Page 31 of Royally Drawn (Resplendent Royals #3)

A Rough Sketch

INGRID

I sat my sketchpad down, sipping tea placed beside me. The cuppa was a nice gesture, but the taste was not . I slightly puckered and tried to hold back from looking so out-of-sorts. I did not like tea, even if these Brits loved the stuff. Neandians were proud of their coffee culture.

“You don’t like tea?” Duncan asked.

“We’re coffee people,” I grimaced. “But I appreciate your kindness. It’s… nice. It looks better than it tastes.”

Keir chuckled. “You sound like Peder.”

“Scandinavians are coffee people. Apologies to the British part of you, but I agree with your stepdad here,” I said.

“Mamma is a coffee drinker, too. In the summer, she’s perpetually toting around a tumbler of iced coffee,” Keir said.

“She had four boys. I can understand why.”

I said it but didn’t look up. Instead, I was focused on drawing and tracing his nose’s outline with shading.

“If I came, would you not offer me tea?” Duncan asked, looking offended.

I shrugged, still sketching. “No. We would be as accommodating as ever and talk to your people to get what you like to drink. When Parker visits, we have his preferred tea shipped in.”

“Oh.” Duncan quietly backed off.

“You look for anything to get offended by, Duncan. We’ve never shorted my brother-in-law, and we wouldn’t short you.”

Keir snickered.

I ignored them both, trying to sort between which features defined which parts of them in my mind. We’d been sitting here this morning with nice light—the last morning here. Soon, Keir would fly me north, and I’d not see him again until we were in Norway together, celebrating Cici and Isak. Right now, I sketched the two of them as they were.

Keir read a service manual for an aeroplane. I wondered why anyone would do this, but I recently discovered that “plane people” were as mad as horse people. He slowly paged through it, occasionally furrowing his brow and making a note here or there. I adored his grumpy or concerned looks most. I was trying to capture that strong brow and the cleft in his chin as I continued to shade in the outline I’d drawn earlier.

Duncan was sitting with his legs over the arm of a chair—sideways—and watching a stupid reality TV show. I’d picked it last night, he’d gotten invested, and now I was pretty sure we were continuing to watch it because one of the girls had a nice arse. Men were so simple. I try to make his expression look more dignified than vacant. It wasn’t that Duncan was a dunce. Instead, everyone looked unattractive when staring mindlessly at a TV.

Keir stood up and stared down at what I’d drawn. “You make me look better than I do.”

“I was thinking I wasn’t doing you justice,” I laughed.

He bent down to kiss me and said, “I’m going to get more biscuits. You didn’t bring enough, Duncan.”

“Your girlfriend ate them all!” Duncan pointed at me.

“I did not!” I laughed. “You had a roll of them yourself.”

Neither Keir nor I denied the girlfriend characterisation, but it turned my stomach. It wasn’t that I wouldn’t have been happy to have a boyfriend like Keir or that he didn’t bring me joy. He brought me joy and oh so much else. It was just the wild lives we lived. He had his things, and I had mine. I wasn’t about to think of him as more than someone I enjoyed. And I didn’t want to put more pressure on him than that.

“I will get more,” Keir said.

He padded off to the kitchen.

“What are you drawing then?” Duncan asked.

“Just life. I sketch what I see.”

“Why?”

“I dunno. It helps me take things in, notice things.”

“What do you notice about this?”

“Uh, the fireplace stone is gorgeous,” I laughed. “It frames the room. I sketched it with the clock alone up top. I really like it.”

Keir returned, putting an entire tin of biscuits down on the coffee table.

“Put them further away, then!” Duncan protested.

“You ate them all. You can walk,” Keir said.

“What about us?” Duncan asked. “You’re drawing us?”

I smiled. “I’m drawing you, yes. Uh, both of you are similar. It’s uncanny how much you all look alike.”

“I disagree,” Keir said. “My father looked very little like his other siblings. He took after his mother. And I take after him. Mamma says we all came out carbon copies—all but Win, who takes after her.”

“Why Win?” I asked. “Why not Edwin?”

“My father is Edwin–that’s his namesake,” Duncan answered. “Everyone calls him Ed, so that was out.”

“Our father said Eddie sounded odd. Win just stuck. I dunno,” I said.

“I suppose names are limited in our families. Ah, the joy of royalty!” I snickered. “It’s like Leah. I always wondered how she got to Leah from Natalie.”

“Mummy is Nat or Natalie. Uncle Georgie and Uncle Pat just always called Leah that. How did you become Ingy? Does that annoy you?”

I worked on Keir’s hair. “I don’t know. We all have pet names–Alex, Asti, Odie, and Ingy. It doesn’t bother me. You all look similar–even Cici bears a resemblance. I did a sketch of Cecilia ages ago— something so ridiculous and dramatic. She was lying on her side on this couch, but I had her staring off. So, she has this beautiful profile.”

I flipped through my sketchpad and handed it to Keir.

“She looks gorgeous. You just did this for fun?” Keir asked.

“Yeah. I used to bring my sketchpad with me everywhere. It was how I made it through bad days. I’d mostly sit in this beautiful walled garden we had. I’d paint sometimes, too. I painted a lot of squirrels on the garden wall.”

“That is odd,” Duncan said, walking over to observe the picture of Cecilia. “She looks prettier than in real life.”

“Hard disagree. She’s fucking beautiful,” I said. “And given how attractive her parents are, it seems impossible that wouldn’t be the case.”

Cecilia had her father’s height, legs up to her neck, and her mother’s megawatt smile. I wished I looked more like Cici. I figured everyone probably did. The grass was always greener.

“Why squirrels?” Keir asked.

“Squirrels got to leave. They would climb the wall and disappear,” I said. “I longed to be free.”

Duncan and Keir both made the same face of genuine sympathy.

“See, there it is!” I declared. “You both make that sad puppy face when you hear something sad.”

My reaction was genuine—I delighted in pointing this out—but it also allowed me to deflect. Opening up about childhood trauma proved difficult. I didn’t know Keir or Duncan well enough to gauge their reactions ahead of time. I couldn’t predict how they might perceive me.

“I dispute this,” Duncan said. “We really don’t.”

I flipped back to my current sketch, Cici, and back. “You all do. Very much.”

“Can we not say the same about you and your sisters?” Duncan asked.

“Well, first of all, we are sisters, not cousins. Second, not really. We’re all several shades of blonde. Astrid and Alexandra look alike. Odette and I also bear a resemblance. But she’s more womanly and slightly taller. We’re split. Alexandra and Astrid take after our father. Odette and I take after our mother.”

“How much?” Keir wondered, pulling out his phone.

“I honestly only know what people tell me and what I see in paintings and photographs of my parents. My mother died the day of my birth, and my father passed shortly after her from a broken heart,” I said.

Keir scrolled and pulled up a photo of Mamma—a portrait of her painted when she was about Alexandra’s age. She wore the tiara. Alexandra occasionally broke out for state occasions. It was extravagant and heavy. I always wished it was mine. I relished any time I got to wear a tiara. Mamma looked happy, peaceful, and at ease in the painting. She had this small but elegant smile. Her blue eyes were bright, her lips full, and her cheeks rosy.

“You’re her dead ringer,” Keir noted. “She was beautiful.”

I smiled, taking the phone for a minute. “We do look alike. I wish more people talked about her. It’s difficult to know anything when no one talks about my parents. Or, in Dad’s case, they only talk about his mental illness. It’s like he wasn’t even a person...”

Keir rubbed my back, pulled me close, and kissed my forehead lovingly. His tender gesture surprised and comforted me. His touch was genuine.

“I get it,” Keir said. “All too well. You’re like Win and Ollie. They never knew Dad, but at least they had some pictures.”

“I have one,” I murmured, choked up. “It’s Mamma holding me the day I was born. She bled out and died only minutes later. She was beaming. But that is all I have.”

I sniffled. Duncan handed me a tissue, showing unexpected kindness.

“I’m sorry to bring the mood down.”

Keir rubbed circles on my back. “You’re not. Win used to ask Mamma about his birth story—how he and Ollie came to be. It would drain her batteries, but he was insistent that he knew how much Dad loved him. He wanted to know everything about how he came to be because those were the photos she kept on display. He fell while she was getting an epidural—passed out—and had to get a CT scan. No sooner had they brought the twins home than Dad was told he had terminal cancer. His decline was steep. So, she doesn’t display the photos of him with the twins as toddlers. He’s thin and looks nothing like the man we all want to remember him as.”

I curled closer to Keir and thought about the dozens of times I would climb into Alexandra’s lap like a baby and demand she tell me about the day I was born and how much Mamma and Papa loved me. It was as if I needed it to feel less guilt for taking my mother away from us all. I didn’t say it. Perhaps I didn’t need to? I gathered Keir understood.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “That’s awful.”

“It was better to have known Dad,” Keir said. “I feel guilty they didn’t know him. Nate and I got to feel his love and attention in a way they never did. We were his pride and joy—all of us. He only ever wanted to be a dad, you know? And… Mamma says sometimes it’s hard to believe he ever left. She still expects him to walk into the house when she visits us here in the UK.”

“That’s rough. I don’t know what I would do. Four boys and widowed in my thirties? I couldn’t cope.”

Papa hadn’t. And we’d lost him all the same.

“Mamma is tough and had a lot of support—from her mother, my aunts and uncles, and Peder. Peder became my dad’s best friend over the years, and… he was there to lend a hand with us. I won’t say I didn’t feel anger towards them getting together. I’ll never be totally over it, but he is a good man, and he did right by us. Dad wanted that for our mother. He didn’t want her to live in misery and, unlike your dad, Mamma had time to prepare for the inevitable.”

“Heavy shit,” Duncan said. “But I must say that even though I never knew Uncle Paul, he was very beloved. Anything I hear about Keir’s dad is positive. He was a little unhinged, very flighty, and loved hard. He was very close to Cici’s mother. Mummy was always protective of him—and still is of Aunt Sanne.”

“Mamma and Auntie Nat remain close,” Keir agreed. “Our mother is the biggest mama bear and had no luck with the British press. They hated her, but she trusted Aunt Natalie and Uncle Ed to care for us and agreed to send us to Eton. We stayed with them as a compromise for the first few years. She struggled to send us abroad while she moved north with the twins Lars and Peder. In the end, Nate and I were fine, and Duncan got annoying older brothers he never asked for.”

“Could have been worse,” Duncan laughed. “He’s a real wanker this one, but he’s generally right—at least about how to behave in public.”

“If only you took my advice, Duncan,” Keir said.

“I could say the same about things Alexandra tells me,” I said. “But we’re the youngest children—or, in your case, the only, Duncan—and we will have to find it out on our own. I understand that.”

“The family shit-stirrers,” Duncan snickered. “Can you capture that essence in a drawing?”

“Afraid not,” I admitted. “It’s only a rough sketch.”