Page 39 of The Thing About My Prince

Lexi looks up, having rested her knife on her plate after cutting her steak, then switched the fork to her right hand and stabbed the chunk of meat with it.

She pauses with the fork halfway to her mouth, probably unsure it’s her who’s even being addressed since no one actually used her name.

“Me?” she asks.

My mother nods and picks up her glass of white wine.

“Oh,” Lexi says. “Yes, I guess you don’t do it like that here. This is how I was raised to eat. It’s considered good manners in the US.”

“In the US.” My father shakes his head and releases a disgusted sigh, while making sure he gets the perfect carrot-to-steak ratio on the fork which is, very Britishly, in his left hand.

Lexi turns her head to look up at me. “Have I done something wrong?”

Oh my God, the concern behind the depths of those blue eyes makes me want to put my arm around her and kiss her to reassure her.

Actually, she’s supposed to be my fucking girlfriend, so I’m going to do exactly that.

The second my hand touches her shoulder she flinches and pulls away the tiniest bit, but a moment later, sheobviously remembers that we’re supposed to be a couple and gives into it, leaning in and allowing me to pull her closer.

“Absolutely not, my love.” I kiss her gently on her forehead. More than the brush her lips gave me in the garden, but not enough to leave any moisture behind—that would be rude. “Of course it’s not bad. It’s just different.”

I slide my hand across Lexi’s back as she returns to her upright position, a flush to her cheeks.

It’s the exact same shade of pink in the exact same spots that appeared after I pulled the hair away from her face while we were sitting on the bathroom floor earlier.

Fuck, I wanted to kiss her then too. But in a much less polite way.

We might have been joking with all the shower shagging noises, and it was definitely fun, a whole new variety of fun for me—the way we laughed together, the way she mocked my dirty talk, the way it made me think of her actually in the shower with water running dow?—

“Americans do a lot of things differently,” my mother says.

I drop my knife and fork to my plate with more of a clatter than I intended. “Like what, Mum? What other American behaviors besides scandalous silverware usage do you object to?”

“How about you tell us how you two met?” my sister pipes up in the super cheery voice that’s a sure sign she’s activated her peacekeeper mode.

“Yes,” Jeremy adds, in his role as the perfect, supportive fiancé. “I hope it’s as fun a story as ours.”

He reaches under the table, seemingly rests his hand on Sofia’s leg, and they giggle. They met when he clipped the wing mirror of her car and she rolled down her window to yell at him. Jeremy bought her lunch to apologize, and that was that. She moved into his house on the grounds of the stud farm two months later.

“Oh, okay.” Lexi looks at me again for reassurance. Which is an oddly amazing feeling.

This is a woman who’s brave enough to want to live her life in dangerous war zones and yet, right now, she’s seeking my support. Though I am very experienced with this place and this family, which very often feel like the center of an international conflict.

It was pretty short-sighted of us not to think we needed to come up with a cute tale of how we met. But we’ve been so entirely focused on the book that the practicalities of this whole pretend relationship situation didn’t occur to me.

“Why don’t you tell the story,” Lexi says.

Shit, I’m all out of ideas. And my brain is definitely not good under pressure.

“Oh, you know you do it more justice than I do.” I nudge her playfully with my elbow. “You’re the professional storyteller in this relationship, after all.”

“Was it through that god-awful football club?” Dad asks.

Lexi’s eyes flash to mine for a second, before she takes a breath and turns to my sister.

“Didn’t have anything to do with the Boston Commoners,” she says, completely ignoring my father. “I’m afraid it’s a pretty dull story. We met at Oliver’s apartment in New York.”

Okay, that’s not what I was expecting.