The Royal We by Heather Cocks

Author:Heather Cocks
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Romance, Young Adult, Contemporary, Adult
ISBN: 9781455557103
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2015-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Two

The room reeked of booze and smoke and stale sweat. My mouth felt like I’d eaten a stick of paste, and tasted about as compelling. My head throbbed. My stomach churned. I was clammy and cold, which I quickly realized was because I was naked other than a sheet covering my ankles.

And some guy’s leg was thrown over mine.

His breathing was slow, heavy, rhythmic; whoever he was, he was asleep. I pried open my eyes and saw a very posh hotel room that a cyclone of hedonism had torn to bits. The carcasses of the minibar blanketed the floor alongside heavy glass ashtrays full of cigarette stubs and ashes. Clothes dangled from anything they could; a deck of cards lay scattered as if someone had hurled it up into the air. A trail of powder led to the suite’s second room, where I could see a slumbering couple I didn’t recognize. Carefully, so as not to stir him, I lifted my head and looked my mystery companion in the face.

It was Clive.

* * *

New Year’s Eve on Wayne Hanson’s island reawakened a sleeping beast in me that would have given my selective biographer Aurelia Maupassant a stroke. I flirted with inappropriate guys. I gave out absurd fake names like Picasso Von Trapp and lied elaborately about my job—neurosurgeon, buttock-implant technician, party planner—while wearing tight shirts and tighter skirts provided by Joss, who seemed to like me a whole lot more now that I was feeling, as Bea might’ve said, more experimental and psychotic. Clive’s new girlfriend, an old ex of Nick’s called Davinia Cathcart-Hanson, was generous with the perks of her father’s conglomerate and routinely booked us cheap airfare and gratis suites anywhere that had a warm beach, strong drinks, and a throng of people who either didn’t know who I was or didn’t care. And I went, again and again, to escape the memories that were boxed up in my Chelsea love nest along with a great deal of Nick’s stuff. Which apparently he didn’t want. He’d simply dropped away without so much as a note to tell me I should toss the chartreuse tie he left behind, which was a gift from the Queen, and which he hated. Of course, I hadn’t texted him either to return his cashmere sweater that I was still sleeping in, even though it didn’t even smell like him anymore.

Instead, we engaged in a screamingly immature game of cat and mouse. Photos of Nick and Gemma had given way to a mix of reports that he was exceedingly popular at the Royal Naval College, and grainy stills of him inside nightclubs, or leaving them, with a series of pretty women. I insisted I didn’t care, that it was all gossip for sport—and yet, when the paparazzi caught me bodysurfing in Portugal, the surf ripping off my ill-advised string bikini top, I didn’t hate the gloriously carefree shot of me that made the paper. Nor did I mind when the photographers found me

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