“I said,do you understand?” She fixes me with her best glare.
“Yes, Your Highness,” I say as I dip into an unplanned curtsy.
Victoria grins triumphantly. “Good. Now leave and don’t come back without help, food, or a plan to get us rescued.” She checks an imaginary watch. “You have one hour.”
Theo and I hurry off before she can give more orders. We walk to the edge of the water, where we both slip off our shoes and walk in the soft, wet sand, the tide coming up over our toes, sinking a little with every step.
Theo throws me a sidelong glance, his eyes dancing with delight. “I cannot believe you curtsied to my little sister.”
“I don’t know what happened! It’s like I was possessed by the spirit of your ancestors!”
He bites back a laugh and shakes his head. “I don’t even know who you are anymore. You used to be so idealistic.” He sighs wistfully.
“I wasn’t so much anti-royalty as I was pro-getting-under-your-skin,” I tease as I kick water into his face.
He tackles me in a bear hug, soaking us both in cold water, and before guilt or worry or fear can set back in, Theo gently tugs me into his side and wraps his arm around my shoulders. “Pretend with me.”
“Pretend what?” I ask, though I already know I’ll say yes.
He plants a kiss on my temple. “That we met on your senior trip to London, and I asked you on a date.”
I close my eyes, letting the false memory wash over me. “What did we do?”
“We went to an animal shelter and signed up as dog walkers for the afternoon. We took them to the private palace gardens, along with a picnic basket filled with pie that I made specifically to impress you.”
My chest burns. I can picture it so easily. It strikes me that even in his perfect reality, he’s still him, a royal by birth, and I’m still me, an eighteen-year-old American who loves to play with dogs. But with a slight change in circumstances, we might have had a chance.
“You really pulled out all the stops.”
“I didn’t have much time to impress you, I had to do everything I could.”
“What happened next?”
“The world was never ending, and we fell in love the way most people get to, without the threat of complete annihilation hanging over our heads.”
I sigh. “Sounds too easy.”
“You flew back home at the end of the week, but you were proper obsessed with me—”
“Bloody unlikely!” I tease, pulling out my dreadful British accent.
His mouth hitches up in an easy smile. “Fine, I was obsessed with you. You were all I thought about. But when I missed you so much that I thought I’d go mad, I picked up the phone, and I called you. When I scrolled through your social media, I commented on every single picture. I didn’t haunt the palace hallways in the dead of night because I was crawling out of my own skin thinking about you.”
“You didn’t?”
“Not in this timeline. And when my mum died, you’re the first person I called.”
He has no idea how much I wish that’s what happened. “I hated the thought of you going through that alone.”
“That’s the thing, though. I never really felt alone, even with you on the other side of the pond. In this scenario, we never went more than an hour without texting each other. Our friends took the piss out of us, but it didn’t matter, because we were happy.”
“Sounds delightfully uncomplicated for a long-distance relationship with a reigning monarch.”
“It was, until you were about to start university, and I went mad with jealousy. I imagined you in a new place, surrounded by hundreds of smart and interesting blokes from all over the world. Guys who could walk you to class without bodyguards and take you on a date without the tabloids stalking you—”
“I thought we were pretending away the bad stuff.”
He shakes his head. “You’re right. Sorry. You were about to start school, so I invited you on vacation before you got swamped in your studies. A week on a tropical island in Portugal.”
