Page 69 of Rivals

She kept smiling until Colin finally stepped away from his camera, lifting his hand in a dramatic flourish. “Well done, well done! I’ll have the final proofs next week, and will be sending them all electronically….”

Sam couldn’t wait an instant longer.I’ll be right back,she mouthed to Beatrice. Not daring to look in Marshall’s direction, she stumbled out into the hallway, grabbing fistfuls of her pink skirts.

Her chest felt tight; her breath was coming in shallow gasps. Sam ran through the East Gallery, where tapestries of Roman gods and goddesses stared impassively down at her; then through the Blue Chamber, painted with a fresco depicting the Battle of the Chesapeake. King Louis XX had commissioned it when he built Bellevue, as a symbol of Franco-American cooperation. Sam had long ago given up counting the historical inaccuracies.

She turned another corner and came face to face with a wooden door whose placard readher majesty.

Beatrice wouldn’t mind if Sam escaped into her office, just for a minute. No one would bother her there.

Beatrice’s massive desk stood on the opposite side of the room, stacks of paper arranged neatly on its surface. Sam pulled out Beatrice’s chair and collapsed into it, then closed her eyes and groaned.

Maybe it was good that she’d been forced to see Marshall today. They were bound to run into each other eventually; better that their first encounter post-breakup be here, amid the stiff formality of a photo shoot. As much as it hurt to see him again, it would have been even worse to run into him without warning.

When Sam opened her eyes again, they landed on the paper tucked to one side of Beatrice’s desk.

I, Lord Theodore Beaufort Eaton, being of sound mind and body, do absolutely and entirely renounce my position and my titles…

This was Teddy’s statement of renunciation.

Sam read the document once, twice, in a dull sort of shock.

When she heard a low voice ask, “Sam? Are you in here?” she thought at first that she’d dreamed it, that she’d been worrying about Marshall so much she’d hallucinated him. But there he was, standing hesitantly in the doorway.

“Sorry,” Marshall added clumsily. “I’ll leave you alone. I just saw you rushing out of the photo shoot, and you seemed upset….”

I was upset because of you,she thought. Because it hurt so acutely to see Marshall and know that he wasn’t hers anymore, that she couldn’t reach over and touch him the way she used to. That they had to behave like strangers now.

“Wait!” Sam blurted out, before he could turn aside. “You don’t have to go.”

Marshall took a single step into the room, then shifted his weight as if he wasn’t sure whether he was allowed any farther. “Um…I saw you went to a party with Nina and Jeff last weekend. How was it?”

Sam was still sitting behind the desk. She reached to tuck back a wisp of hair, only to realize she’d loosened the tiara pinned there. “It was nice to see them.”

“That’s good.”

There was another awkward silence. “How’s Rory?” Sam asked, hating how stilted it sounded.

“She’s good.”

Silence again.

Sam couldn’t take any more of this. She wasn’t sure what Marshall had expected, coming in here and checking on her, as if they had anything to say to each other anymore. They’d said it all on the beach that night, and now there was nothingleft.

“Look, I should probably be getting back.” She pressed her hands on the surface of Beatrice’s desk and stood, but Marshall cut her off.

“Sam.”

“What?” The single word came out sharp.

Sam had been fine—or at least she’d been able to pretend she was fine—when they were out at the photo shoot, with all those people around as human buffers. But now it was just the two of them, alone in this room, with no one to diffuse the impact of seeing him. No one to distract Sam from the fact that her entire body was humming, as if it had been dormant and only woke up again in Marshall’s presence.

“I’m sorry,” he said clumsily. “I know I’ve forfeited my right to ask how you are, that I have no claim on you anymore….”

Sam’s next words came out soft, like a sigh. “Marshall. You’ll always have a claim on me.”

He nodded slowly. “And you on me.”

There was so much packed into those four words. Sam knew that he was opening a door, ever so slightly.