Page 44 of The Unlikely Heir

Oh my god. Can there ever be a good elevator joke?

I might make it my life mission to find out.

We’re going to spend the rest of the evening trading bad elevator jokes, aren’t we?

I suspect that might be a glimpse into our future, yes.

I feel a smile spreading across my face.

There’s a brief pause, then I get another message from him.

What is red and goes up and down?”

What?

A tomato in an elevator.

I laugh out loud. As I lean towards my laptop and prepare to do some googling, I’m suddenly aware that an unfamiliar feeling, almost a strange sense of buoyancy, is growing inside me.

I can’t quite identify the exact name for this feeling. But I definitely don’t want it to end.

ChapterTwelve

Callum

My stomach feels like it’s been invaded by a horde of tiny barbarians, each armed with knives, taking turns stabbing into my stomach lining. I twist the paper containing my speech for the Emphysema Foundation, hoping my sweaty palms aren’t going to leave it with unsightly smudges.

Just another day at the office.

Public speaking has never been my thing, not after the debacle of my fourth-grade speech. My speech topic then was on butterflies, and I’d dutifully spent the previous few weeks reading all about them. What I hadn’t realized was that I wasn’t supposed to regurgitate every single fact I’d read. The class had started fidgeting and squirming around the ten-minute mark, and at twenty minutes, Ms. Kinchaird had stepped in and suggested I should finish up with one last favorite fact. I’d at least finished strongly because who wouldn’t find the fact that butterflies taste with their feet interesting?

You’d think I’d be getting better at handling my nerves given the frequency I’ve had to go on stage and word vomit in recent weeks.

But if anything, my nerves seem to be amplifying, like my body is some giant nerve production machine.

The venue for tonight’s event is a magnificent medieval building with soaring stone arch ceilings on the bank of the Thames. The arches are illuminated by golden lights that I’m pretty sure weren’t here in medieval times.

The room is filling up now, rich and beautiful people swirling around, chatting. In another few minutes, people will sit at the round tables for the dinner, and I’ll have to take the stage, which already gleams under the spotlight.

Instead of seeing potential donors, all I see are people who could be potential witnesses to my humiliation if I mess up my speech.

The other day I’d confessed to Amelia how I felt, and she admitted she felt similar. Then she’d sent me a meme.

If you’re afraid of public speaking, just imagine everyone in the audience is on their phone and paying no attention to you whatsoever.

Which had at least made me laugh.

Raymond isn’t here tonight, but he’d given me some last-minute advice before I left.

“Try not to stuff this up. We really need some positive headlines right now.”

Thanks, Raymond. No pressure or anything.

The media team has been getting a bit twitchy about my recent coverage.

The pants debacle—orPantsgateas one of the newspapers handily headlined it—blew up into a story, but rather than take the sexual predator slant, it turned into another debate about my nationality and whether an American can be a good king.

Raymond is on a one-man mission to enhance my Englishness. I’ve been forcing myself to drink English Breakfast and Earl Grey tea and dunk cookies into my cups of tea—although I’m on strict instructions that cookies are to be called biscuits at all times, though Jaffa cakes are apparently a hybrid between biscuits and cakes, the correct definition of which caused a brief but furious debate between Maudie and Raymond and ended inconclusively.