“How can you be so sure?”
He pauses, the bottle halfway to his mouth, and swallows, his throat bobbing. He gently sets the bottle down and turns fully toward me. His face is open with want, and for the firsttime all day, I’m pretty sure I know what he’s thinking. Warmth from the fire feels like it might devour the room whole. My fingers stray to the chain around my neck, his ring still hidden from view. I wonder how he’d feel if he knew I was wearing it.
I wonder how I’d feel if he asked for it back.
“Come here?” he asks.
My heart thumps painfully in response.
A knock pounds on the door.
“You in there?” a voice yells from the other side.
When Theo opens the door, I catch a glimpse of Henry. “Can this wait?” Theo asks in a low voice.
Henry cranes his neck to see over Theo’s shoulder and waves to me. “Victoria sent me to get the dog.”
“My dog?” I ask incredulously.
Theo looks over his shoulder at me. “Wait here?” he asks. “I’ll be back soon.” The door to his room swings shut, leaving Henry and me inside.
“Why does she think she can take my dog?”
“She’s used to getting what she wants,” Henry says.
“She’s not getting Comet.”
He shrugs on his way to the refrigerator. “I bagsied the fried rice, but there’s some egg rolls in the fridge if you want.” He grabs a carton of leftover Chinese food and sits next to me.
“Why aren’t you ever wearing a shirt?” I ask.
He laughs. (Dimple confirmed.) “Are you excited to come to London?”
“Should I be?”
“I bet Theo has told you all about how horrible our lives are, but it’s not so bad. I can show you around if he’s too busy brooding to do it.” He takes a giant bite of fried rice and pushes a mess of dark curls out of his eyes. “Sorry I was standoffishearlier, by the way, it’s just that I thought you might be a nutter.”
“You never know. I still could be,” I say, which makes him laugh again. It’s easy to see now what Naomi was talking about. He seems completely unselfconscious, and I can see why people are drawn to him. What I don’t get is why he would be excluded from an outing specifically designed for the public if everyone loves him. “So why were you uninvited from the park this morning?”
He takes another large bite and chews for a long time. “I’m sure you’ve figured out pretty quickly that the tabloids are ninety-five percent rubbish?”
“Yeah,” I say, thinking about how half the internet has already diagnosed me with clinical narcissism based on absolutely nothing.
He tosses the empty carton into the fire. “That means five percent of it is true.”
I lean forward. “Like what?”
“Google is free,” he says with a smirk. The firelight glints off his eyes, and I realize they’re not as dark as I thought; his irises are bronze with a ring of green around the pupils.
I glance at the door. “Will Theo be gone awhile?”
“Depends on how persuasive my sister is.”
“She’snotgetting my dog.”
Henry chuckles. “So I’ve heard.”
“I guess that means I have time to do some reading,” I say. He salutes me cheekily on my way out the door. As I’m leaving, I see Theo and one of the men from the meeting—his communications secretary, Graves—arguing in the hall, their backs to me.
