Playing Dirty(146)

Keira laughed. “What?”

“Well, you know that bit at the end of Last Crusade, when they have to pick the real Holy Grail, and there’s all these fancy gold ones, but the real one is just a plain wooden cup? That’s what it made me think of. This isn’t the chair of someone who needed to look like they had power, this is the chair of someone who actually had it.”

“You have chosen wisely,” Keira murmured, quoting the film.

I looked at her. “I certainly have.”

The moment between us was broken by an icy blast of cold air through one of the little windows.

“We should go,” I said.

Keira nodded. “Thanks for this. It really made my day,” she said. “Maybe on another day you could show me your crown jewels.”

“Oh, well, they’re kept on display in the Tower of London,” I said.

Keira sidled up to me and kissed me, gently cupping my crotch and squeezing. “Not the crown jewels I was talking about, darling.”

I grinned, letting my hands roam across her body. “I see. Well, those are on permanent exhibit in my bedroom.”

“I remember.”

“But you’re welcome to view them any time.”

“Now?” Keira suggested, squeezing harder and getting the response she’d wanted.

“Now is good.”

“But not here.”

I nodded. “Even I don’t think we should do it on the old throne. You’ve got to draw the line somewhere...”





Chapter 22

Keira



Although the decision I’d made in the tower room about telling the Queen of my pregnancy had been made under the influence of Andrew’s sweet behavior, I still knew it was a good idea. The bottom line remained the same as ever: she had to find out sometime.

“I think she’d be okay with us getting married,” Andrew said as he sat on my bed the following morning.

I arched an eyebrow. “Well, that was a very romantic proposal....”

He grinned. “Sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. I just meant that I know my mother seems like a slave to tradition and all that, but she’s pretty progressive as monarchs go. And of course she likes you. It’s the pregnancy that might be a little bit of an issue, but a marriage would certainly help to smooth that over in her eyes. I realize that doesn’t exactly sound romantic at all, but there it is.”

I nodded. It was the twenty-first century, but royalty tended to work about a century behind everyone else. More to the point; where royalty were concerned, everyone else suddenly started working a century behind as well. It was a strange thing about the British public that, while they were perfectly happy to have children outside the sacrament of marriage, the idea of a member of the royal family doing it could generate the sort of horror usually associated with declaring war. When the royal family were involved, common sense went straight out the window and a lot of people started caring about stuff that they usually didn’t care about. It was as if someone had decided that the price for living with royal privilege was that you had to live by a set of different rules to everyone else—rules that were probably considered a bit draconian in the nineteenth century, let alone the twenty-first.

How the Queen herself might feel about her eldest son getting a maid pregnant was almost unimportant—her job was to represent the British people, and if they were pissed off, then she had to be. It was also her job to protect the institution and the succession, and these events might put both at risk. Our baby would be heir to the throne, but how could an illegitimate baby be a legitimate heir?

On balance, everything would be so much easier for the family if I wasn’t around.

“I could…” I started to speak before hesitating for a second. There’d been a dark thought clouding my mind for a while now, whenever Andrew brought up the idea of marriage, but I hadn’t wanted to voice it until now. “We don’t have to get married if you don’t really want to. I could just hide out somewhere.”

“What?” Andrew looked horrified.

“I don’t want to cause you or your family any problems,” I continued. “And I don’t want you to feel like you have to marry me one day because…” I laid a hand on my belly, “because it’s the right thing to do. The honorable thing to do. That’s not what I want.”

Andrew silenced me with a finger pressed softly against my lips. “Keira, I love you, and there are a thousand reasons for that. I want to marry you; not just one day, but one day soon. Not because I feel like I have to, not because I think it’s the right thing to do, not because I think that baby needs a father, but because if I don’t then I know my life will always be incomplete. Without you in my life, there will always be something missing from it. It’s taken me years to find what I now realize has always been the missing part of me, the thing that made me a proper person, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let it go now for any reason. Listen,” he looked me dead in the eyes, “I have no idea what my mother’s going to say, how the media is going to report this or how the public are going to react. And I won’t say those things aren’t important, because, whether we like it or not, they’re going to have a big effect on both our lives. But just because they’re important, doesn’t mean they matter in the end—they can’t change how I feel and they won’t change two simple facts: I love you and I want to marry you. I don’t know the circumstances in which it’s going to happen or how hard it’s going to be, and I don’t know if it will be at St Paul’s or a registry office, but I want to marry you. And—in case I haven’t mentioned it already and because I can never say it often enough—the reason I want to marry you is because I love you.”