Page 111 of American Royals II: Majesty
Startled into submission, the driver stepped out of the car. The keys were in the ignition, the motor already rumbling.
Sam looked up in time to see Caleb hurtling down the front steps of the palace in pursuit. “Sorry,” she called out, before getting in the car and throwing her foot on the accelerator.
“Sam!” Marshall shouted from the backseat. “What are youdoing?”
She tore down the front drive, reaching to frantically adjust the mirrors. Marshall tried to throw his door open, but Sam had enabled the child lock.
“Buckle your seat belt,” she informed him. “We’re going for a drive.”
Technically Sam didn’t have a license; she’d never passed the parallel parking section of the driver’s test. She was only allowed to drive her Jeep—which she’d lovingly named Albert—on the country roads near Sulgrave, and only if her car was at the center of a formation, with a black security vehicle in front and another behind.
Driving in the capital, without her Guard, was definitely illegal. But it was too late to worry about that.
Sam whipped around another corner. Metro stops and colored pennants passed by in a blur. She wasn’t really sure where she was going except that she wanted to get as far from the palace as possible.
“Sam, you have to pull over!”
“I just wanted to talk,” she said reasonably, as if it were totally normal for her to commandeer one of the palace vehicles.
Marshall let out a huff of protest. “I have nothing to say to you.”
“Good, because you’re not the one who’s going to do the talking. You’re going to listen.” Sam’s hands tightened over the wheel as she blasted through a yellow light. The windows were tinted, so no one could look through and realize that the wild driver speeding down Cumberland Street was next in line to the throne.
“Look, it’s true that I had a crush on Teddy,” she admitted. “I kissed him last year at the Queen’s Ball, before he evenmetmy sister.”
In the rearview mirror, she saw Marshall grit his teeth. “This isn’t exactly helping,” he pointed out, but Sam forged ahead.
“When Teddy got engaged to Beatrice, I felt…angry, and rejected. I’m not proud of this, but I asked you to start dating me out of spite. Because I wanted to hurt Teddy as badly as he’d hurt me.
“Then you and I started acting like a couple, and at some point I stopped thinking about Teddy altogether. I reallylikeyou, Marshall, and it killed me that we were pretending. Before I met you, I never gave any thought to the guys I hooked up with. It was always just meaningless—”
“Still not helping,” he cut in, and she winced.
“What I mean is, things with you are different. So different that it scares me. Last weekend in the carriage…” They pulled up to a stoplight, and she risked a glance back at Marshall. “I thought we had agreed that it wasn’t fake anymore. That we meant it.”
“That was before I knew you were using me to get your sister’s fiancé!”
“I didn’t want him!” Sam burst out. “You have to understand, I neveractuallywanted Teddy. I just wanted him to choose me over Beatrice.”
“You’re not making sense,” Marshall insisted, though his tone was slightly less caustic than before.
“I’ve always been jealous of Beatrice.” Sam kept her eyes straight ahead; they were somewhere in the financial district now, monolithic office buildings rising up on either side of the road. “I fixated on Teddy, because it was easier to think about him than the fact that Beatrice is the future queen and I’m the useless one.”
“You’re not useless,” Marshall said heavily.
“I would say that I wish I could take it all back, but that’s not true,” she concluded. “Because if I hadn’t asked you to fake a relationship with me—no matter how messed-up my reasons were—I would never have realized that I want to be with you for real.”
There was a protracted silence. Sam swallowed. It would be okay, she told herself; at least she’d tried.
Then she heard the click of Marshall unfastening his seat belt. He braced a hand on the front seat and began climbing up over the central console.
“Seriously?”Sam veered wildly into the other lane, just barely managing to avoid colliding with a taxi. A chorus of angry horns shouted at them.
“Sorry.” Marshall lowered himself into the passenger seat. “But if we’re really having this conversation, then I need to be able to see your face.”
“I—okay.”
“Sam, did you really mean everything you just said?” he asked.
