Page 54 of Fake Dating the Prince

Shit.“All right, good point, let’s—” Flip stopped abruptly. “Okay, but that was days ago. Why would he leave now?”

His father paused and stood up straight, his hands dropping to his sides. “Hm. Good question. What were you doing when you last saw him?”

Panic clawed at Flip’s throat. If he said it out loud, it became a real possibility—that Brayden had left to avoid having to say no.

If hedidn’tsay it out loud, though, he would have to try to puzzle out the meaning behind Brayden’s disappearance alone, and he didn’t think his head was clear enough for that.

“I was about to ask him to marry me.”

The words seemed to suck all the sound out of the rest of the world. For several long seconds, silence reigned. Finally his father said, “I think you’d better think about your exact words. What did you say? How did you say it?”

Flip swallowed and thought back. He’d been nervous, and not just nervous but thrown off from his interactions with Minister Bechard, and he’d started setting up his proposal like he would an argument—points against first, so he could refute them.

Everything became… regretfully more complicated.

That sounded bad.

Some more critical members of the press might have dubbed you an unsuitable match for me. But while you have conducted yourself well….What? He’d never finished that sentence. That could just as easily be leading up toit’s not good enough for me, please pack your things.

“I am an utter wanker.” How could he have bollocksed this up so completely?

His father clapped him on the shoulder. “It’s okay. Your mother needed two tries too.”

For fuck’s sake.

Flip picked up his momentum again and exited the bedroom into the living area. He needed shoes and a coat. His passport, maybe, if he was going to have to fly somewhere. Where had he left his gloves—on the table?

He hadn’t, but while he was looking, his eyes caught on a square of white paper—his own stationery from the desk in his bedroom. Was this the note he’d looked for? Or—

“Read it in the car,” Irfan ordered. “Come on, let’s go.”

Flip let himself be hurried. His father was right. But before the door closed behind him, he ran back for one more thing.

He wouldn’t be caught unprepared this time.

BRAYDENhad purchased a coffee and a pair of sunglasses—not easy to find at Virejas Airport in the dead of winter—and spent the remainder of the time before his flight in the first-class lounge, an indulgence he paid for with some of the money he’s saved from his refunded hotel stay. For two hours he hid behind a week-old copy of theGuardian, nervously bouncing his foot up and down.

Miraculously, it went even worse than he’d feared.

He’d hoped that the first-class lounge would be less crowded, perhaps populated only with a few well-to-do patrons who would be too polite to stare or at least to talk about him when he was within earshot. Maybe they’d even be jaded—surely they rubbed elbows with Europe’s wealthiest on the regular. Who would even care about the brand-new (ex-)boyfriend of Lyngria’s future king?

Clearly some deity somewhere had seen Brayden’s incredible hubris and was acting to correct it.

Though many of the passengers seemed to be traveling alone, that didn’t prevent them from turning to each other, or the lounge staffers, and whispering to each other.

“Isn’t that…?”

“Why isn’t he with the prince?”

“He’s not as handsome in person.”

“Do you think they broke up?”

“Should we ask him?”

Brayden felt lucky that his flight was called for boarding before anyone gathered the courage to make inquiries to his face. But his luck didn’t hold. As he buckled into his seat in economy class, his neighbor squinted over at him. “You look familiar.”

“I get that a lot.” Brayden pasted on a plastic smile. He’d never been airsick a day in his life, but his stomach felt as though it might revolt at any moment, and he felt a hair’s breadth away from a breakdown. He put his headphones on before takeoff, hoping to telegraph how much he didn’t want to speak to anyone.

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