Page 51 of The Thing About My Prince

“I’ve already put a plastic sheet on the car seat,” he says.

“You travel with plastic sheets?”

“Never know what you might have to clear up.” He points at me from my head to my feet. But it sounds more like he never knows when he might need to dispose of a body.

“Got to get you back to the castle,” he says. “Oliver’s parents are not happy with the photos that are already online.”

Of course they aren’t.

I now get Oliver’s feeling of being damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

OLIVER

“Less than twenty-four hours and already she’s embarrassed the family.” My mother pulls off her glasses in despair as she paces in front of the living room windows.

“No wonder you like her.” Dad doesn’t even raise his eyes from theFinancial Times. “Peas in a pod.”

“Criticize me all you like.” My fingers dig into the top of the high-backed armchair I’m standing behind like it’s a shield that might protect me from their barbs. “But do not criticize Lexi. None of this is her fault. It was you who sent her there. She didn’t ask for any of it.”

“She did not have to get into the damn bog,” Mum says, pausing to face me, hand on hip for emphasis.

“What exactly is wrong with her joining in and looking like a good sport? You should want her to be popular. All the comments on those photos were good. One of them said she was ‘a breath of fresh air’ because she got involved and got mucky with everyone else.”

“To hell with the comments, do you think the headlineswere good?” Mum resumes her aggressive pacing. “Giles showed me one that saidPrince Oliver’s dirty girlfriend, and the caption said she walked across the grass in her socks. In hersocks!”

“And if she’d waded into the bog wearing Sofia’s wellies and ruined them, you’d have been pissed off about that too. She can’t win.” I straighten and rub the back of my tense neck with my tense fingers. “Also, fuck Giles.”

“Steady on.” So it takes the word fuck to make my father put down his paper, does it? “It’s disrespectful to speak of a loyal member of the staff like that.”

My head might be about to combust. “When has Giles ever had one ounce of respect for me?”

My parents’ right-hand man has done nothing but encourage their disapproval since I got drunk at a friend’s house when I was sixteen and a photographer snapped me throwing up in a bush in someone’s front garden.

Giles can smash his etiquette and decorum bullshit into a ball and shove it up his prickish arse, along with that fucking listening device. Since nothing goes on in this place that he doesn’t know about, I have to assume that, at the very least, he chose to ignore the bugging of my room.

“Respect needs to be earned,” Mum mutters in the direction of the heather bed outside the window.

The fury simmering inside me reaches boiling point and sends my hands flying into the air. “And you see no irony in that sentence at all? No irony in expecting an entire nation to respectyou,our whole family in fact, purely by dint of our births?”

She turns around slowly. “Parts of this nation have never respected me, Oliver. You know that.”

And here we go, a guilt trip that rips me in half. At least this one might be justified. That was a clumsy, clumsy thing for me to say after everything my mother went through whenshe was a teenager. But why it hardened her, rather than gave her compassion for anyone going through something similar—me, for example, her goddamn son—I will never know.

If only someone had thought to use therapists back then. In fact, is anyone in the family even allowed to have therapy now? Or would it be seen as “complaining”? Christ, everything but slapping a smile on your face and soldiering on is seen as complaining—particularly by Giles.

“I’m sorry, Mum.” I walk around the chair and drop into it. “It’s just… Could you find it in you to have even the tiniest grain of compassion for my girlfriend?”

Every time I refer to Lexi as my girlfriend, it sends a strange shiver through me. Partly because it’s such a long time since I’ve described anyone as that, but also because maybe a part of me wonders what it would be like if that’s what she really was.

The word slips off my tongue smoother and more naturally in relation to Lexi than it ever did with some actual girlfriends.

But that’s ridiculous. Not only have we known each other less than a week, she’s part of the enemy—the media, the press—and is only temporarily on my side because she has to be, because if she doesn’t write my book, she doesn’t get the job she wants.

There’s just this nagging certain something about her. Something I can’t put my finger on. Something that happens when she looks at me that makes me forget everything else in the world for that split second. And the way she laughed when I said “melons” during our fake bathroom sex—man, her natural abandon was beautiful.

“None of it is anything to smile about, Oliver.” Dad folds up his newspaper and hangs it over the arm of his chair.