Her shoulder tightened beneath his hand, but this last time was a charm, because he got the offending material on his very first try. Thank God. “All done.”
She looked over her shoulder at him, her eyes wide. “That was fast.”
“The hard part’s done, anyway. I still need to drown it in antibiotic ointment, then bandage it.”
“Thank you,” she said, and then waited, as if she wanted him to say something.
So he did. Even as he reached for the ointment and gauze that he’d already picked out for her bandage. “When I kissed you,” he told her, “I wasn’t thinking about Ted.”
“I wasn’t either,” she said. “Because—”
He cut her off before she got off up to speed with her explanation, becausewhyreally didn’t matter. “But we should’ve been. Especially you. And part of me is freaked out. My judge-y inner grandpa, I believe you call it. The part of me that’s a traditionalist. The part that learned right and wrong—without a lot of wiggle room—from my grandmother. So I’m not sure how to process the fact that youweren’tthinking about him. That you were so okay with kissing someone else when just a few days back you were on the verge of getting engaged to him.”
Tasha shook her head, no. “But you’re notsomeone elseand I wasn’t... I mean, Iwas, but Iwasn’t...” She took a deep breath and started again as he opened the paper wrappers on the gauze. “It wasn’t going to be a real engagement. Ted and I had a... well, I know this sounds insane but... it was a business arrangement.”
Okay, he wasn’t sure what he was expecting her to say, but it certainly wasn’t that.
She kept going. “His mother was pushing all these women at him—women who would makeacceptable—” she gave the word air quotes “—wives for the crown prince. And God, it just really exhausted him. Hehatedit. He wanted her to stop, so... I was working as his personal assistant—we’re friends, but I needed a part-time job so he paid me to organize his life.”
Thomas remembered hearing about Tash’s assistant job from Mia, and disapproving—yo, Judge Gramps—because, in his opinion, she’d clearly settled badly, in terms of her post-college career. Now he just let her continue as he opened the gauze pads he’d chosen.
“But then this gossip blog posted a picture of us together—we were laughing at something—and they were allWho’s the redheaded vixen wrapping Prince Tedric around her little finger?or something equally ridiculous and demeaning, and he got the brilliant idea to just run with it. And afterthatworked so well, he decided what hereallyneeded was to get engaged. You know, to shut his mother down even more completely. So we set this up. But it’s a hundred percent pretend. It’s like, I’m playing at being a princess again. We live together, yeah, but we have our own bedrooms—Ted snores.” She shook her head, as if annoyed with herself as he attached the bandage to her arm with tape. “But that’s not... What I mean is, we don’t sleep together.” She got even more precise. “We don’t have sex. We’ve never had sex. We’re friends.”
Friends. Pretending to be lovers.
As he helped her pull her bathrobe back up and over the gauze, Tasha added, “We play to the cameras, to annoy his mother. And to fool the world. That’s all it is.”
Play to the cameras. That video Thomas had seen, where she’d seemed to look directly at the paparazzi’s camera before giving the prince a Hollywood-worthy PDA...
Suddenly it made sense.
And yet.
“It sounds like something straight out of a rom-com,” he said.
“I know, right...? But that’s totally Ted’s MO. He’s...quirky and eccentricis the way you’re described when you’re next in line to be the king.” She’d tightly refastened the front tie of her robe, and had already slipped down off the stool to rifle through the first-aid kit for bandages for her knees. “So that’s why I wasn’t thinking about Ted. Because our relationship isn’t real. Outside of our friendship. Which of courseisreal.”
Thomas went back to the sink to wash his hands again. She was talking about this crazy arrangement—about Ted—carefully. Choosing her words to make sure he understood, instead of just letting the truth fly in her normal ebullient manner.
Either it was tremendously important to her that he believe what she was telling him—the caveman part of his brain liked that—or...
She wasn’t telling him quiteallof the truth.
You’re leaving something out.If their roles were reversed, she wouldn’t have let it slide. She would’ve said that to him. Directly. Right in his face.
He turned to look at her as he dried his hands—she was almost done bandaging the first of her scraped knees. “Are you sure Ted feels the same way? Like it’s just a big game? Cause if thiswasa movie, he would’ve started the whole... what’s the romance trope called?”
“I can’t believe you still remember tropes.” She looked up to smile at him, both disbelieving and infinitely pleased.
“You were so into it—romance novels. Plus, it was interesting.” Thomas packed up the first-aid kit, since she’d taken out the supplies she needed. If they left the pod—whenthey left the pod—he was going to take the kit with them. Along with as much ammo as he could carry. And a supply of peanuts—but not in heavy glass jars. “I learned a lot. Read some good books, too.” The rom-com movies they’d watched endlessly were far less his thing.
“Marriage of convenience,” Tash told him. “Even though the trope’s calledmarriage, it includes pretend-to-be-my-girlfriend situations, too.”
“Right,” he said. “Right. And—correct me if I’m wrong—but I thought the trope was all about the way playing pretend turns friendship into real love.” He searched the drawers for the plastic baggies that Tash had found. “Because there’s something real there—some spark—from the start, even though no one acknowledges it. Except maybe one of them—let’s call himthe prince, because there’s nothing like royalty to make a story extraextra—he’s got a secret.” He put the box on the counter then raised his voice as he went into the pantry to grab six jars of peanuts from the shelf. “And we all come to realize that he’s been jonesing for the, you know, plucky redheaded best friend, right from the start.”
“Oh my God!” she said. “No.” She shook her head emphatically as he came back into the kitchen and set the jars on the counter. “No! Ted isn’t... He’s not... He’s... No. I mean, I get why you might think that, because Iamfabulously plucky, but absolutely not.”
“Yeah, but isn’t that how it works?” he countered as he popped open one of the jars and poured its contents into the baggie. The box said quart-sized—it was close to a perfect fit. “The plucky best friend is clueless until the prince rushes through the airport to stop her from getting onto the plane.”
