Playing Dirty(85)

To be fair, she hadn’t exactly walked. She’d run away like her ass was on fire; like she couldn’t stand being near me for a second longer. She’d even somehow managed to look sexy while dashing off in her heels like a drunken giraffe.

And there was that pang again…why did I miss her so much?

“We’ll be landing in a few minutes, your Highness.” Kathy’s voice nudged me out of the introspection into which I’d slipped.

“Thank you, Kathy,” I said with a smile. She looked a little disappointed that I hadn’t cracked onto her, but that was too bad for her. She’d have to remain disappointed, because it wasn’t going to happen, not while the lovely Keira was still on my mind.



***



There were many official homes belonging to our family, inherited from the ancestral Arlingtons and occupied by all of them throughout the years. The most familiar to the public was Wellington Castle, but the one in which I’d always felt most at home was Richmond Palace. Though its name might be slightly less well known, it remained a dominating and impressive presence, and to me it was simply the site of many good childhood memories. We’d spent a lot of time here when my father was still alive—he’d died of a heart attack when I was only twelve—so this was the place with which I most associated family life. Despite there being the sad memories of my father’s passing, coming back here was still a good feeling due to all those other wonderful memories we’d made.

This exact moment, however, wasn’t going to make a particularly good memory. I’d just stepped inside, and I was in for a lecture.

“It’s not that I don’t appreciate your right to have ‘a bit of fun’,” my mother said. She could pronounce inverted commas with cut-glass precision. “But at some point you have to settle down and learn to be more restrained in your activities. We don’t need another George IV. And I’m not going to live forever.”

“I don’t even want to think about that,” I said.

She gave me a look of severe remonstration. “Please don’t use my inevitable demise as a way to excuse your tom-catting it around with any girl without the sense enough to say no to you.”

“Sorry.”

I was often taken aback by how well my mother knew me. It could be hard having a mother who was also the Queen; they could seem like two different people, and it was hard to believe that the figure who stood in crown and regalia on state occasions as if carved in stone even knew what ‘tom-catting it around’ might mean.

“When you were younger,” she continued, “we made allowances. We let you fool around. For example, we let you get all those silly tattoos, because they can easily be covered up. We didn’t want you to grow up without having a childhood and an adolescence like everyone else. The monarchy is changing and it’s important that a future king enjoy the experiences that other people enjoy.”

“And I appreciate that.”

“I’ve noticed,” she said icily, her glance shooting daggers at a newspaper front page that featured a photo of me outside a New York bar surrounded by young women; the same bar where I’d met Keira. “The problem is that you’re not other people. Because of who you are and the family which you were born into, you’re able to enjoy those experiences to excess. You don’t have to go to work in the morning, you don’t worry about your mortgage, and life is easy for you. For the moment people tolerate you—especially all the female people— because you’re living out their fantasy and they don’t blame you for it. But the time will come when they hate you for it. The more of your responsibilities that you shirk, the more you take advantage of the privilege into which you were born, the quicker that day will come.”

“Isn’t that all the more reason for me to enjoy it now?” I said, a smile playing on my lips.

“No. You might think that a Prince’s job is to wait to become King but there are duties required of royalty. It is a full-time job.”

“I did four charity events in New York,” I countered.

“And only gave half a speech at one because you’d made a date with the coat check girl.”

“That’s not true!” I protested. The girl had been a waitress, and you could hardly call what we’d done a ‘date’, unless getting a blowjob in a private bathroom counted as a date. That was before I met Keira, and I found myself thinking about her all over again; her plump pink lips, her sparkling eyes, her animated words over her future art career. Strange how I could divide my world, and my behavior, into pre-Keira and post-Keira despite our meeting only being brief and cut short by my ‘Drew Ellis’ lie.