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Once this was over, she would travel to the edge of the globe and live like a hermit away from the damned internet. It was the only way she was going to survive.

She watched half-fascinated, half-aghast as people commented in real time. Some even stitched videos of their reactions alongside the photos.

Mortified, she read one of the articles. ‘It says we finally got together at New Year after months of yearning.’

‘Yep.’ He almost smiled.

‘You didn’t talk to me once that whole night.’

‘We’ve carefully kept our distance from each other for a long time.’

‘Well,’ she conceded, ‘that’s not untrue.’

‘Precisely. We’re both good at hiding our feelings.’

‘I didn’t think you had them.’

‘I think you now know I do.’ He glanced at her. ‘But as I also said, they come and go. They’re not anything real.’

So that was the message? It had been a meaningless five minutes of fooling around. Fine by her. She would never acknowledge how hot she’d become or how much more she wanted. Instead she agreed. ‘Exactly.’

This was Alex. She didn’t like him. She would shake this off and the sooner she got away from him the better.

He leaned forward, skimming an opinion piece that some royals expert had hastily penned. ‘The outrage over the invasion of your privacy is enormous. That’s good.’

‘So now people feel sorry for me?’ Her irritation trebled. ‘How is that good?’

His eyes widened. ‘I thought you were worried about being the scapegoat. Now you don’t want pity?’

‘I don’t want to be pathetic.’ She watched amazed as she saw people excited about them—that the ‘sweet’, ‘misunderstood’ commoner-turned-princess had tamed the playboy prince. More and more defended her. There was so much support flooding in that it was suspicious. ‘Did you plant those comments?’

‘No. You’re watching a grass-roots, genuine response in real time.’

‘Some are actually Team Tilly?’ She was astonished.

‘Yes. But,’ he smirked, ‘several are also jealous as hell.’

She frowned.

‘You’ve married me.’ His tease shattered her tension.

‘Ugh.’ She swatted his arm and tried to focus again on the headlines filling the screen: ‘Crown Prince of Chemistry.’ ‘Secret Romance Shock!’ ‘Forbidden to Forever: Scandalous Affair becomes Royal Marriage.’

It was only through Alex that she’d become acceptable. ‘I am pathetic,’ she muttered morosely. ‘I used a man—marriage—to rescue me from a sticky situation when I should have just…’

Honestly, she still didn’t know what she should have done.

‘You did the best you could in the moment. Sometimes when you’re deep in the trenches, you can’t see beyond the dark in front of you to what the other options might be, even when they’re obvious to others. Or later. Sometimes you just have to keep moving—it’s enough to survive however you have to.’

Tilly turned to look at him. There’d been a genuine thread in that statement, giving her another glimpse of experience. Of pain.

He glanced back to the screen but she kept watching him. She wanted to ask how he knew that—wanted to bridge the crevasse between them. She wanted to know not just his body but also what was going on in his head. Which wasn’t only weird, it was unwise. She couldn’t become one of the many women fascinated by Alex Montesi.

When she got away from here she’d eventually find some other guy who turned her on, because she wasn’t letting Alex ruin her future sex life. She wasn’t getting fixated. She wasn’t risking her heart on him.

‘What are you thinking?’ He suddenly turned.

‘Nothing.’