And then, as quickly as it had started—only a day or so later—the furor was gone. The media was like a starving dog, and the only way to stop it eating you was to feed it something else, and a story had just hit the headlines that trumped my and Keira’s scandal and made the public forget that they’d ever really had a problem with us.
I stared at the paper, disconsolately. I should’ve been pleased; I’d been saved from scandal and so had my bride-to-be.
But it had come at a price.
“I can’t believe Michael did this. I can’t believe he actually went to the tabloids and admitted he was the one who leaked the photos and the pregnancy information,” I said.
Keira snuggled up beside me, her head nestled in the crook of my arm. “I think he wanted to.”
I continued to stare at the paper and at the article that angrily tore my brother to shreds. It turned out that I’d been right; a royal prince stabbing his brother in the back, letting his bitterness and jealousy get the better of him, was a bigger story than a prince getting a maid pregnant. The media had never really liked Michael, simply because, when you got right down to it, he wasn’t that likeable, but they’d never had a chance to attack him because he never really did anything wrong, which was one of the things that made him so hard to like. While we might admire men who stuck to the straight and narrow, never straying from their duty and wagging their fingers at those who do, they were not the sort of men anyone wanted to have a drink with.
So now the media had a genuine reason to go after Michael, and they ran with it. It was already known that he was jealous enough of me that he’d sold pictures of me and Keira, but might there be more?
The papers were sure that there was.
They’d hastily dug back through old stories looking for other ways in which Michael might have done wrong. Where evidence didn’t exist, they simply made it up. The bottom line was that where sex (and more pointedly love) was concerned, we all made mistakes, did the wrong thing (or the wrong person) and wound up in situations we wished we could take back—we’d all been there. But to turn on your own brother? Who did that? Who tried to cheat his own brother out of his birthright, nearly drove him away to another country and used the love of his life as a weapon against him? What sort of person did he have to be? The papers eviscerated him.
What none of the media outlets took the trouble to mention was where their surprisingly detailed information had come from. It’d come from Michael himself.
“I don’t see why anyone would want to bring all this down on themselves,” I said with a sigh.
“Sure you do,” said Keira.
I smiled. “You’re telling me what I think now?”
“It’s easier than waiting for you to figure it out,” Keira said. “Look, when they were having a go at you, didn’t you feel a little like you deserved it?”
I hedged. “Maybe a little. Doesn’t mean I liked it.”
“But it made you feel better,” she insisted. “It’s the same with Michael. He wants it to be bad, that way he can get on with his life with a clean slate.”
“I guess.”
“Have you spoken to him?”
“No.”
“You should. You’ve got a question to ask him.”
“I have?”
I’d become used to Keira being able to read my mind, but it was disconcerting when she knew what I was thinking before I did. However, as usual, she was totally right. I had a very important question to ask my brother—after what he’d done to make things up to us by sacrificing himself to the media, I couldn’t think of anyone else who I wanted to be my best man. After all, despite everything, he was family, and family was the most important thing in the world.
And soon, when Keira gave birth, my family would be even bigger.
I smiled at the thought of seeing our baby for the first time.
I couldn’t wait.
Chapter 28
Andrew
There’s no antidote for what ails a country like a royal wedding. When international sporting events go badly and recession threatens, a royal wedding is the palliative needed to get everyone smiling again. Really, you can only pity those countries that don’t have a royal family.
The Queen had personally overseen the details of the wedding, with help from Keira, and it was already being touted in the media as the ‘Wedding of the Century’. All had been arranged with speed and the minimum of fuss, which is what happened when a wedding was organized by people more used to putting on state dinners. No matter how poorly relatives get along, the seating chart for a reception holds no fears to anyone who’s had to arrange one for the countries of the old Commonwealth.