by Kate Johnson
“It’s not that I’m saying I do want to get married, or rather, not really soon or anything, but it has to be the end goal. We don’t just do cohabitation in my family. Unmarried partners aren’t even allowed to come for Christmas. So if… if I tell you how I feel and we go for it, then… then something has to give. One or both of us has to give up something.”
“You mean,” Xavier said into the silence she left when she’d run out of words, “I have to give up something. I have to go tell Abuela I’m leaving the Church.”
“Or I tell Granny I’m forfeiting my place in the Succession.”
The words just came out. Eliza wasn’t even sure if she meant them.
“What?” He put down his glass and sat up straight. “Eliza—you can’t do that. What does it even mean?”
“It means I give up my claim to the throne.” She frowned a little as she thought. “The Act of Succession says that no one in line for the throne—essentially, all those descending from George II—can marry a Catholic. But it has happened. I’m sure… there was a great aunt or something, one of Queen Victoria’s grandchildren, maybe… She gave up her place in the Succession.”
“And? What else? What does it mean?”
“Well, I don’t know. I suspect…”
She trailed off, thinking, and Xavier gazed at her with impatience.
“Suspect?”
“I might lose my title. I wouldn’t be Princess Elizabeth any more.”
Hadn’t this all started because she hadn’t wanted to be a princess for a day? Hadn’t she liked not being a princess with Xavier?
What if she wasn’t a princess for good?
She tried to remember what had happened to Victoria’s granddaughter, but she had a suspicion that, as with most of that generation, she’d married into another royal family and kept her title, or even levelled up. It was just a shame she’d picked one of the few remaining Catholic monarchies.
If I married Xavier, would I become a plain Miss? A Mrs? Mrs Elizabeth Rivera. It sounded good, actually.
Do I love him enough? Does he love me?
“But Princess Elizabeth is who you are. You couldn’t just be a Miss.” Xavier seemed affronted at the idea.
“No. Well, in this scenario the object would rather be to make me a Mrs,” she pointed out. “And I suppose I’d be Lady Elizabeth anyway. I’d still be my father’s daughter. You’d just be a Mr, I’m afraid.”
“Lady, I was born a Mr and I can survive being one for the rest of my life. But you…Eliza, you can’t give up who you are.”
She watched the rain tapping against the trees, making the leaves bob, and took a deep breath. Felt her lungs expand. She wasn’t underwater any more.
“It isn’t who I am,” she said. “It’s just a part of my life.” She hesitated. “You’re a part of my life.”
He put his arms around her and cuddled her close. “And you’re a part of mine. I love you too much to ask you to give up something so important to you.”
He loves me. The heat inside her that had been fuelled by anger felt so different now. Was this what being happy felt like? It had been so long she couldn’t remember.
“Okay, look. Don’t rush into this,” Xavier said. “Think about it. We have time.”
Eliza let him hold her, talk to her, feed her snacks from the minibar and top up her champagne. And inside she felt a lightness she hadn’t felt for a long time.
Valentina seemed suspiciously un-worried when Xavier strolled in late the next morning. He’d tried to send her a text to tell her he wouldn’t be back that evening, and she’d replied with a breezy, “Sure, see you tomorrow.” No asking where he was. No annoyance he wasn’t there to help her with the kids. Just acceptance he was off somewhere he hadn’t told her about. She’d so planned this.
His sister and Eliza’s cousins. How had they planned this between them? Had Valli just called up Buckingham Palace and demanded to speak to someone who could get him and Eliza back together? Probably.
“Hey sis,” he said, walking into the apartment where she was attempting to get Mateo to put his own shoes on. “Don’t worry, I didn’t drown, or get mugged, or thrown in jail.”
“See, I told you it was nothing to worry about,” Valli said, not looking up.
Eliza slipped in behind Xavier and took his hand. She was barefoot, her dress still a little damp and irreparably stained. She still looked every inch a princess.
“Yeah, I mean why would you worry when these big guys with a black Caddy come to our hotel and insist I leave with them immediately?” Xavier said.
“What?” she said, glancing up in irritation. It was only for a second, and then she went still and looked up again, slowly.
“Hi,” said Eliza brightly.
“Ave María,” said Valli, her eyes going huge. “Oh holy crap, it worked!”
“Aha! I knew it,” said Xavier, as his sister tried to get to her feet and curtsey at the same time.
“Oh my, uh, Your Majesty—”
“It’s Your Highness,” Xavier said, with a smile at Eliza, “and then ma’am, rhymes with lamb.”
“Your, yes, Highness, ma’am,” said Valli, and hissed at the children to curtsey. Mateo gave it a try, and Xavier had a hard time keeping a straight face.
“Or you could call me Eliza,” she said.
“Uh, sure, Eliza, ma’am.”
“I guess you get used to this,” Xavier murmured.
“You would think,” Eliza said, keeping her smile bright.
Eventually Valli calmed down, and managed to explain to the kids that Eliza was ‘Uncle Xavier’s very special friend,’ and Eliza paid for a room service lunch while they gently interrogated Valentina on what she’d planned.
“It was Anita. She said you needed to talk to the princess, and I agreed, but we didn’t know how. We started looking stuff up but there was no way to contact you without going through your mother—”
“This is not coincidental,” Eliza said drily.
“Well, sure, but that wasn’t the way to go. So then I had this brainwave and said wasn’t there this stuff about the girl Prince Jamie married, like wasn’t there some controversy about her being a commoner or something, and I wondered if she could help.”
“I told you it was Clodagh,” Eliza said.
“Oh my God, is that how you say it? ‘Clo-dah. That’s so much prettier. Why does it have the G in the middle?”
“It’s Irish. They like extra letters, it stops foreigners trying to speak their language. How did you get in touch with Clodagh?”
“Through her charity. Ohmigosh, it took forever.” Valli shredded a brioche. “We thought she’d never read it. Everything was so polite, like it was just assistants reading it, you know? And then finally she came back and said, like, it was so great, ‘My husband and I,’” she cracked up, at her own regal impression, “isn’t that so funny? I can so hear her saying it…”
Clodagh, even to Xavier’s untutored ear, had a pretty working-class accent. He raised his eyebrows at Eliza.
“She agreed with your idea and set me up to come here,” Eliza said. “I bloody knew it.”
“She said she’d been thinking of the same thing. You guys needed to talk. You can’t go from being totally in love to just never seeing each other.”
“Bloody sneaks,” Eliza grumbled.
“Hey, don’t be mad at them,” said Xavier. “It worked.”
She leaned over and kissed his cheek, much to the disgust of the children.
“So you’re definitely a couple again now?” Valli said. “You guys are so cute!”
“We’re… working things out,” said Eliza. “Would you mind awfully if I borrowed Xavier for a day or two? When are you flying home?”
“Day after tomorrow. I’d stay longer, but I could only book this week.”
“I’m terribly glad you did. Is it,” Eliza enquired diffidently, “a scheduled flight?”
“Yeah, it’s a package deal, you know? Mateo, stop playing with your food.”
Xavier thought about the overcrowded flight full of excited tourists and children kicking his seat and babies crying and people who’d already started drinking at the airport, and grinned at Eliza. “You’ll love it.”
Eliza smiled regretfully, her accent becoming super-posh. “Alas. I suspect no place will be available for me. Such a shame. I will of course arrange to land at the same time so we can travel onwards together. I’m sure Tapper can arrange ground transportation enough for all of us.”
“You’re coming to… wait, how are you travelling?” Valli asked suspiciously.
“Well, I don’t know yet. We came over on British Airways, of course, being official business. I expect we can charter a plane or maybe a helicopter. I admit I wasn’t paying attention to how long it took last time. How far is it to Miami?”
Valentina stared again.
“Uh, less than two hundred miles. About an hour’s flight,” said Xavier.
“Oh, then either will do. Do let me know.”
“You can be kinda evil,” Xavier said, as they left the resort he’d been staying with Valli in, and Eliza’s car took them to her much more expensive hotel, where her suite had a private pool and overlooked the sea.
“I am composed solely of the milk of human kindness, and would never dream of punishing someone for cooking up an underhand scheme by condemning them to a flight full of screaming toddlers and sunburnt holidaymakers.”
“Hah,” said Xavier, and kissed her. They were sealed in the privacy of the luxury car, he could kiss her all he wanted.
“You’ll have to stop,” she said as they came in sight of the hotel. “I’ll look like I’ve been ravished.”
“You want ravishing, I can ravish,” Xavier promised, and she blushed adorably.
“When we’re in private, please.”
“I’ll see if I can wait that long.”
Neither Tapper nor any of the PPOs expressed any surprise at Xavier’s presence in the suite, nor Eliza’s request that they be undisturbed. Eliza didn’t have long to wait for her ravishing at all.
The next day Eliza, or rather Tapper, booked a private plane to take them to Miami. The plane itself was inspected by Eliza’s team but she seemed allowed to waltz up to it, and then back off at the other end, carrying whatever she wanted.
“Christ, no wonder we have a drugs problem,” he muttered as they took their incredibly plush seats. The plane was tiny, allowing for Eliza’s security and admin team and the two of them, and no one else. A stewardess possessed of model poise and good looks plied them with champagne and gourmet snacks. Even the pilot looked like a rockstar.
“I suppose if you do quit the force you could always work in private aviation,” Eliza told him, looking him over in a way he would have found invasive from anyone who hadn’t spent the past twenty-four hours wrapped naked around him.
“Oh, you’re funny. Seriously,” he added in a lower voice, “is it a job requirement?”
“Oh, yes. They’re selected for being, um, presentable. I met one once who modelled part time. Might as well make hay while the sun shines, she said.” She fiddled, apparently subconsciously, with the scar on her face. Her fingers pressed into the dents, the flesh going a little white. “Now listen, I’ve been thinking. You really do hate your job, don’t you?”
Xavier hadn’t realised he was making a face in response to that until she laughed.
“I’ll take that as a yes. Why don’t you quit and train as something else? I was thinking, with all your expertise, you ought to be able to parlay that into something.”
“What, like serving champagne on private jets? I don’t think so.”
“No, silly, I meant how about… well, you worked in Narcotics, you must have a wealth of knowledge.”
“More than I ever wanted,” he said, chin on hand, watching her think out loud.
“Perhaps you could work for a charity? Or a drugs prevention scheme?”
“Eliza, my entire career has been a drugs prevention scheme. I’d really rather forget everything I knew about heroin.”
“Fair enough. Other charity work, though? What about hurricane relief? You must have organisational skills. The Caribbean gets battered by storms so often, perhaps you could be the face of a relief effort. A patron at least.”
“Maybe.” Abuela would like that, for sure. He knew nothing about being the patron of a charity, but if anyone could help him, it would be Eliza’s family. He smiled, because being the patron of a charity was something members of the Royal Family did, not retired cops. She was thinking about ways to keep him in her life, and that made him happier than he could ever remember being.
Eliza was off again, another idea bubbling up. “Or if you’d rather the private sector, what about being a technical advisor? For television, or film. Gritty crime dramas are always popular.”
He hadn’t thought about that. But he wasn’t sure he wanted to go to Hollywood. For one thing, he couldn’t see Eliza living there. And one thing Xavier had begin to realise was that he wasn’t going to live anywhere without Eliza.
This was it. He’d live wherever she wanted, he’d find a new career that suited her lifestyle, he’d start his life over with her. Mr Xavier and Princess Eliza Rivera. Yeah. That could work.
“Or, and don’t laugh at this, my other thought was survival courses. You know, how to not die on a desert island. Finding water and building shelter and all that.”
Xavier opened his mouth and shut it again, because that sounded ridiculous until he thought about it for a second. “Survival?”
“Yes. You could present things on TV. Like the ones I used to watch,” she added with a smile. “You might save someone else’s life. You’d be very popular. I mean, look at you,” she teased.
“But you were the one who thought up all the stuff that we actually survived on.”
“And I’d be happy to advise you. People wouldn’t want to see me anyway. What does a princess know about survival? But an undercover narcotics cop? He knows a bit more.”
Xavier frowned. What she said was backwards, and irritating, but true.
“And you could teach different environments. You don’t have to go far to die in the wilderness. There are always people getting hypothermia in Snowdonia.”
Xavier didn’t even know what Snowdonia was, but he was intrigued with the idea.
“Or is that a really silly suggestion?” she said, biting her lip.
“No, it’s… actually, I like it.” He’d probably have to do some proper training, but it had potential. “Only one problem I can see.”
“What’s that?”
“Well, where to base it? Miami, or… Norfolk?”
“Well, you won’t get a lot of custom in Norfolk, it’s the arse-end of nowhere, but…oh.” Her cheeks went pink as he smiled at her. “I… Yes.” She smoothed her skirt. “Do you… want to be based in Norfolk?”
Xavier considered how much fun this was going to be to explain to his family. “I’d love to,” he said, and she beamed.
The flight was shorter than he’d expected— “Because we don’t have to do any of that tiresome taxiing to the gate nonsense, and it doesn’t exactly take long to get seven people off the plane,”—and there was a car waiting for them on the tarmac.
Eliza checked her watch as her team checked the car. “Oh good. Plenty of time. How’s traffic this time of day?”
“Terrible,” said Xavier, because the time of day didn’t matter.
“Oh. Well, I’m sure we’ll have plenty of time. Valentina’s flight doesn’t land for another forty-five minutes, and she’s coming into Miami International, isn’t she?”
Before he could answer, she went over and said something to one of her security people.
“This will only take fifteen minutes,” she said, and refused to be drawn any more on the subject.
Xavier knew Miami pretty well, and they weren’t going in the right direction. Valentina had called home and managed not to give away Eliza’s presence,
whilst ascertaining that this weekend everyone was gathered at Uncle Alberto’s house because there were at least three family birthdays this week and his had the biggest backyard.
“Where are you taking me?”
“Oh, you’ll see. Won’t take long.”
They turned off the 916 into the pleasant suburbs. The houses were nice here, family places near good schools. And if you were lucky you could afford a place that backed onto one of the picturesque lakes. Some of them sold for over a million dollars.
“This really isn’t my family’s neighbourhood—”
“We’re here, ma’am,” said the driver.
Xavier looked out at a large, two-storey house, with columns and pillars decorating the front and landscaped gardens surrounding enough parking for half a dozen large cars.
“Uh?”
“Xavier…” She looked around. “This is where Marisol lives.”
“What?” That couldn’t be true, she’d told him… well, she’d told the lawyer at least, that she lived on the very edge of the school district, spending every cent she had on the right address so her son didn’t have to go to school in an area where gangs peddled drugs outside the school gates. She’d painted a picture of misery and woe.
Xavier the cop hadn’t had much cause to frequent these safe, affluent suburbs composed mostly of happy families. He hadn’t actually checked Marisol’s address. He’d told his family not to mention her. He’d put his hands over his ears and ignored all mention of her.
He should have realised she was lying.
“This is her registered address?” The place was a total McMansion.
“Yes. The house actually belongs to her fiancé.”
“But she said he’s a teacher…”
Eliza laughed. “Did she say of what?”
“A high school football team.” But a high school coach could never afford a place like this.
Eliza sighed. “Well, the football part is true. He has a nice short commute to Miami Gardens.”
The penny dropped. “What? No. Don’t be—that’s insane. No, the Dolphin’s coach is—”
“His boss, admittedly, but he still makes a nice living. Oh. I wonder if that’s him?”
The triple garage door was opening. Xavier caught a glimpse of a low-slung, shiny red sportscar hidden inside, before a BMW X5 reversed out at speed and zoomed down the drive.