Page 60 of The Impossible Princess
She nods, threading her arm through mine, leaning her head against my shoulder for the briefest moment. “How’s work?”
I laugh, the sound rumbling through my chest. It’s been a week of having the captain throw his weight around, scaring new recruits senseless. “I don’t want to talk about work.”
A breath of amusement leaves her lungs.
“So we’ll talk about the matchmaking. That should be a laugh. I’ve spent this week turning down a number of my mother’s romantic suggestions.”
“Your mother makes suggestions about your love life, too?”
She jabs me with her elbow. “It’s a dance. Mama lays out a list of potential partners—cross-referenced for strategic importance—and we get to say which ones we would like to meet.”
“Does that actually work?”
“It’s how Alma met her hairy grand duke.”
I halt and our hands stretch between us before she turns around to look at me.
“That’s a bloodless way to go about it.”
“Mama was matched that way and Alma seems—”
“Content?”
Clara looks troubled. “Resigned.”
“Is a hairy grand duke in your future?” I’m tense but try to make the question as easy as I can. We’re dating, but I wonder if we’re defining it differently.
“Oh no.” The momentary relief I feel disappears at her next words. “By the time I get to choose, the grand dukes will be taken,” she laughs, pulling me up the trail. “Like everything else in the family, the older sisters will get their pick, and I’ll take whatever’s left. I’ll have to make do with lesser counts and barons, a distant cousin. Unless…”
“Unless?” I repeat, and I know I sound forbidding. It’s hard to keep my voice calm when I’m right in the middle of planning how to lay waste to my rivals. I’ve halted again, feet planted, arms crossed.
She darts back and leans up on her tiptoes, brushing my lips with her own.
“Unless I ignore Mama’s list entirely.”
27
Battered Tiaras
CLARA
My morning begins with the day’s agenda helpfully slipped under my door by Caroline. Breakfast, horseback riding, an hour of repose (commanded in a suitably impressive typeface so I know Mama means business), luncheon, and an afternoon audience with the queen.
I ought to be wondering what it’s all about. I ought to be hoping that Mama has begun to take my subtle hints that I am diligently studying up on geriatric memory loss. Instead, I stretch, unable to hide my grin. I drove two hours in the car yesterday, the longest trip since returning from the States. The dashboard on my poor Fiio doesn’t know what to do with such long distances except suggest a restorative cup of coffee and a rest with gentle but increasingly desperatepings.
I flop dreamily into a chair before my mirror. Seeing Max leaned up against his car yesterday, ankles crossed, his relaxed shirt hugging broad shoulders…it’s a miracle I didn’t steer into a ditch.
I begin to comb out my hair when a feather of doubt creeps in. I haven’t told Max I love him. Maybe it’s because I’m worried that the more he sees of royal life—the more he sees of the demands it makes—the more he’ll wish he had settled for something less complicated. The man has to have as many chances as possible to decide what he wants before shouldering the weight of my feelings too.
I’ve worked out my reasons for delaying sensibly, but then I remember him helping me to the top of a massive boulder yesterday, the rock likely deposited thousands of years ago when the Weichselian glaciers rolled up and retreated to Scandinavia. I never worried for a second that he’d drop me. Max is strong, dependable. I couldn’t be in safer hands.
Max can’t make his choice to get serious about us before he has all the information. So that’s it. Before he leaves on his deployment, I have to tell him how I feel.
A smile plays on my lips as I tie my hair back in an Hermès scarf and rush down to breakfast.
The morning flies by. I’m not an accomplished rider, but the activity keeps Cousin Helmut from singing his son’s charms. Père mans the grill over lunch, and I swoop behind him, stealing a sausage before he can swat me on the backside. He curses me in Pavian (“May your face grow a duckbill.”) and hauls me close, his other hand busy with the tongs.
“It’s nice seeing you so happy,Clarita,” he says, sunglasses obscuring his eyes. “Sometime you’ll tell me what makes you smile, hm?”
