Not Your Prince Charming

by Kate Johnson

  “Look, I’m all about the feminism and the body-positivity, love,” said Baz, “but the truth is you’d sell a lot more records if you were…”

  “Thinner?” said Scarlet.

  “…more like you used to be.”

  Her gaze strayed to the Wild Child album cover on his wall of chart-toppers. Her provocative teenage self pouted glassily at the world. “Nineteen, borderline anorexic and an alcoholic?”

  Baz opened his mouth, then his sense of self preservation kicked in and he shut it again.

  “Don’t blame me, love, blame the industry,” he said.

  The industry you’re part of? Scarlet wanted to say, but didn’t. Instead she said, “Look. Tell me if the tracks are any good.”

  They were good. She knew they were good. Scarlet had grown up with music. It was in her bones. She knew when she was producing shite—her third album, for instance—and when she was creating liquid gold. The tracks she’d recorded last month were gold. She knew it.

  Baz sighed. “They are good. You sound amazing—”

  “Then who cares what I look like?”

  “Everyone, love, that’s who.” Baz, who gained most of his calories from vaping and looking at pictures of food, checked his reflection in the shiny cabinet door and smoothed an eyebrow with his finger. “It’ll be the only thing they talk about.”

  “Then at least they’ll be talking about me.”

  “Is that how you want to be known? The fat singer?”

  Scarlet wanted to shout at him. She rubbed her temples and said, “No, I’d just rather be known as a singer. Look, if this is a deal-breaker, Baz, then—”

  “Whoa, whoa, let’s not be hasty. Think about it, yeah?”

  Scarlet picked up her bag and stood. “Sure, I’ll think. Thinking burns calories, right?”

  “Scarlet. Don’t be sarcastic.”

  Then don’t be a misogynistic prick. “Are we still on for the Snowball?”

  Baz sighed. He’d told her about the gig weeks ago—a cancellation at a ski resort’s beginning-of-season party that had opened up a slot for her to try out some new material. Of course, he hadn’t seen her in a while so he’d assumed, as apparently everyone had, that she still looked the same as she had when she was 25 and miserable.

  “We’re still on,” he said. “I’ll send someone out with you.”

  He wouldn’t be going himself. Time was, Baz would have cancelled all his plans to travel with Scarlet, no matter the gig. Now she’d be lucky to get some unpaid intern.

  “Great. I’ll try and stay off the pies, shall I?”

  “Yes,” said Baz, apparently unaware she was being bitterly sarcastic.

  She knew he was watching her as she left the room, and not in the sexy way men used to watch her when she was thin.

  “It’s your career I’m thinking about,” he called, as she passed the awards cabinet.

  “Sure it is,” she replied, barging the door open with her hip. “Sure it is.”

  “Let’s talk about the flight simulator,” said Dr Tenning.

  “Let’s not,” said Tom.

  “Thomas,” said the doctor, who had been told repeatedly not to Your Highness him, but couldn’t seem to stop addressing him by his name in full, “we agreed that we would.”

  Tom stared at his knee and wished his jeans had a thread to pull.

  “Tell me in your own words how it went.”

  “It didn’t.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I mean I couldn’t get in.” He looked up. The doctor regarded him calmly. “I put one foot on the step, and… I couldn’t go any further. Froze up. Palpitations. Sweating. The lot.”

  “A panic attack?”

  He’d pushed himself, standing there with one foot on the step and one hand on the metal railing. Made his other foot move, get on the next step, breathe steadily—

  “I couldn’t breathe. My lungs refused to work. I thought I was going to choke.”

  He told her this as dispassionately as he could, which he feared wasn’t very dispassionate at all.

  “That’s okay. It will take time.”

  He hated her calm tone of voice. Her bland reassurances. He wanted a time and date when he’d be better. A pill that would fix it all, so he could get in a helicopter tomorrow and fly.

  “Have you practiced your breathing?”

  Breathing, for God’s sake. He knew how to breathe. He’d been doing it unaided since the moment he popped into the world.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Have you really?”

  No. “Of course.”

  “And the meditation?”

  Tom threw up his hands. “I can’t. I tried, I honestly did, but I can’t do it.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because…” Because it’s all a load of bollocks, he wanted to say, but made himself find a rational answer. “Because I can’t switch my brain off.”

  “Meditation is a way of switching the brain off—”

  “Well, not mine. I just don’t think it’s going to work for me.”

  “Have you considered how the season is affecting you?”

  Tom gazed at the discreet and elegant Christmas tree on a table in the corner and felt… nothing. “I like Christmas,” he said, because he’d got nothing against it.

  “How are you intending to spend it this year?”

  He shrugged. “Sandringham.” When she raised her eyebrows, he sighed. “Charity parties and teas. Mince pies with adorable children. Handing out gifts in hospitals.” He probably wouldn’t be doing that this year. “Christmas dinner with fifty of my nearest and dearest at the Palace. One year, we had live ballet.”

  She just made a note. Maybe she had live ballet all the time round her way.

  “Then three days at Sandringham, during which I will be expected to change my clothes seven times in one twenty-four hour period, probably because with the amount of booze going down I’ll have thrown up on half of them. Still, the alcohol will keep me warm at night. No central heating,” he told her. “Ice on the inside of the windows when I was a kid. Don’t get winters like that any more,” he added, as if the 1980s were a far-off time Dr Tenning might have only heard about in books.

  “Your family will be there?”

  Tom hadn’t the energy to be polite. “What do you think?”

  “Your parents, aunts, uncles—”

  “My grandmother, the Queen.”

  “Your cousins?”

  He shrugged. They’d all been invited, and it was not considered politick to refuse.

  “But not your oldest cousin, Edward?”

  Tom had trained himself not to flinch when he heard Ed’s name. He snapped the elastic band at his wrist instead, and enjoyed the sting. “That would be gruesome,” he said, “since he’s been dead a year and a half.”

  “In a helicopter crash,” the doctor reminded him.

  “Gosh, was it really?” He was being too sarcastic; he didn’t care. “I’d forgotten.”

  “Thomas—”

  “Don’t call me Thomas.”

  “—it’s coming up to Christmas, you’ll be spending it with your family, but there will be one person conspicuously missing.”

  “He was missing last year.”

  “So were you,” Dr Tenning reminded him, because Tom had spent last Christmas in the hospital. Not because he wasn’t well enough to come home, but because he was too cowardly.

  Ed had been killed in a helicopter crash, and the country had mourned for him. Six months later Tom’s helicopter had come down in an explosion of fire and blood and he’d had the temerity to live. The country had just been told he’d suffered a minor injury. Nobody had told them it was the contents of his head that had been smashed and glued back together wrong.

  “Don’t you think this is going to be significant?”

  Boy, she was on fire today. “Yes, probably,” said Tom.

  “What changes do you think you might be able to make to avoid potential trigger
s?”

  He laughed, but she didn’t seem to be joking. “Changes?” he said. “This is Sandringham. Christmas hasn’t changed there since they installed electric lights.”

  “Perhaps this year, your family could accommodate some of your needs.”

  Accommodate—? That would mean accepting that something was wrong with him, and the Royal Family just didn’t do that kind of thing. Never explain, never complain, never apologise.

  Tom stood up and reached for his coat. “I think we’re done here.”

  Not Your Royal Christmas will be available in print and ebook Christmas 2018

  Excerpt from Max Seventeen

  Paranormal Romantic Novel of the Year 2017

  Max was running.

  The day was hot and bright, because days were always hot and bright on this crappy planet at the arse-end of the universe. Cheaply terraformed, barely able to support the dreg ends of life, farted at by the sun on a regular basis. Nobody lived here if they didn’t have to.

  At this moment, Max was sincerely considering how much ‘have to’ there was about living on Zeta Secunda, a planet so shitty it didn’t even have a proper name. There was a spaceport a few clicks away, but spaceports required ID and security, and Max was fresh out of both. Well. Fresh out might be a stretch. Probably that last ID had ended up in the same place as that last decent pair of boots: inside those fecking sand-beasts. Ten feet long, and that was just the jaw. Max had been lucky to get out alive.

  For a given value of luck, anyway. That bunch of culchies were still mad at Max for something. Hard to figure out what. Might’ve been the card sharping. Might’ve been the fake money. Might’ve been that fella left with his pants hanging out the window.

  Either way, Max was running.

  Sand fountained up ahead, and a whine whistled past. Grand, so they’d found their guns. At least here in the badlands they were the cheap old kind with bullets, which required aiming and accuracy, neither of which this lot seemed to have. Quite probably they were hungover. Possibly also still drunk. Not that Max could judge, brain still throbbing with last night’s poteen.

  Max was running on empty.

  “I see you, kid!”

  Max ignored that, and leapt over some low rocks to the sand below. Ahead, there was nothing but more rocks and more sand. So much more sand.

  “Ain’t nowhere to hide!”

  Yeah, obvs. Sand, rocks, more sand. Max was dark with dirt and sun and vaguely sand coloured, but not nearly enough. There was nowhere to go, no shelter, no respite. Sooner or later they’d catch up.

  Another smash. Another whine. Closer this time.

  Max stumbled, foot rolling on a stone, knee thudding into the sand. Hell of a day to have fallen out the window with no clothes on.

  The sun was fierce punishing. The desultory government advisories for Zeta Secunda included not going outside without solar protection. They meant proper pharma grade sunscreen. They didn’t mention the fucking sand. Max didn’t even have a shirt.

  “Run, punk, run!” Those yahoos were getting closer. Some terrible little land buggies, or maybe horses. They used both around here, and it wasn’t as if the wind was giving away any clues. No bugger was rich enough for a heavy-air vehicle. The HAVs and the HAV-nots, Max thought hysterically, stumbling on.

  Smash, whine. Closer together. Sound and sand hitting at the same time.

  Shit, not this time, don’t let me die like this! I’ve got no fucking pants on!

  The ground shook with the vehicles, pounded with the hooves of the horses. Closer, closer. Max kept on running. The sand gave way, shelving and sliding. Burned like the lava it once had been, grinding and grating, raw against raw skin. Max slid, the sand like waves made out of grit, desperate not to scream.

  Sand fountained, the herald of impeding doom, and Max scrambled to bleeding feet, limping on over unforgiving dunes. The shadows closed in.

  Max kept on running.

  The engines of the Dauntless hummed smoothly, at a frequency that seemed perfectly calculated to grate on Riley’s nerves.

  Just four more years, then you can quit this fascist popsicle stand.

  Fantasies of ripping out that Service chip they’d implanted and hurling it at the captain made up quite a lot of Riley’s downtime.

  “Sir?”

  The captain gave no indication she’d heard.

  “Sir, it’s about Pherick. Pherick Green, the coolant engineer? It’s just, he’s been gone three standard weeks now, and—”

  The captain tapped something on her tablet and didn’t look up. “Green is on personal leave.”

  “Yes, sir, I know. But we’re not allowed personal leave longer than—”

  “The Service is capable of making exceptions,” said the captain coolly.

  Really? thought Riley. In whose favour? Eleven bloody years I’ve been committed to the Service, and when was the last time I got any leave?

  The dark thought occurred that on Sigma Prime, you could commit murder and still get out of jail in less than eleven years.

  “I understand you are friends,” said the captain, and there was something in the way she said it that made Riley uneasy.

  “We work together.”

  “I see. And Ensign…” she tapped her tablet, “Yakira is not an acceptable substitute?”

  “Ensign Yakira is doing a fine job.”

  “Then what is the problem?”

  The problem? Riley wanted to say. The problem is that Pherick just disappeared one day, barely a few hours after telling me he’d uncovered something really disturbing but he couldn’t tell me what. The problem is that his brother Jameson went AWOL on an away mission three months ago and he’s not even supposed to be part of away missions. The problem is I think something very strange is going on here and I’m kind of scared that if I start asking questions about it, I’ll be the next one to disappear.

  Out loud, Riley said, “I just wondered when Pherick would be back, sir. I owe him a drink.”

  “I’m sure you’ll be buying it soon. Was there anything else?”

  You’ll be watching every single thing I do on this ship from now on, won’t you? thought Riley, but said, “No, sir. Thank you, sir.”

  The cool, neutral corridors of the ship closed in like a jail as Riley strode away, plotting escape.

  Max Seventeen is available in ebook and paperback: http://mybook.to/Max17

  About The Author

  Kate has a second cousin who held a Guinness World Record for brewing the strongest beer, and once ran over herself with a Segway scooter. She misspent her youth watching lots of Joss Whedon and reading even more Terry Pratchett, which made it kind of inevitable that when she grew up to write romance novels, they’d be the weird ones around the edges. A few years later, she lives with her cats who are only partially named after Whedon characters, and a dog who is only partially evil, in the south of England. She still loves Joss Whedon and Terry Pratchett.

  In 2017 Kate became the first author to win a Paranormal Romantic Novel of the Year Award from the Romantic Novelists Association, with Max Seventeen, which was also the first self-published book to win in any category. She has been shortlisted twice more, for The Untied Kingdom and Max Seventeen: Firebrand.

  You can follow Kate online:

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