Several people around us turn to look. They give us severe glances. It is a funeral after all.
“I suppose my mother and Claire have given you quite the royal treatment,” she says. “Well, I assure you not all royals are like that. I certainly am not.”
She links arms with me. I’m stunned.
She says, “You and I are going to get to know each other better. And I have a feeling we’re going to be very good friends. Shall we?”
She indicates a waiting limo whose driver holds the passenger door open. He bows to her.
Oh, she wants us to go together.
“OK,” I say, still bewildered. It’s like being asked to hang out by the prom queen, especially when you are the class dork.
As I get into the limo, I catch Madame Fournier’s dark look.
It clearly says, ‘Beware’.
2
In the next few weeks, I don’t get to see Alex much in the daytime. He has his father’s estate to sort out, affairs to settle. He still comes to my bed every night. But he is visibly tired from his increasingly long days, and most of the time, I let him sleep.
I watch him sleep in my bed in the palace guest room. His long dark hair is fanned upon the pillow and his naked chest rises and falls so peacefully. He has not moved into his father’s bedchambers.
“It’s not the right time,” he says. “Besides, I can’t turn my mother out of her own bed.”
Nothing ever seems to be the right time. It’s as though we are so afraid to let the world know we are out of the mourning period. Or maybe that’s the way things work around here, and I’m being an impatient American.
Not that I want to sleep in the King’s bedchamber. I’m perfectly happy having Alex here in my bed forever. I’d be perfectly happy having him anywhere, so long as we’re together.
Alex’s dreams are troubled. I know this because he mutters and cries in his sleep. We make love, but not as often as before. I attribute this to stress. Both of us are immensely stressed.
“When is your coronation?” I asked him earlier.
“Probably a year from now,” he replies in a wry tone.
A year? Is he kidding me?
“It is not deemed seemly in this period of mourning,” he explains. “But I am still King. I don’t need a crown to tell me that.”
“I know, but a year?” I marvel.
“Queen Elizabeth was also crowned a year after her father’s state funeral. We are no longer in medieval times where the crowning of a King is essential to the seizure of power.”
I don’t know about that. I know Alex isn’t into power, but I have a bad feeling about this. The longer we wait to tell the world about our engagement and the longer it takes for Alex to be crowned, the more bad things can happen.
There’s got to be a law on it, like Murphy’s Law. If anything bad can happen in a year, it will happen on the eleventh month, or something like that.
I do, however, have a new BFF.
Maybe I should not be calling her a BFF because I’m not sure we’re going to be friends forever. (After all, look what happened to me and my roommate, Deanna). But I do sure enjoy her company because she’s closer to my age. I’m talking about Marie Vassar, of course. Unlike Claire and Tatiana, she has no queenly airs. In fact, she could have been just another American college student, even though she has technically finished her final term.
“I think it’s because I spent most of my teenage life in America,” she says. “Mother wanted me to have an American education from the start and Claire to be sent to Swiss finishing school. She wanted us to embrace separate education systems.”
Ah well. I privately think one is working out better than the other.
“What are you going to do after college?”
“Take over the family’s businesses, of course.” She laughs. “That’s my major. Economics. I’m going to make Moldavia the jewel in the EU. We already have the second highest GDP per capita in Europe. We need to be the first.”
Marie Vassar is certainly ambitious. She has great plans to make Moldavian economy soar more than ever before. We go for walks down the Riviera, where bathers soak themselves in the sun and splash in the silvery Mediterranean waves. Paparazzi follow us, but are kept at arm’s length by our bodyguards. I have since learned to ignore these distractions.
“Look at this.” She waves her hand around the beach. “We need more tourists, more hotels, more casinos, more land. Moldavia can be twice as rich as it is. We’ll surpass Singapore.”
The press would caption us as ‘The Princess and her future Queen?’ So even if we have not leaked out news of our (informal) engagement, the world is already speculating that Alex and I would marry in place of Alex and Tatiana. Poor Tatiana. She’s completely out of the picture at this stage. But this is not a pity party. I’ll do anything to be with Alex but I’ll do it the correct way – without guile or stabbing anyone in the back.