It was no use. I was crumbling. He was winning. He was forcing me, through charm and logic and something that might even be called—gulp—the truth, to not just love him more than I’d even thought possible, but to love myself and some absurd, why-the-hell-not dream of our future. He was making it sound doable and enticing and real.

“So I suppose you’d like some sort of answer,” I said, still clinging to wisecracking insecurity, “to your big question. But if I say yes, which I’m not saying I am, would I get some sort of title?”

“First you’d become the Duke of Somewhere. Perhaps the Duke of Piscataway. And while I pray that my grandmother will be with us for many more centuries, we will someday mourn her loss. And then, following a coronation, I would become King Edgar and you would become the Royal Consort, Prince Carter.”

“Which sounds like a rap star’s baby.”

“Your answer?”

“Not yet,” I said, because Edgar had just provided a legitimate hindrance. “Because there’s one more royal rule, isn’t there?”

“What rule?”

CHAPTER 32

The walls of the Throne Room are covered in red silk damask, and it’s carpeted in red, with the red upholstered throne placed on a raised platform at one end. This is exactly what I’d always wanted my childhood bedroom to look like.

Queen Catherine was seated on the throne, wearing a hot pink dress of stiff linen. Just to make sure I got the point, there was a larger-than-life-size oil portrait of her, in royal regalia, including one of her most stupendously jeweled crowns, a sword and an ermine cloak, in a gilded frame on an easel beside her. On a certain gaudy level, Buckingham Palace is a prime high roller’s suite in Vegas.

Edgar and I stood a few feet away. There weren’t any chairs for us. On purpose.

“Nana? Mr. Ogden has a question.”

“What now?”

“Your Majesty,” I said, “no one in the royal family is allowed to be married without your approval, isn’t that right?”

“Quite true. And if I had my way, no one in the world would ever be married without my approval. I could save people so much time and trouble.”

“So,” I said, now standing next to Edgar, “what do you think?”

The queen sighed deeply, monumentally annoyed, as if deciding between breakfast and an execution.

“I think that you are two men from different countries, with extremely different temperaments. And the world will be watching you, at every moment, for any signs of distress or impropriety.”

“Or personality,” I added.

“Or outrageousness,” said Edgar.

“Or fun,” I said, looking Her Majesty right in the eye.

“Or trifle,” she shot back.

“Nana?”

“You are both causing me such—Mr. Ogden, what was that word your great-aunt Miriam used? Tsuris?”

“It means headaches, in Yiddish.”