Eva nodded. “Absolutely. Unless you wanted to go black widow on his bum after you had his child.”

“But that would require having his child. Talk about diluting the bloodline,” Addy mused.

There would be no arguments from me. “We dated, remember? It didn’t work. I think Dad got that when I reminded him, but that doesn’t mean he won’t come back with a date for me. Plus he wants me to go to the state banquet with the Spanish royals.”

“Aren’t you going?”

I shrugged, toying with the edge of a serviette. “I don’t know. They’re long and monotonous and so full of protocol, and it’ll be nothing more than a matchmaking endeavour for my father. At the same time, I don’t know how I can get out of it.”

“You can’t.” Eva shook her head and snapped a breadstick in two. “Your only way to do that is to find a boyfriend yourself or tell him you want to focus on your education.”

I wrinkled my nose. “I don’t like either of those options.”

“I’m not sure that you have a third.”

I knew she was right. “Fine. I’ll tell him. This afternoon. Before he spends anymore time in Windsor organising the state banquet and finds someone else to attempt to set me up with.”

“Good.” Adelaide nodded approvingly. “You know parents always find stuff out. I think we could be seventy with a secret and they’d all find a way to haunt us and tell us they know what we’re hiding.”

“No kidding,” Eva muttered. “I literally travelled fifty miles away for a date and Mum still found out.”

My eyebrows shot up. “How did she find that out?”

With a sigh, she explained. “David Courtenay introduced me to his cousin at Beatrice’s birthday, and we hit it off. Unfortunately, the date was a bust, but Lady Harvey saw us. Naturally, she called Mum immediately, and that was the beginning of one night of hell.”

I winced. I could imagine. While Lady Vic didn’t care if her children married into titles or not, she was still very invested in their dating lives. Almost a little too much sometimes, especially if there was a hint that they could marry ‘up’ as people liked to say.

It was a very antiquated way of thinking, if you asked me.

Unfortunately for me, nobody had asked. Not that it ever stopped me offering my opinion, mind you.

Our food was brought over at that point, and we passed the meal by sharing small talk. I asked how Addy’s book was going, and she groaned that she was struggling massively and wasn’t sure she’d make her agent’s deadline to submit to publishers. Eva once again bemoaned her boss, and we very childishly suggested many ways to prank him that would probably get her fired but were hilarious to think about.

By the end of the lunch, after we’d split the bill and said our goodbyes, I felt a thousand times better than I had this morning. I still felt the weight of my impending assignment, but it no longer felt like the crushing landslide it had before I’d left.