“She’s a good enough sort, but we don’t see her much,” Clive said. “Her father requested she be on Nick’s floor, to light a fire under her or some such, and you don’t run afoul of a man who has such, er, sensitive personal information.”
“Keep your friends close, keep the secrets of the Royal Birth Canal closer,” I said.
“Something like that.” His hand brushed my leg again.
“And you’re the person everyone wants to sit next to at a wedding,” I said. “You’d have dirt on everyone in the room and at least two of their relatives.”
“Only two?” Clive feigned shock. “I do want to be a reporter, actually. I like learning about people. My brothers think it’s just an excuse for the fact that I’m afraid of having my ears torn off.” At my quizzical expression, he added, “They play rugby. Professionally. The biggest, thickest clods you’ve ever seen. Cauliflower ears and broken noses and all.”
“So how did you end up on Nick’s floor?”
“My dad was mates with Nick’s dad at St. Andrews,” Clive said. “So we’ve known each other since we were born, same as Bea.”
I glanced at Lady Bollocks. An immaculate blonde with a creamy tan was wresting Nick’s arm from her, to the visible chagrin of nearly every woman in the room and a few hopeful men besides.
“India Bolingbroke,” Clive said, with the precision of a spy. “The new girlfriend. Daughter of Prince Richard’s second cousin twice removed.”
“Good luck to her,” I said. “I think the whole room is out for her blood.”
“We tease him about it, but it’s a bit unremitting,” Clive said. “Last year Nick was with Ceres, the girl whose room you’re taking, but she cheated on him with the polo captain. I think everyone hoped it’d be open season again.”
Nick leaned into India as if she were the only one in the room. It was a technique he eventually told me he developed to freeze out the sensation of being devoured by hungry eyes, two of which, that day, belonged to Lady Beatrix Larchmont-Kent-Smythe.
“She’s like a guard dog, that one,” Clive said, tipping his beer at her.
And then her steely gaze found me. I saluted her comically with my gin.
“Well, nobody has anything to fear from me,” I said, downing the dregs of my drink like a pro. “I’m not here for any of that bullshit. I just want to have fun.”
“Bravo to that,” Clive said. “And when poor old Nick is forced to marry one of these squealing aristocrats, promise you’ll sit next to me, just like this”—he made a point of shifting so that I was half on his lap—“so I can whisper secrets to you.”
“Deal,” I said.
He held my gaze. An excited shiver ran up my spine. I wasn’t there to get married, but I was definitely up for a good time.
And that’s the true story of the day I met Nick: I left the bar with another guy.
Chapter Two
I am one minute older than my twin sister, and she seemed to view that accident of biology as some kind of challenge. If I got As, Lacey got A-pluses. When I hit five foot nine, she was already half an inch taller. She was school president and the head cheerleader, while I was just the softball team’s least-effective relief pitcher (Lacey never understood playing for fun; to her, if you didn’t dominate, it wasn’t worth doing). When our dad had heart problems, we both studied medical textbooks, but she full-on memorized them and decided to go into cardiology—and then, I think, stuck with it mostly because wants to be a doctor looked so impressive next to valedictorian on our graduation program. So as I stared at the mountain of library books on my desk after just one day of term, I wondered what crossed wire had landed me at the very top university in the world when Lacey always had the edge in the Superstar Stakes (even if she was the only one who thought of it that way). My relatively brief settling-in period had ended when the calendar flipped to October, bringing with it the beginning of term—Oxford calls it First Week—and a raft of stern lectures from the academic fellows on the rigors of independent study, a stultifying pile of reading with which I had to be conversant in a hurry, and warnings from Nick’s personal protection officers about acting completely normal yet maintaining constant vigilance. I needed moral support. But Lacey needed dish, and Lacey is good at getting what she wants.
“So how many times have you hooked up, exactly?” she pressed.
“It’s barely even an interesting amount,” I hedged.
“You’re the artist,” Lacey said. “Paint me a picture.”
Bedsprings creaked through the phone line. I could picture Lacey the way she talks on the phone: on her stomach, legs bent, covering the receiver with a giggle to repeat what the person on the other end was saying. It was strange being that person. Especially because up to now, we’d always dissected our romantic lives over a messy plate of cheese and crackers, and that wasn’t nearly as fun long-distance.
“I don’t know,” I said, pulling open a block of English cheddar. “Three. Ish. Okay, four. Anyway, you should see the beard on my history fellow—”
“Four times in like ten days? You must be into him!” Lacey squealed.
“No!” I said, perhaps a bit too loudly. “It’s casual! We’re young. Consequence-free making out is the entire point.”
“You’re such a guy sometimes.”