauren said. “I had Pokémon cards when I was a kid.”
“Yes, it’s cute when you’re a kid,” Joy replied. “No woman my age should have as much knowledge about these characters as
I do, Lauren. It’s not healthy. This one time, when Theo was with his dad, I had a man over and I noticed a rogue Pokémon
card had stuck to his back while we were in bed!”
“Oh my God. Okay, I will avoid all Pokémon, thank you for the advice,” Lauren said, then tucked her laptop into her bag and
grabbed a long scarf off the back of her door. “Any other last words before I head out?”
“Just that if you evolve a Shroomish before it reaches level forty-five then Breloom can’t learn the Spore attack.”
Lauren laughed as she switched off her office light, leaving Joy in the dark.
“And you have to finish the game if you want to catch Dragonite and Charizard.”
“Have a good day, Joy!”
“Safe travels! Watch out for Team Rocket!”
Lauren made it out to the car in the Palace’s inner quadrangle, where they were set to meet the duke, and there she saw James
engrossed in his phone. “Good morning,” she said. “I was hoping you’d be able to change Eugene’s mind about this.”
“You’re hilarious,” James said without cracking a smile. “I’ve worked with Eugene for coming up to ten years, so trust me
when I say that there is no changing his mind on anything to do with the Queen or the royal family.”
“Can’t someone else come with me? What about Harriet? What’s she doing today?”
James snorted as he held the door open for her. “You don’t want to be alone with Harriet.”
“Why? She’s harmless.”
“She’s sort of known as . . . the Grim Reaper.”
Lauren looked up from her phone, alarmed. “Harriet?” she said, and James gestured at her to lower her voice. “Our Harriet? The woman who wears cardigans that she probably knits herself?”
“Yes, yes, she’s quite lovely, but every single royal she has worked closely with over the years has, well, passed away.”
“What?!”
“Of course,” James added hastily, “bar one, the others were quite old and probably well overdue for their time to come. But
it’s something that we’ve all noticed over the years.”
“Have any staffers died?” Lauren asked. “Like cute young comms directors? Should I be scared?”
“Oh, no, no, of course not.” James laughed like Lauren was the ridiculous one in the conversation. “And again, they were all fairly ancient. Say what you want about the royals, but they cling to life like a bad ex.”
“Okay,” Lauren said warily. “I’ll, uh, keep an eye out for the scythe.”
“I have to tell you, I feel ridiculous being this dressed up for a hospital.”
Lauren sat next to the duke in the car on their way over to the children’s hospital as he straightened his collar and picked
a piece of lint off his pants. James rode shotgun next to the driver–slash–protection officer, tapping a message on his phone,
probably telling Eugene that she hadn’t started a crisis. Yet.
“Well, you look wonderful,” Lauren said. “And a suit is very appropriate for this kind of engagement.”
“It’s a hospital,” the duke protested. “A children’s hospital, as you’ve pointed out to me more than a few times. Wouldn’t jeans be less intimidating for the kids?”
“You are projecting royal confidence,” Lauren replied. “Or at least you should be. You’re a prince and a duke, a member of the royal family, and also, these children have probably been raised on Disney princess movies. The bar
is very high here in terms of their expectations when they’re meeting a member of the family. Jeans and sneakers are not what
they want to see.”
“My nanny loved playing those movies when I was a kid,” he said.
“I watched them, too. I wore a yellow Belle dress until it literally fell apart in the washing machine.”
James turned in his seat and raised an eyebrow at her, shaking his head. She could practically read his mind: No personal details.
“Now, did you and Eugene go over all the material that I sent?”