Page 67 of The Dandelion Princess
Her lips twitch. “I wonder what kind of toner—”
She never finishes the thought.
We do eat eventually, after letting half the water boil out of the pot and replenishing it. Over pasta, she tells me about her last family meeting and how her mother threatened to cut off her wi-fi if she was late again. She swipes the warm olives off my plate, placed there in anticipation of theft.
This becomes our habit. When our schedule allows it—and even when it doesn’t—we make dinner and talk about our day, then move to the lounge where there is an entire wall of glass and a view of the city lights. I scroll through a tablet with one hand, going over the accounts for Lindenholm or emails from the office, while the other arm anchors her to my side. She tells me about the intense logistics of Queen’s Week and chats on her Friction server. She often works on the source code of the app she created for her family to track notable dignitaries ahead of royal events. I limit myself to careless, lazy kisses on the top of her head, promising myself more only when I’ve shifted a mountain of work.
As a result, I work like a man possessed.
It takes two weeks before she acknowledges that this was a brilliant idea. “It’s like a personal chef,” she tells me, placing a kiss on the underside of my jaw that has me gripping the leather sofa. This easy affection I decided I could not do without is murder. “There’s an entire category of my life I no longer have to think about.” She places another kiss, and I turn my head, stopping her mouth.
I absorb her approval with satisfaction. I’m brilliant. The first person in recorded history to have their cake and eat it, too. But I can’t help feeling like we’re fighting fire with drums of gasoline and tracts of dry, brittle forest. Ella and I are forever, but not like this. So I try to keep it light, and she tries too. There’s laughter in the air every time we get serious, setting aside everything we’ve made ourselves busy with to do what we’ve been wanting to do all night.
We don’t tell anyone, but some people begin to notice. Ella chats with my doorman Felix when she comes over, discovers his kid has a cough, and drops a small box of interlocking bricks offat the front desk to take home. The guards manning the palace security checkpoint have taken to opening the gates when they see my plates, and the night footmen stationed in the Great Hall probably have a betting pool about when I’m going to make Ella an honest woman.
It is sheer luck that Alix hasn’t figured it out. When she video chats from a backyard cookout in Pennsylvania or a dressmaker’s studio in Lebanon, Ella dives into my front hall, using the large blank wall as her backdrop. While she talks, I hold her free hand, lace our fingers together, and kiss them until she bats me away.
Caroline Tiele has seen me parking in the Summer Palace employee lot at all hours, and offers me a brisk nod when she does. She never asks where I’m off to, who I’m with, or how we’re spending our time. I know she knows.
Tonight, I’m in Ella’s suite, watching an episode ofMoonflower. I drag her feet across my lap and answer questions about the complexity of historical Seongan wedding rites.
“But when are theyactuallymarried?” she asks. “When the bell rings? When they drink the nuptial wine? Or when they bow?”
I roll my thumb over the gold chain around her ankle and slide my hand along the curve of her calf. “It’s a process,” I answer, frustrated by these self-imposed boundaries. I have no one to blame. I drove the stakes into the ground and strung the fence myself. “In a way, they’ve been married since he sent the bride his first gift.”
“That wouldn’t make her married,” she protests, crunching on a peppermint. “Not even in ye olden times.”
“She kept his gift. That’s the thing.”
My gaze travels to her bed, heaped with stuffed raccoons, and the buzz of my phone breaks me out of a dangerous daydream. A text from Noah. “Basketball at the palace. ASAP?”
Ella rests her chin on me and reads over my shoulder. “Do you have to?” she sighs.
I grunt. “I should.”
“Where are you supposed to be?”
“He probably thinks I’m at the office.”
She looks up with an expression I’ve been calling her “math face” since I tutored her for the college entrance exams. “Five minutes to the car. Thirteen minutes to drive—”
“It’s Friday night. The traffic is awful,” I say, removing her glasses and setting them aside so I don’t smudge the lenses. “It’s at least twenty minutes to cross town.”
“Another three minutes from the car park,” I drag her around to the front of me.
She adds an extra five minutes to the timer on her phone. “You stopped to talk to one of the footmen on the way in.”
She tosses the phone, and when I kiss her she laughs. She always laughs.
We’re not laughing when we hear a tap on the door. I lift my head and scowl at the nearest clock. We have ten more minutes.
“Ella?” Freja’s voice calls through the door and Ella pushes me off the couch. I land with a thud.
“It’s fine,” I whisper, “we’re just gaming.” We prearranged a cover story for just this eventuality.
“Have you seen yourself?” she hisses. Grabbing my face, she points it at a mirror, her voice low and urgent. “You look like you’ve been attacked by the dragon of Sondmark. Moreover, you’re supposed to be fighting traffic.”
“Ella.” Freja’s voice, slightly impatient, carries through the door and Ella drags me to my feet and stuffs me into her closet, really putting her back into it when I won’t move as fast as she likes.
