Page 17 of His Princess Brat
Left to my mother, apparently, I stood even less of one.
“You have got to be kidding me.” I have no idea what I’d expected when my mother told me she had arranged for me to have private guidance and ladyship coaching from someone who was, according to her, qualified to teach me all the ins and outs of behaving like a proper lady, but it wasn’t this.
It was weird enough that I received the instruction to attend the lesson in my own quarters, directly after breakfast, but no scenario of ridiculous over the top The Princess Diaries hell could have prepared me for this.
Jax, the pompous, stiff, sarcastic as one can manage to be without having even the most minute sense of humor, right-hand man of my cousin Mazi, stood in the middle of my suite, dressed in a full penguin suit, holding a small red book in his hand. I couldn’t see what the book was, but I could guess. I was about to get schooled in manners.
As if I hadn’t worked tirelessly for twenty-four (almost five) years to perfect the ones I had.
Looking around the room, I could see that this entire hour and however many were scheduled to follow was going to be a remedial class on proper etiquette that covered a bunch of shit I had known since before I could wipe my own ass.
“I assure you, I know how to tell a salad fork from a dinner fork.”
“Good,” Jax replied. “We can skip that paragraph and go straight to how not to engage in pissing contests with other ladies of the court.”
“She was being obnoxious.”
“Even the obnoxious ones must be dealt with respectfully.”
I snorted. “I respectfully disagree.”
“Lord, grant me patience.” The elderly manservant sighed heavily.
Setting my jaw, I ground my teeth together and resolved to somehow make it through the hour without choking him with his own ascot.
And where had he managed to find an old-fashioned school desk to move into my room? If he was going to school me, apparently, he was going to do it right, and though there was already a perfectly nice desk by the balcony doors, obviously it wasn’t humiliating enough.
“Am I supposed to sit here?” I asked, gesturing at it with a forced smile.
“Please.”
With a scowl, I took my seat and folded my hands atop the desk, like a good little schoolgirl. Internally, I was swearing up a storm. If he didn’t tell me at least one useful thing in the first thirty minutes, I was going to throw him off the balcony into the garden, and hope my aim was good enough that he landed on a rosebush, and not one of the large cement sculptures or fountains scattered throughout the courtyard below. I was trying to leave here with a potential husband, not a murder rap.
Crossing the room, Jax offered a haughty smile and dropped the red book unceremoniously on the desk in front of me.
It was thin, no more than roughly eighty pages, with a dull red jacket, and a sketch of a pair of old-fashioned pantaloons on the front. The title was The Young Girl’s Handbook of Good Manners: For Use in Educational Establishments by Pierre Louys. It reminded me strongly of an old Emily Post’s Etiquette book that I had been forced to read at least a dozen times throughout my childhood and adolescence.
Jax had, apparently, grossly misunderstood what my mother had asked him for. At least, I assumed he had until he said, “In a little while, we will be joined by my wife, Lady Ayo, to go over proper dress and grooming. In the meantime, please read the first twenty-five pages to yourself. There will be a quiz in one hour to determine which of the things you require further help with.”
The answer was none of them, but I cracked open the book to the first page and nearly choked on my own tongue when I read the text.
I had no idea how Jax happened to come into possession of this book but however it had happened, grave mistakes had been made. Emily Post it certainly wasn’t.
The book didn’t seem to give ‘advice’ in any particular order. The first page consisted of only three tips, written in scrawling italics, and spaced out with a three-line gap between them.
This is what it read:
Never sit on a gentleman’s lap with your skirt and panties still in place. It might give him the wrong impression.
Don’t jerk off your lover in public unless you’re willing to do the same for his friends.
When bringing your partner to completion, don’t yell ‘Thar she blows!’ It’s rude.
Biting my tongue because it was all I could do to keep myself from cussing him out in a very unladylike tirade, I turned the page.
When coming at the opera, try not to sing higher than the soprano; it’s not a competition.
It got worse from there. If I wasn’t so annoyed at this waste of time in which I should be figuring out how to work Azid, this situation would be utterly hysterical. Unable to stop myself, I turned the page again.
