Page 31 of The Impossible Princess
“Your whole life, then.” I move on to the ball of her foot and she sinks back, her eyes drifting shut. The careful friendliness slips from my face, and I look my fill at her features picked out in the firelight.
“The press won’t be interested in me that long. Noah will have a family someday, and I won’t be so close to the Crown. I can expect a momentary spike of interest for every scandal I’m involved in, another spike when I marry, and smaller ones with each Lutheran baby.”
I smile. Eyes closed, she smiles. My hands still. I want to pull her out of her chair and into mine, but I don’t trust plastic Scandi engineering.
This wasn’t supposed to happen. I was supposed to remember that my commanding officer has the power to sink my career, relegating me to a future of obscure commands and insignificant clerical work, if I don’t stay out of the press. I was supposed to get Clara to the cottage and find out that she’s like a fish out of water—find out that she tiptoes around my house and sniffs at my hand-me-down furniture until she can make her excuses and go. I was never supposed to forget she is a princess. But the truth is that she treats this place like she belongs here.
She opens her eyes, and I hastily rearrange my features. She glances at her watch, tugging her foot from my hands.
I want to touch her again, maybe in a bout of arm wrestling, but she swiftly ties the laces of her sandal and stands. “I have to get back.”
“Do they pull up the drawbridge at midnight?”
She pulls me out of my chair, walking backward towards the house. “Help me with the boxes?”
It’s friendly but I’m still holding that live wire, tense all the time and aware of every breath she takes, frustrated out of my mind.
“When are we going to plant the flowers?” I ask as she slides into the driver’s seat.
“We have a bunch of preparations for the state dinner with Vorburg.”
“That’s not for months. February, right?”
“You wouldn’t believe how much there is to get ready,” she says. “If I could come in the morning sometime—”
Hell, yes. “Wednesday. Sunrise.”
Her brows lift. “That’s five o’clock.”
“Oh, I see. You’re one of those soft Handselites.”
She rolls her eyes. “Five it is. You’d better feed me breakfast.”
15
Junior Associate
CLARA
I glance at the time on the dashboard, my fingers drumming anxiously on the steering wheel. I didn’t mean to stay so long. There’s a logbook in the gatehouse that switches out at midnight, and I am bound to be the first, obvious entry if I don’t hurry up.
Maybe these gymnastics are silly. My security team also knows exactly where I am, with whom I spend my time, and how long I’m out—there’s no getting around these frustrating realities unless I take Ella’s advice and entirely bypass the security system. But, I remind myself, pressing down on the accelerator, no one (by which I mean my mother) will go snooping over the records and asking awkward questions about my movements as long as I don’t give them a reason to.
I am cutting it close.
As I pour out of a roundabout, I remove my earrings, snatch a make-up removing towelette and scrub it haphazardly over my face. At a stop, I pull my hair into a ponytail and grab the linen bag with the bright logo emblazoned across it from the floor and plop it conspicuously on the passenger seat. When I slip the car into its slot in the old stables, I shoulder the bag and follow the illuminated path towards a side door of the palace, my heart thumping out of time.
“Hey.”
I yelp, adrenalin surging through my veins. My breath breaks from my lungs when I see it’s only my sister.
“Oh. Hey, Freja. You startled me.”
“Gone shopping?”
With clammy hands, I lift the bag, full of books from a recent trip to the Handsel booksellers market. They aren’t for show. I did buy them. I will read them. No lies have crossed my lips.
“Going out?” I ask.
