Page 44 of The Impossible Princess
“None rate an invite to my mother’s garden parties,” she says, hooking her shoes onto her feet and walking to the door. “Anyway, I shouldn’t have kissed you, not if we wanted to be friends. I’ve ruined it.”
She’s right. It is ruined. We crossed a line tonight, and no matter what fiction we decide on in the next minutes, I could never settle for friendship now. The risk of losing even that pushes me forward.
I lift my shoulder and hope it sounds like this is just another back and forth about pig-shaped watering cans. “Kiss me, don’t kiss me. Be friends, don’t be friends. Those are unimaginative choices, princess. You had your way with my lips tonight, got it out of your system,” I wait for a contradiction that never comes, “but I’m still planning to press-gang you next week into painting the cottage. I’ll even call you lazy royal scum if you like.”
She laughs, the sound filling up the tiny hall. “Paint the whole thing?”
I grin, dialing back to half-pirate. “Have you seen the peeling? I’m not about to lose free labor by becoming awkward over a kiss. I can’t afford to.”
A brow lifts, but she gives a tiny nod to this bit of ridiculous logic. “I’m worried. If the press gets a whiff of this, all my hard work to impress my mother might go up like a puff of smoke. And I had to complicate it by kissing you. Do you really think we can go back to how things were?”
We can never go back to how things were. But I say, “Easy.”
Another smile, this time more firm. “I have to get back to the palace, Max. I should have told the guardhouse that I needed a security detail. I should have—” She exhales a long breath. “I don’t know what I’m going to tell security to get me out of this.”
I nod, trying not to think about her lips on mine; of how easy it would be to drag her back to the couch and lose another hour or two. “They don’t behead princesses anymore.”
Her nose wrinkles. “I’m trying to prove to my mother that I can be responsible, and I shook my security detail. It can’t happen again.”
“No texting you to come over, last minute?”
Her eyes shut. “This must sound so stupid to you.”
I get close, closer than I should in light of such friendly talk. “When I’m on deployment, you’d be surprised by how much warning I have to give before I’m allowed to leave.”
She smiles at that. “I like it when you do that.”
“Do what?”
“Make me feel like my life is normal.” She touches my hand. “Still friends?” she asks.
“Still friends,” I reply, fingers twining with hers, brushing her palm, communicating the things I can’t say.
“And nothing that happens tonight has to change things?”
“Nothing.”
A tiny nod. “Good,” she answers and goes up on her tiptoes, pressing her lips softly against mine, lingering.
I take it from there. Friends don’t kiss like this.
21
Disputed Territories
CLARA
I don’t sleep. I don’t even try. I spend the whole night clutching my phone, swiping it on and off, waiting for Max to text me. What is he supposed to say after I threw myself at him? What do I want him to say?
Officially, we agreed to kiss and forget, but I see that this was a ridiculous vow made when I harbored the faint hope that he would kiss like the guys I knew in college—boozy and distracted by mastering a kill move inFourteen Nights to Die III. Instead, Max kisses like he’s been dispatched by the Royal Navy to claim disputed territories or die trying. (In this metaphor, my lips are the disputed territories.)
The night is long, and I have plenty of time to draw increasingly strange parallels.
If my feelings are a mimosa, the remembered delight of those kisses would be a tall flute of champagne, while the guilt would only be a tiny container of orange juice wafted from an adjacent room. For blowing off my security detail, however, I feel genuine remorse. At first light, I throw back the covers, determined to prostrate myself to the head of security.
Nils Helmut is composed of equal parts spit and polish. I’m hoping that a hot Danish and fresh coffee from the palace kitchens might buy me forgiveness for this one tiny lapse, and I set off, armed with the peace offering.
It’s just my luck to run into Noah as he’s returning to his cottage, wearing worn tweeds and a dress shirt open at the neck. His biscuit-colored dog is busy sniffing the petunias in the garden bed. He raises his hand in greeting, and I jog over, the paper sack and lidded cup feeling conspicuous paired with my jogging clothes.
