The Royal's Pet by Adora Crooks

Author:Adora Crooks [Crooks, Adora]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-03-04T16:00:00+00:00

25

Roland

Rory was right. It’s a beautiful night.

At Buckingham Palace, I wear the crown. Here, watching the sun dip behind the cliffs with a bottle of Italy’s best dangling from my fingers, wedged between two people who love me and who I love, I’ve never felt more like a royal.

The sun burns the sky red, yellow, then orange, its rays leaking across the oceanfront. It’s been a decade since I could see the sun set without the foliage of Buckingham’s garden poking out from underneath. I feel as though I’m watching it for the first time.

The estate has really taken a beating with years of disuse. None of us dare to dip a toe in the pool, but it’s enough to drink and watch the skyline. Feels like forever since I’ve seen so much sky. The patio is decorated with an assortment of Greco-Roman columns, marble statues, and wide-hipped vases so overrun with vines that they look like leafy fountains. There’s plenty of room out here, but the three of us fit snugly on a single chaise, Rory sitting half on my lap, half on Ben’s.

What do the Italians call this? Paradiso.

“So this is what it’s like to be royal, huh?” Rory breaks the comfortable silence. “I could get used to this.”

A laugh puffs out of my chest with a huh sound. “I’m sure you could.” I take a sip from the communal limoncello bottle and then pass it over to her. “There was a time when I’d have given anything to be a Normal.”

“We’re pretty far from normal,” Ben states. The sunset spits flecks of fire into his dark irises, his eyes trained on the horizon. He’s a beautiful man. Beautiful in the way a raven is beautiful—sharp, dangerous, and sleek. Strange how I never noticed it before, but now I can’t stop sneaking glances at him. I wonder what he’s looking for out there. A sniper in the distance, perhaps.

Rory’s small body shifts in my lap so she can nudge Ben’s bare foot with hers. “What about you? Did you ever want to be a prince?”

A small, bitter smile lifts the edge of Ben’s mouth and shows off a glint of teeth. “I wanted to be anything but a Limehouse boy.”

“What’s so bad about Limehouse?” Rory asks.

“D’ay awll talk like dis, aye, mate?” I rib him, laying on a thick Cockney accent.

Ben grimaces. “Your Cockney is shit.”

“Aw, I like it!” Rory says. “Why’d you get rid of it?”

Ben lapses into silence for a moment. It used to irritate me when he would take forever to form a single sentence, but now I’ve grown to like watching him think. You can see the wheels turning in his head as he hunts for just the right word. “When I came back from my tour… it took me a while to find employment,” he says. “The palace was my last shot. I knew they weren’t going to take in a dirty, desperate Cockney kid. So I had to improvise. I had a… friend from up North.

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