Eddy turned and seized Hélène’s hands roughly in his. “But wedidget involved, and we’re here now. I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
Hélène hadn’t meant to let herself say that; the words were a reflex, torn from her lips without a conscious thought.
“That settles it, then. We’ll find a way through this,” he said fiercely.
Hélène’s throat burned. “Eddy…thereisno way through this, short of me giving up my religion. Which I cannot do. I’m sorry, but I cannot love you more than I love my God.”
“I would never expect you to.”
If only he were angry. He had every right to be: she had promised his grandmother to convert, only to claim that she had changed her mind. Yet instead of looking at her with disgust or disappointment, Eddy seemed consumed by a grim regret.
She hated herself for the lie, but what choice did she have? She didn’t dare tell him the truth.
“Very well, then,” Eddy said heavily.
Something in Hélène shattered at those words. He was about to agree with her, to tell her goodbye. And even though it was what she’d wanted, she couldn’t bear to hear him say it.
As long as they were talking, they were still together. As long as they were talking, they still had a chance. But once Eddy walked away from her, they would be over for good. To think that after a year of secrets, of passion and infatuation and illicit meetings, after getting approval from the queen herself, they would still end up here.
Walking away from each other, just as they should have done a year ago.
“I’m going to abdicate.”
For a moment Hélène thought she hadn’t heard correctly. She looked up at Eddy, who was staring at her with clear-eyedpurpose.
“You…what?”
“I’ll abdicate. Or, more accurately, I’ll renounce my place in the line of succession.” He shrugged. “Technically, you can only abdicate if you’re a reigning king.”
“No,” she breathed. “There’s no way.”
“Of course there’s a way. I just sign a paper and give it to Parliament,” Eddy said steadily. “Hélène, you say that you don’t love me more than you love your God, and that is as it should be. But I have to admit that I love you more than anything. More than the Church of England, that is for certain. And more than I love being a future king.”
There was no trace of his usual irreverence in his expression; Eddy looked more serious than Hélène had ever seen him.
For the first time that she could remember, he looked nothing like a boy, but like a grown man.
Finally she found her voice. “You can’t do that, Eddy. They’ll never let you—”
“Of course they will. Kings have signed away their rights plenty of times.”
“When they’re defeated in battle! Not because they want to marry someone they shouldn’t!”
“Well then, I suppose I will be the first.”
As she became more visibly distraught, Eddy seemed to grow calmer, his certainty increasing with every moment. Hélène’s heart seized at the realization of just how much he loved her.
If Eddy really was willing to give up the throne for her sake, then May’s threat no longer mattered. Hélène and Eddy could still marry. They could run away from it all, far from the scandal—because they would both be ruined if they did this, Eddy for renouncing his duties and Hélène for thegossip May would spread. But it wouldn’t matter, not where they were going. They could escape somewhere impossibly distant, like Venice or Jaipur or maybe even America. There were places out west they could go, to live as she’d always wanted to live, with horses and wild spaces and—
And then what?
Could she live with herself, knowing that she and Eddy had dumped all their responsibilities and scandals onto their families? Were they really going to run away, leaving everyone else to pick up the pieces? Hélène’s thoughts drifted to George, who would be forced to take the throne in his brother’s place…and to her parents. Forget getting their throne back—Marie Isabelle and Philippe wouldn’t be able to show their faces in society at all. No one would want anything to do with the former king whose daughter had nearly broken the British monarchy. Her name would be synonymous with betrayal, her family despised to the end of their days.
Eddy might be willing to leave everything for her, but he’d spent his whole life destined for the throne. She knew he would make a good king, despite his family’s complaints about his lack of academic motivation. A ruler didn’t need to be a scholar; Eddy was smart in other ways, observant and thoughtful and warm. And unlike his father and grandmother, who were both painfully aristocratic, Eddy actually had some grasp of what it meant to be an ordinary person. His time in the military—and his own irreverent, joyful nature—had exposed him to real life, even if he’d never lived it himself. He could speak with his future subjects in a way the rest of his family could not.
Hélène couldn’t let him give up on being king. Not whenEddy might reshape the way the monarchy interacted with the public, with the entireworld.
