Page 70 of The Prince and the Puck
CHAPTER 36
LIZZY
CORONATION CONUNDRUM.
Once Lambert’spublic persona was fully rehabilitated and he had the hang of managing it himself, there was less for me to do on that front. I returned to the office of the guard, happy to see Stephanie Long taking Neel’s place. She was levelheaded, intelligent, and someone I was sure the realm could trust.
Declan and I spent time together, getting to know each other in our home country as the people we were born to be. But there was a layer of uncertainty between us. I would be sent off soon on a new assignment—though Neel’s mission to Luxembourg turned out to be only a ploy to keep me out of his way as he continued to foment anti-monarchist sentiment. It didn’t matter anyway, since soon, Declan would become king. There had been no indication that the plan had changed despite Lambert’s excellent new image.
At the Queen’s insistence, Declan went to his royal fittings, taking Lambert for moral support. I supposed that was the kind of thing men needed when they had to try on clothes for hours at a time. More importantly, I took it as confirmation that Declan intended to ascend the throne.
It was the one thing we didn’t talk about. That and our true feelings, but those two topics were so interwoven, we couldn’t touch on one without the other coming up. I guessed we were both living in denial, delaying the inevitable.
My feelings for him didn’t change. They only deepened.
"And until you tell him how you feel, you’ll never be able to say that you really tried," my mother told me repeatedly. “You must be brave.”
The thing was, I was brave. I was brave in the face of real, actual, physical danger.
So why was I so scared to tell Declan how I felt about him and what I really wanted?
“The calendar looks incredible,” Joey told me when we talked later that night. I’d asked Declan for some time, and was lounging on my bed in my old room, my mother in the den watching television.
“I’m so glad,” I told her. I really was. Even if my PR assignment had been fake, it mattered to me that the players I’d come to admire got what they were looking for out of the effort.
“Honestly, these photos are so hot,” Joey gushed. “I’m emailing you the PDF, okay? You’ll die.”
“And is it selling?”
“Like hotcakes,” she confirmed.
“And how’s Wilma?”
Joey chuckled. “Well, it turns out, wombats are quite the handful. Luckily, this one is already pretty domesticated, though John isn’t thrilled when he gets into his hockey gear.”
“So, are you and Prince Declan spending a lot of time together?” I’d told Joey the whole truth earlier in the conversation when she’d mentioned Declan’s absence from the team. It didn’t feel right to keep the secret, and there was little chance the rest of the team wouldn’t find out soon enough. For now, I had asked her to keep it quiet.
“We are,” I admitted. “But I can’t pretend I see a future for us.”
“What? Why not? I would think discovering you share a homeland and a past crush would have cemented things!”
“There’s the little detail of him being royalty. And my being from the serving class,” I reminded her.
“It’s not the Dark Ages,” she laughed. “Does that even matter?”
I didn’t know. “It might. To his family. Maybe to him, though he hasn’t admitted it.”
“Lizzy, that’s ridiculous,” Joey said, sounding angry on my behalf. “You’re an amazing person—what difference does it make if your family is royalty? Or noble or whatever?”
I sighed. “It’s just… it’s tradition. It’s hundreds of years of things being done a certain way,” I told her. “For all I know, Declan’s parents have someone in mind for him already.”
“Well do they?”
“I don’t know.” Declan had never mentioned it if they did. Maybe he didn’t know?
“I think you should go for it. You guys are perfect together, regardless of class or station or whatever. This isn’t Downton Abbey, Lizzy.”
But it was pretty darned close.
