Eleanor had been making good strides in her recovery, but her gait remained halting and her right side didn’t routinely obey her commands. Richard insisted she shouldn’t return to her duties yet, and to her profound irritation the doctors agreed, so all the Queen could do was sit and stew. Eleanor was getting a taste of the waiting Richard had done for a lifetime, and she didn’t care for it one bit. It was hard to tell if this was The New Eleanor, who’d shed her filter, or a natural clash between two people who had, in their own ways, each been bred to rule.

After the Stampede, Nick and I had been flown by copter up to Jasper, a town in the Rockies with a beautiful resort where Eleanor and Henry had stayed back in the early ’60s, shortly before he died. The mountains wore their snowy caps proudly even in midsummer, and the greenery was lush, hugging the perfectly clear blue lake around which the Jasper Park Lodge was built. We’d been placed in the same charming log-and-stone cabin Eleanor and Henry had taken—a quaint, freestanding building on the edge of the property, overlooking the lake and the vast expanse of natural wonders surrounding it.

“I wish we could go for a ramble,” Nick said, gesturing out the window. “Get lost in the woods.”

“Or eaten by bears.” I walked over to the chilled bottle of local Chardonnay that was waiting for us, next to a plate of cookies. I poured a glass. “One of the magazines they left in the bathroom has a story about a sassy local bear who keeps playing with the lobby’s sliding doors.”

“We could sneak out, you know,” Nick mused, sliding off the bed and stepping out onto the balcony.

“And give Popeye a heart attack?” I said as I joined him. It was cool and still outside, the lights of the far-off lodge reflecting onto the lake, and the stars above us as bright and bountiful as I’d ever seen.

“Our PPOs are asleep—”

“Popeye never sleeps.”

“So we could pop out into the wilderness—”

“Is there actual wilderness at a five-star resort?”

“And get up to no good.” His fingers crept under the waistband of my jeans.

“You’re bold in Canada,” I told him, running my hands up his chest to lock them behind his neck.

“It’s all this fresh air,” he explained.

“But you’re also forgetting that we can get up to a lot of no good right here, without worrying about wild animals.”

“Besides each other,” he teased, lowering his lips to mine. Neither of us said anything else for a long time.