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Then he pushed Flip ahead of him into the service room behind the bar.

“Have you been drinking?” Flip asked, bemused, as Brayden continued nudging until they stood in front of a long plastic table serving as a prep area.

“Not yet,” Brayden said cheerfully. “Now where’s—there he is.”

A tall blond man entered from the bar and offered a bow. “Your Highness,” he said. “Your escort said you requested this specifically.” He brandished a bottle of Don Julio Reposado.

Brayden beamed. “Isn’t Sven great? Say thank you, Flip.”

“Thank you, Sven,” Flip said dutifully. One of the most important etiquette lessons his mother had drilled home was Don’t be rude to waitstaff .

Then he turned his attention back to Brayden, who had procured a pair of shot glasses and a plate of citrus, presumably from Sven. He placed them on the table.

Flip probably shouldn’t. He had the distinct impression that tequila shots were the territory of frat boys and those who wished to be frat boys. But at some point in the past week, he’d gotten swept up in Brayden’s enthusiasm. If he was going to give it up tomorrow, he wanted to indulge tonight.

“All right. How does this work?”

Sven had disappeared back to wherever he came from. Brayden took a salt shaker and a small canister of cinnamon from his jacket pocket—Flip silently vowed never to tell Bernadette—and lined them up next to the plate. “North American or European style first, do you think?”

Flip considered. “The lemon will taste extra sour after orange, so North American first, to be as objective as possible.”

“Excellent choice.” Brayden poured a generous amount in each glass.

“So the order for the North American tequila shot is take the salt, drink the tequila, bite the lemon wedge. But you can’t just dump salt in your mouth.

You do it like this.” He brought his hand to his mouth, licked a stripe across the back of it, and upended the salt shaker over his damp skin.

Flip sucked in a sharp breath.

Brayden looked up through his eyelashes. “What, too uncouth for you?”

Flip had a sudden flash of Braden licking the back of his hand like that if he hesitated too long, and the back of his neck went hot. He copied Brayden’s actions almost defiantly.

“Now, in fairness,” Brayden said, demonstrating how to hold the lemon wedge in the hand with the salt, “this tequila is way too good for this kind of treatment. But they didn’t have any of the paint-stripping kind from my youth, so we’re improvising.”

“Because you’re so ancient,” Flip said dryly.

“My tequila days are many years ago now.” Brayden handed him one of the shot glasses, his expression daring Flip to disagree.

“People years?” Flip queried blandly.

Brayden snorted, and they both had to catch themselves before they had a repeat of the ice cream shop meltdown. “Shut up. Okay, are you ready?”

Probably not . Flip clinked his glass against Brayden’s. “Bottoms up.”

“You’re a menace,” Brayden said, pink-cheeked, and Flip realized the double entendre.

The salt on his tongue made his mouth water, but the tequila went down warm and smooth. The lemon, though, puckered his whole face until he had to shake his head to clear it. “Ugh.”

“Whew,” Brayden agreed and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “All right, well, I’m awake now. Your turn. How do we do this the European way?”

Flip spread the cinnamon sugar on the plate, rimmed the glasses, and poured the shots. “There’s no licking involved, I’m afraid.”

“I bet you’ve never done a body shot, huh?” Brayden sighed.

Flip almost dropped the bottle. He’d seen Brayden mostly naked, after all, and he was seeing him again now in his imagination, laid out on his back with a line of salt on his stomach—

No. He turned to hand Brayden his drink. “A gentleman doesn’t kiss and tell.”

“You’re not missing out on much. They’re mostly just messy.” Brayden threw back the tequila, hummed thoughtfully, and took his time with the orange. “I like that better. It wouldn’t work half as well with crappy tequila, though.”

Flip agreed and tried not to think about how getting messy with Brayden might not be so bad.

Brayden would happily have spent the entirety of the evening in that back room with Flip, either shooting tequila or shooting the shit, but he knew they couldn’t.

He made sure they exited the room one at a time—he could only imagine the field day the Lyngria tabloids would have if someone thought the crown prince had snuck out of the party for a quickie—and resigned himself to an evening of schmoozing and maybe another dance with Flip if he got lucky.

Unfortunately it turned out he had made the dangerous mistake of underestimating his fake boyfriend’s mother.

“Brayden,” she said smoothly as she glided over to him not twelve seconds after he left the storeroom, leaving him almost certain that she’d seen Flip exit a minute before him and that she 100 percent thought they’d been boning. “There you are. I’ve been hoping for a dance.”

Shovel talk! It’s a shovel talk! Abort! Abort! shouted Brayden’s hindbrain. But what was he going to do, run screaming from the queen at her own party? That seemed rude.

Dear Lord, if she’s going to murder me, please ask her to make it quick. Amen. “Of course,” he said, offering his hand and hoping his French accent wasn’t too provincial. Speaking with Bernadette was one thing; this was royalty. “Do you fox-trot?”

Queen Constance did, it turned out, fox-trot, and while Brayden didn’t enjoy dancing with her as much as he had with Flip, she also didn’t scoop out his liver with a rusty spoon, so he was calling it a win.

On the stage, one of the current scholarship students was belting a lively show-tune-type number, and Brayden easily led the queen through the steps.

She didn’t offer much in the way of conversation until they were halfway through the dance, but perhaps she’d been lulling him into a false sense of security.

“You’re an excellent dancer,” she commented as he swung them expertly to avoid a collision with a skilled pair of dancers. “When did you learn?”

“Kindergarten, more or less.” He navigated them through an easy spin. “My grandmother had a dance studio, and I used to go there after school. Grandma figured I might as well do the lessons too.”

The queen tilted her head. “A shrewd woman.”

“She would take that as the highest compliment.”

She smiled. “How are you settling in this evening? You seemed out of sorts earlier.”

Ma’am, I was flat-out shitting my pants.

He chose his words carefully. “To be honest, meeting Flip’s parents, who happen to be the queen and prince consort of a European country, and then being introduced to the rest of said country as their crown prince’s boyfriend was kind of a lot to handle in five minutes.

” The song had come to the key change. It would be winding down soon, but not soon enough to get him out of this.

“I should have agreed to meet you earlier, when he asked.”

“Why didn’t you?”

Shit, he shouldn’t have ad-libbed. Now he had to come up with an answer.

It shouldn’t have surprised him that the truth fell out. “Deep-seated commitment issues.” Fuuuuuck. No more drinking tonight. “It’s a long story. But I’m glad I’m here now.”

“Hmm,” said Queen Constance. “Me too.”

Oh God, she knows everything , Brayden thought, but fortunately the song ended, giving him an opportunity to escape. He bowed, and Her Majesty curtseyed and thanked him for the dance.

Brayden had sworn off more alcohol tonight, but he needed to do something with his mouth that wasn’t talk, so he wandered to the outskirts of the room, found a server with tiny plates of some unrecognizable hors d’oeuvre, and took three of them to the first unoccupied table he found.

He was halfway through the second hors d’oeuvre—some kind of fish egg with cheese on toast? With capers? He had no idea, but it was delicious—when he realized that, in fact, he wasn’t alone.

“Oh my God,” he said automatically in English before switching to French. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t see you there.”

The blonde girl in the corner couldn’t have been more than ten, and she was pushed as far into the corner as possible, as though she were becoming one with the wall. “It’s okay,” she said. “I’m used to it.”

Brayden pushed his plate toward her. “You want one of these? They’re weird but good.”

She looked like she wanted to say yes but thought she shouldn’t—fair, since she didn’t know Brayden from Adam. But eventually hunger won out and she pulled the plate in front of her. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” Brayden glanced around.

Where was this kid’s guardian? Did nannies attend things like this?

Or maybe they just posted security at all the exits and that was that?

Or, shit, maybe she was one of the scholarship kids.

Somehow that was even more horrifying. “So. Why are you sitting in the corner?”

She picked a caper off the top of the sandwich thing and ate it. “Why are you ?”

Ouch. This girl knew where to aim. “There are a lot of people here that I don’t know. And the people I do know are important and busy.”

Another caper. “Me too.”

“Well,” he said philosophically, “now we know each other. I’m Brayden.” He held his hand across the table.

She looked at him suspiciously and then wiped her hand on a linen napkin and shook. “Clara.”

Clara— Princess Clara ? He decided it would be impolite to ask. “Nice to meet you, Clara.”

She ate another caper. He wondered if she’d deconstruct the entire thing and eat it in components, or if maybe she only liked the capers. “I saw you dancing with Flip. You’re a good dancer.”

That answered his question, mostly—if she was leaving the prince off Flip’s name, it was probably because she didn’t think of him that way. “Thank you. I had a lot of practice, starting when I was even younger than you.”