Page 71 of American Royals II: Majesty
“You okay?” Ethan asked, as everyone around them began packing up their things.
She hugged her knees to her chest. “Ethan. I don’t want to hurt you.”
“What?” he asked, bewildered. “You haven’t hurt me.”
“But you are hurting! And webothmanaged to hurt Jeff! We shouldn’t have ever…”
Ethan leaned forward. “What are you saying, that we shouldn’t have ever gotten together?”
“I don’t know!” She closed her eyes, her heart aching. She hated that she’d put Ethan in a position where he could lose his best friend. That she’d put Jeff in a position where he already had.
Ethan wrapped an arm around her shoulders. Nina took a deep breath, feeling her back rise and fall beneath his touch.
“Jeff will get over this—maybe not right away, but eventually. We’ve been friends for too long for him not to forgive this.” Ethan sounded confident, but Nina had a feeling he was trying to convince himself as much as her.
“Of course it would have been better if he’d learned the truth from us,” Ethan went on. “But I’d be lying if I said I regret that he found out. We would have told him soon anyway. And in the meantime, you and I can stop hiding.”
“We haven’t been hiding,” Nina pointed out. If they had, the reporter wouldn’t have ever found out about them.
“I don’t mean on campus. I mean with the royal family.” Ethan let his hand fall to the base of her spine. “I was thinking we could go to Beatrice’s wedding together.”
Nina blinked.
“Ethan,” she said hesitantly, “do you realize what you’re saying? This will be the most media-heavy event of our lives. If that reporter wanted to make a story out of nothing but campus rumors, think of how much worse it’ll be when we’re at the wedding together!” She shook her head. “We were both invited; can’t we just hang out at the reception without giving everyone a story?”
“I don’t think we’llbea story,” Ethan argued. “The other guests are all more important and gossip-worthy. Who’s going to talk about you and me when there are foreign royalty around? Besides,” he added, in a lower tone, “Iwantto be there with you.”
Nina wanted to be there with Ethan, too. Yet she wasn’t ready to be in the spotlight again, her photo printed in the tabloids. She had worked so hard to dissociate herself from all the gossip, and if she went to the wedding with Ethan, it would start chasing her all over again.
“I’ll think about it,” she promised, and glanced toward the river.
A few hundred yards away, on the edge of the park, stood the oxidized green form of the Statue of Liberty. Floodlights illuminated the statue’s face, casting her features in a golden-green blaze. She looked more dynamic from this angle, as if she’d been caught in a swirl of motion—as if she’d picked up the torch and was about to strike someone with it, to defend liberty itself.
Nina knew that when the French had shipped the statue over, it had almost ended up in another city instead: in Boston or Philadelphia or even that regional shipping city, New York. Of course, Congress had insisted that it stay right here in the nation’s capital, where it belonged.
“Want to go up?” she asked abruptly.
When Ethan realized where she meant, he groaned. “Right now? Why?”
“Why not?” Nina answered. It was a very Sam sort of reply.
The woman at the ticket office didn’t bother charging them for tickets, since the monument closed within half an hour. “This late, you’ll have it to yourselves,” she said with a wink.
Sure enough, when Ethan and Nina reached the elevator, they ran into several groups of people on their way down, but no one else heading up.
“This is so unbelievably cheesy of you,” Ethan muttered, though he didn’t actually sound displeased.
“That’s me, the queen of all things cheesy and touristy. Get used to it.”
No one else was on the circular viewing platform at the top. It was several degrees cooler up here than it had been at the statue’s base. Nina stepped forward, the wind whipping her hair.
Washington wasn’t a beautiful city, not the way Paris or even London was. It was too messy, having grown through the centuries without much of a central plan. One-way streets tangled and looped over each other in blithe confusion, Revolutionary monuments standing next to clunky new housing developments with rooftop pools.
That was Washington, Nina thought, a city of contradictions: crowded and cruel and thrilling and lovely all at once.
“Behold, my son. Everything the light touches is your kingdom,” Ethan growled behind her, and she burst out laughing.
“Aren’t you glad I made us come?” She spread her hands out. “I bet you haven’t been up here since your fourth-grade field trip!”
