“I don’t think so. Certainly not now that I’m planning to let myself go.” He patted his stomach. “No one looks twice at us here. If they do, it’s to wonder how that crispy blonde snagged such a foxy continental toy boy.”

I snorted. “Be serious.”

“I seriously am,” Nick deadpanned. “Look, we’ve pulled it off, Bex. We’ve spent weeks being whomever we like, with no one the wiser. And now that we’ve managed to get lost up here, I want to relax for a bit. I want a slow pace and a kitchen full of groceries and a routine. I love you, and us, and this, and I want to focus on that. Don’t you want that, too?”

As I searched his face, considering what he’d said, suddenly I was back at Nick’s long-ago birthday party at Buckingham Palace—an event where he’d backed out of introducing me publicly as his girlfriend—and I was looking into the eyes of my father. I really do love him, Dad, I’d said then, my way of promising that the pain of loving Nick in secret was made right by the sincere depth of our feelings, and that the oddities of his life, of this life, were worth bringing into mine. My dad died before I got the chance to prove it. He’d missed my happiest hour, but also my lowest—the day I let myself get so lost that I nearly turned that promise into a lie.

The bizarre turns of the last few weeks had in so many ways brought me and Nick closer, both to each other and to the seeds of ourselves that wanted to grow outside the confines of the palace walls. If our former friend Clive hadn’t become the kind of reporter he’d always taught me to mistrust, if he hadn’t dug until he found a half-truth about me and Freddie that he spun into what I could only classify as an international sex scandal, then Nick and I would have had a week in paradise and then gone right back behind the curtain. I wasn’t glad for Clive’s betrayal, but I could still find optimism in the wreckage.

I half stood and shifted into Nick’s lap, cupping his face in my hands and then kissing him slow and soft.

“I really do love you,” I said. The echo was deliberate. I wanted this to be a new promise—a fresh one to Nick, to my dad, to myself. “And I love this idea. Let’s stay. Steve and Margot can make it work.”

“In life, as in the kitchen,” Nick said, then popped a triumphant piece of pie crust into his mouth. “Please note that Steve’s pastry did not have a soggy bottom.” His hand slid down my back. “And how’s your bottom today? I’d better check that, too.”

I looped my arms around his neck. “You are getting cornier every day.”

He shrugged. “Steve is a very basic man with very basic urges.”

“I said cornier, not hornier, but apparently both are true.”