Playing Dirty(133)

“Her Royal Highness, Princess Alexandra of Sweden!”

The liveried footman on the door bellowed the announcement to the room and I turned, almost unwillingly, to look at the woman my mother wanted me to marry. I remembered Alexandra as a very pretty girl my brother and I had played with on continental holidays, but that memory couldn’t have prepared me for how that pretty girl had grown up. Princess Alexandra of Sweden was, by any objective measure, stunning. Her skin was clear, her hair like spun gold, her eyes sparkled with girlish vivacity, and her whole face was as pretty as a picture. While wearing a royal gown, it wasn’t easy to look like anything other than an extravagant meringue-based dessert crossed with a fairytale castle on a cloud, and yet Alexandra managed to make it look good. Somehow that gown contrived to be appropriate to the occasion and yet also leave the viewer in no doubt that the body inside was spectacular. She radiated an angelic beauty and yet her every movement exuded a molten sexuality that had every man in the room adjusting his dress pants.

Right at that moment, I would’ve given her a two and a half out of ten. Maybe three as she’d clearly made an effort with her appearance. There was just no space in my mind for anyone but Keira, who was a perfect ten.

“Hi, Andrew!” There was an energy to Alexandra that made her seem to exclaim everything she said in bright, faintly accented English. “It has been too long!”

I nodded, privately wishing that it had been considerably longer. “Indeed. Are you looking forward to dinner?”

Alexandra leaned closer and the girlish energy in her voice was replaced by something more mature and husky. “I’m looking forward to everything.”

Jesus.

With that, and what might have been a wink, she moved on. I watched her go. It occurred to me that this would’ve been so much easier if Alexandra was just going through with it for the sake of duty, but that didn’t seem to be the case. She seemed to actually want me.

Shit.

***



It had been inevitable that I would be seated beside the Princess—I’d known that, and yet still resented it. Still, I knew that she was good company, or at least she had been as a girl. We’d really clicked as children, both filled with a boisterous desire to do everything we weren’t supposed to do: to climb the highest tree, to throw things at the greenhouse, to steal from the gardener’s shed. Sometimes I looked back on those halcyon days and thought about what a shame it was to have to grow up.

Which was perhaps why Alexandra hadn’t bothered…

“And then we ran out and they chased us, and we found a motorbike and they were still chasing us, and they caught us and we crashed the bike (don’t know whose it was) and they were all like ‘oh my God, it’s the Princess’ and we were like ‘yeah bitches’ and they were like ‘whaaaat?’. It was awesome! I’m sorry, what were you saying?”

“I asked how your fish was,” I said. I’d been sitting and listening in frozen horror for the last few minutes. Any lingering belief that I was some sort of royal rebel had now been well and truly dispelled—I couldn’t hold a candle to Alexandra’s insane antics. It had never occurred to me that I might be seen as a steadying influence on someone, but I guess that’s why the Swedish royal family had agreed to set something up with my mother. They wanted Alexandra to settle down just as much as my mother wanted me to settle down, if not more.

“After this, after this, after this,” Alexandra had a habit of repeating a holding phrase until she decided what to say next, just in case anyone else tried to say something, “we should do something. Have you ever peed off the tower?”

“No,” I said. “I might hit someone.”

“Yeah, that’d be cool! Let’s do it!”

“I’m not sure I…”

“I bet I can hit that old lady with my bread roll.”

“That’s my mother. The Queen.”

“Cool! You can have first shot!”

I felt a sudden and unexpected rush of sympathy for my brother—it was hard work being the mature, sensible one.

“Maybe later,” I said, suggesting that hurling bread rolls at the monarch was perhaps more of an after dinner activity. “Don’t you think there are other things we should be talking about?”

“Oh, I like that idea.” The more sultry side of Alexandra’s divided nature suddenly flared into existence, and I felt a hand sliding up my inner thigh with one destination in mind. Was this how girls felt when I was a bit forward with them? Tonight was turning into a horribly revelatory experience about how the other half lived. After dinner, I might look up some names in my little black book and make some long overdue apology calls.