Chapter 28
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
LEXI
BECCA
Fuck, sorry, just saw this.
Finally, thank God. It’s been over an hour since I texted her to tell her I’d slept with Oliver.
My shoulders, which have been up around my ears, drop with relief.
ME
Emergency. Time to talk?
My phone immediately vibrates with a video call.
“Where the hell are you?” Becca asks. “It looks like a greenhouse.”
“That’s because I’m in a greenhouse.”
“I realize this isn’t the point, or even close to it, but why?”
“Because I needed to get out of that house. Well, that castle. I had no idea a place that enormous could be so fucking suffocating. Plus it’s bugged.
So I came out to walk around the gardens.
But then it got cloudy and the sun went away.
And I didn’t have a jacket with me. Then I got cold.
And I decided that while I waited to hear from you I’d duck in here.
And I’ve been pacing up and down between the herbs and the…
whatever the stalks are in those pots of dirt over there ever since. ”
“Dude, have you had seventeen espressos?”
“Nope. Just wired on the fact I slept with a subject. And while I haven’t checked the company handbook, I’d imagine it’s on the list of fireable offenses.”
“When did the sex happen?”
“Why? Is there a time of day that would make it less fireable?”
She tilts her head and gives me a schoolteacher look. “When, Lexi?”
“Last night.”
“And why did it happen?”
“Because I was interviewing him. And he told me a story about his nanny taking him to a waterfall.”
“Um, okay. That must have been one hell of a story.”
“And we were sitting on the bed, and it was dark. And it felt all intimate. And earlier he’d told a really sick little girl he was going to send her and her dad on a trip to see polar bears.
And he’s truly nice. And not an asshole.
He’s kind and thoughtful and generous. And smart and funny.
And hot. God, Becca, he’s really fucking hot. ”
“Okay. Take a breath.” As soon as her slow, calm voice enters my ears, I realize how fast I’m talking. Which is roughly in time with how fast I’m pacing.
“I can get on board with the kind, smart, funny, and hot reasons,” she says.
“The waterfall, nanny, sick girl, and polar bears are a bit confusing, but we can come back to them later. Right now, my main question is, why the fuck were you interviewing a hot prince with a hot British accent on a bed in the dark? Did it not cross your mind that that might be asking for trouble?”
“I don’t know. I don’t even remember. It’s just how it happened. It felt like a totally natural, comfortable thing to do.”
“And I’m guessing this was the four-poster bed.”
“Does it matter? Does that make it better? Or worse?”
“Just figuring out the vibes,” she says.
“The vibes are good. All the vibes around him are annoyingly fucking good.”
“So the sex was…?”
“Great for me. Not so great for him.”
“Are you telling me you’re a shitty lay?”
“No.” I look around to be extra sure there isn’t a gardener lurking somewhere. There isn’t, but I lower my voice to a whisper anyway. “I’m saying that after he’d…taken care of me, almost as soon as I touched him, he came in my hands before I got his pants off.”
Becca leans into the phone, lips curving into an impressed smirk, head tilting. “Wow. You mean taking care of you got him so fucking hot for you that he couldn’t control himself?” She looks impressed.
“In fairness to him, it’s also been several years since he’s…you know.”
“Not according to the media.”
“I believe him over them.”
“Whoa. Trusting a man, shocking. Trusting a man you barely know—that’s up there with the likelihood of Julian bringing in cake for everyone.”
Fair point, but I ignore it.
“I honestly think Oliver’s given up on women because he doesn’t want to subject them to the way the press would inevitably treat them.
It’s why he was against us pretending to be together—he was worried the reports might break me.
It happened to the last person he dated, who he seems to have liked.
I meant it when I said he’s kind and thoughtful. ”
“No thirty-something dude is so altruistic that they’d go without sex to save womankind from the ravages of the media.”
“The tabloids here are brutal. You should see some of the things they wrote about his mom when she was younger.” I shake my head.
“So why did you want to talk to me?” Becca asks. “Are you hoping I’ll tell you it’s totally fine to keep on sleeping with him if you want to?”
“No,” I snap. “But is it?”
She closes her eyes and slumps her head.
“I was panicking.” Even I can hear the evidence of that in my voice. “And who the hell else would I tell but you? You’re always calm and matter-of-fact and a good head in a crisis.”
“Was his head good in a crisis?” She lifts her gaze and waggles her eyebrows at me.
“Stop it. But since you asked, absolutely out of this fucking world. Seriously.” I snuffle out a long breath.
“And you like him, right?”
“Whether I like him or not is irrelevant. He’s the person I’m interviewing.
The person I have to work with to write this damned book.
And that makes him the most out-of-bounds, untouchable, unkissable, unsleepwithable person I know.
So this is one giant unethical mistake, and I needed to talk to you to get it off my chest.”
“Do you feel cleansed now?”
“Not really. But it doesn’t matter. I’m gonna get through this, write the book, then travel thousands of miles away to my new dream job and never see him again.”
“Is that what you want?”
“Of course it’s what I want. You know I’ve wanted to be a war correspondent for forever. It’s the whole reason I went into journalism.”
“I meant the part where you never see Prince Oliver again.”
“Of course.” My guts clench as the words leave my lips. “That’s the way a job like this works.”
“But what if he wants to continue seeing you? And if you want to continue seeing him?”
“It would be impossible.” I snort and roll my eyes. “And it’s not the case anyway. On either of our parts. I can promise you that.” My guts don’t like those words either.
“How have things been today? It must have been super awkward after last night?”
“Huh.” Her question brings my pacing to a sudden halt. It hadn’t occurred to me to think that today might have been awkward.
“Not at all. He woke me up and had me shut him in the trunk of the housekeeper’s car so we could drive out without photographers seeing him, and then we went to the waterfall he’d told me about last night.
He’d gotten one of the staff to make a picnic for us.
” I suppress the smile tugging at the corners of my mouth.
“Anyway, we did that. And you know what? It wasn’t weird at all. ”
Becca rests her chin on her hand and glares at me in silence.
“What?” I ask.
“You went on a date.”
“No, I did not,” I scoff.
She nods. “The guy you slept with last night woke you up and took you on a romantic picnic by a waterfall that he’d told you the night before meant something important to him. That’s pretty much the definition of a date.”
“It’s not what it was at all.” At least I hope it’s not.
Or do I hope it is? “He hates being cooped up in that place and wanted to get out for a little bit. And it’s hard for me to interview him in the castle because there’s always a chance someone might overhear.
I mentioned the bug, right? So getting off the property makes it easier to talk, and he’d just mentioned the waterfall last night and that he hadn’t ever been back there, so I guess it must have been top of mind, and that’s why he came up with that idea, and he knew that by the time we’d get there it would be lunchtime and we’d be hungry so it would make sense for him to bring food with us. ”
Yes. All perfectly logical.
“You’re panic-processing,” Becca says.
“I’m what?”
“That thing you do when you want to justify something you know isn’t really justifiable.
Like that time you spent ten minutes explaining to me that buying those really expensive noise-canceling headphones was crucial to your workflow, when in fact you just wanted to use them to block out Lee Regus’s self-indulgent ramblings in the office.
You never needed to justify it to anyone anyway. ”
“That was six years ago, and I still use those headphones all the time for listening back to interviews while I go for a walk. As well as for blocking out Lee. So they turned out to be the great investment I always knew they were.”
“Maybe sleeping with your prince last night will be a great investment too.”
I gasp in horror. “Do you think I only did that to loosen him up and get him to tell me juicier stories to make the book better?”
“Um, that truthfully never crossed my mind. But if you think you did…” She shrugs.
“I do not think I did. I would never do that. You know I would never do that.”
“Okay, then you did it for the same reason you slept with any of the other men you’ve slept with. Because you like him.”
“That didn’t apply to Ryan.” I point my finger at her. “He was obsessed with his pool league and had never read a single New York Times article in his life. I really wasn’t that into him. But he did have incredible thighs and a really cute smile. A good time, not a long time, and all that.”
“Is the prince a Ryan?”
“No. Of course not. Oliver has a quick brain. And he’s worldly.
On the flight over, he was reading an article about famine in East Africa and kept telling me shocking statistics from it.
” I pause to think for a moment, trying to find a fault.
“The only slightly odd thing is that he seems to have made a weird financial decision to buy a quarter share in a loserish soccer team. But I haven’t had a chance to ask him about that yet. ”
Is that truly the only fault—and it’s not even a fault —that I can find with him? I can usually come up with a much longer list for every man I meet after spending way less time with them than I have with Oliver.
“Do you want my advice?” Becca asks.
“That look on your face says I’m not going to like it. So maybe I don’t. Maybe I only wanted to talk to you in your capacity as my unofficial therapist.”
“Well, you’re getting it anyway.”
“Of course I am.”
“You are not one to do rash things. You have a spreadsheet for your groceries, for God’s sake. So—”
“In my defense, that’s an efficiency device. What’s the point of starting a list from scratch each time when I buy a lot of things over and over again every week? Also it makes me less likely to forget things I only buy occasionally. Honestly, it’s a great system. More people should adopt it.”
“Right, yeah. Anyway. You’re not one to do rash things. You are particularly not someone who sleeps with people on a whim. You made one guy wait for two months, for God’s sake.”
“Again, in my defense, I met him right when I had a mountain of research to do for an article on sweatshop labor that took every last drop of my time and energy.”
“Which brings me to my next point. You are not one to jeopardize your work or career for anyone. And you know full well that banging Prince Oliver could do exactly that.”
“I wouldn’t describe it as a bang.”
“Which leads me nicely to my next point. Before you make any decisions about how to handle this, maybe you should have real, not spurting-in-your-hands, sex with him. You know you should never make a decision until you’ve gathered all the data.”
“So you’re saying I should sleep with him again? For research?”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying.” She tilts her head and raises her eyebrows. “But also because you clearly really fucking like him.”