Royal Disaster

by Parker Swift

  “I’m okay,” I said into Dylan’s chest, but he pulled away to inspect me, to take a look for himself. I looked down and saw what he saw—the bodice of my dress wrinkled and askew, and I could only imagine what my face looked like. Mascara was probably streaming down my face.

  “Oh, damsel, look what I’ve let happen to you,” he whispered, pulling me closer, holding me against him for a long minute. I felt his head above me turn. “Will, mate—the press.”

  “I’ve taken care of it, Dylan—no one saw you come in here. Caroline will let you stay until the press are gone.”

  “Dylan, the video—” I said, still shaking. The only thing that could make all of this worse was if Tristan managed to follow through on his threat about sending the video to the press.

  “Take the fucker’s phone, Will,” he said, and I could hear the movements behind me, hopefully indicating that Will was removing Tristan’s ability to forward the video to anyone. “I won’t let that happen, baby. We’ll get anything else he has before he has a chance to do any more damage,” he finished while pulling me just a little closer.

  We stayed there for a moment until both of us were calm, or until I was, anyway. When my breathing had evened, when my eyes were dry. The entire time his arms were wrapped tightly around me. The warmth was returning to my skin, to my core. It was as though Dylan thought that by holding me tightly enough to him he could undo what had just happened. And I let him. I let his smell, his muscular frame, and the soothing chant of his words bring me back to him. I couldn’t even tell you what he said—there were you’re okays on top of I love yous and babys and damsels, but it was the mere sound of his voice that did the job of relaxing me.

  When I finally pulled away slightly, my hair fell around my shoulders—Dylan must have removed the pins from the bun without me even realizing it—and he gently used his thumbs to sweep the dampness from my cheeks.

  “I’m sorry, damsel.” He continued to hold my face in his hands. “I’m so sorry.” Dylan’s voice sounded resigned and sad, apologetic in a way that made no sense.

  “I’m so glad you’re here, that you were here, that you came.” But he was shaking his head even before I had finished speaking. We were now alone—Will must have dragged the disheveled Tristan from the room. And the space was dark—the moonlight and lights from the courtyard were the only sources of brightness in the room, but they allowed me to see Dylan’s expression perfectly. An expression not of calmness but of furious defeat, enraged powerlessness, had crept over him.

  I was just beginning to process everything that had happened, everything that had been said. Tristan Bailey.

  Dylan’s eyes left mine and his arms dropped away. I stood up from where we’d sat on the floor against the wall, so I could see him better, so I could get a grip on the uneasy feeling seeping between us, so I could start to ask the questions I needed to ask. He rose as well and leaned away from me, against the wall behind him.

  “Hey,” I said, trying to get his attention, tilting my head, trying to will his eyes to meet mine.

  “Baby,” he said, shaking his head. I gave him a minute, hoping I’d be able to discern what was running through his mind, that the softness would return. But instead his face got harder. He somehow got further away.

  “Fuuuck!” he finally said, so sternly I nearly jumped, his hands running through his hair, his foot banging against the wall behind him.

  “Dylan?” I asked, reaching my hand out, but he didn’t take it. I could practically see the onslaught of thoughts running at lightning speed through his mind. None of them were good. What was going on?

  “Lydia,” he said, and he sounded so…sad. Angry and sad, and I knew now, with certainty, that there was something else going on. This wasn’t only about what had just happened with Tristan. This was about something bigger. Whatever had been bugging him in the car was bubbling up. “Bloody hell,” he started again, bitter frustration and resignation tinging his words. “How could I have let this happen?”

  “Dylan.” I’d said his name sternly, almost shouted it—I needed him to snap out of it, to stop talking to himself, to stop working himself into an angry frenzy and start talking to me. “What is going on? This obviously isn’t all about Tristan Bailey and the emails. You thought it was the Bresnovs, but it was Tristan. That leaves some details to figure out, but at least we know.”

  “That’s the problem, though, isn’t it? I was wrong. I couldn’t protect you from him.”

  “But you did. You came in here. You ripped him off of me,” I protested, marching towards him. Now I was frustrated. He was focusing on all the wrong things. He had protected me—why couldn’t he see that? “Dylan, what else is going on? Talk to me.” My voice was a mix of annoyance and, increasingly, desperation. I felt like he was pulling me down some spiral, to some inaccessible place.

  He stroked my cheek once with his hand but then pulled back, pulled away from me. Like he didn’t believe me. Like it wouldn’t matter what I said.

  “It never should have happened, Lydia. And none of this would have happened to you if you hadn’t been in a public relationship with me. You would have been safe.” He moved to a wingback chair and sank into it.

  “Fucking stop it with the ‘safe’ business! Just tell me what the fuck is going on, Dylan! Why did Tristan think he could get his hands on Humboldt? What was this all about?” I was boiling over, and I had a right to be. He was descending into some dark place, shutting me out, and I needed him to stay at the surface long enough to tell me what he was going through but also to see me, to see us.

  Finally, with his head in his hands, his elbows on his knees, staring at the floor, he spoke. “Lydia…” He trailed off, trying to find words.

  “What?” I asked, suddenly more concerned than angry. This wasn’t the Dylan I knew.

  “When I went to Humboldt this afternoon, my father told me…” He paused, taking a deep breath. “Remember that deal I told you about? The one that went south?”

  I nodded and thought back to that night he came back from Russia, so certain he’d figured it out.

  Dylan nodded. “It wasn’t just a bad deal. There’s more. As I told you, two years ago I realized something was going on with Hale Shipping. I did some investigating and learned that my father had run the company so poorly since my grandfather’s retirement that the place was on the verge of bankruptcy. But the year-end reports looked fine—it didn’t add up. I confronted him about it.”

  He was staring at the ceiling and then the floor—anywhere but at me.

  “He confessed that he’d gone to the Bresnovs for help, for money, and hid it from the board. As you know, the Bresnovs helped my grandfather start the company, and my father thought they’d help him keep it quiet, that a secret deal with them would buy him the time to turn the company around, and no one would ever know. He accepted a large sum from them to get the company back on track, but he was naïve about who he was getting in bed with.”

  He sighed and once again rubbed his forehead with his fingers.

  “They essentially blackmailed him.” He shook his head as he said it, almost as though he’d just made it real by saying it aloud.

  “What? How?” I asked, completely blindsided by this.

  Dylan sighed and took a moment. “They agreed to bail out the company on two conditions. First, he would allow them to use Hale Shipping to launder money for some of their less-legal operations.”

  “God, Dylan,” I started, and I tried to approach him, but he held his hand up. He wasn’t done, and he wasn’t going to let me get close.

  “Tristan was involved. He knew about the deal, helped my father hide it. I couldn’t let that go, obviously. So I intervened. I dealt with the Bresnovs, and my father swore he’d build the company back up .”

  “How did you deal with them?” I was still standing a few feet from him, my arms wrapped around myself, just trying to take all of this in.

  “I did my own research and discovered the Bresnovs are
minor players in a much bigger operation. They have connections to some of the worst criminal organizations coming out of Moscow—human traffickers, drugs, the works. So I approached British intelligence for help. I figured they’d take care of the bastards. But it turned out that the Bresnovs were already on their radar. They’d been keeping tabs on them, hoping the family would crack open their investigation into much higher-ups, bigger criminals. They weren’t willing to take in the Bresnovs before they’d caught the bigger fish. In the end I struck a deal—MI6 provided me with information that helped me stave off the Bresnovs, at least for a while. They also agreed to protect the Hale name and give my father and the company immunity. In return I agreed to work with them, to use our connection with the Bresnovs to further their investigation.”

  “Holy shit.” This shit was crazy.

  He looked up at me for the first time in several minutes, remembering. “Lydia, that’s who I was meeting with that night I was going to Amsterdam—a member of MI6.”

  “A government official.”

  “I didn’t lie.”

  “I know. I trusted you.”

  Dylan nodded at this somberly.

  “So you’re still working with them?”

  “The Bresnovs?”

  I nodded.

  “We made them investors on the official record, much to their chagrin, so it’s much harder for them to use us to do anything illegal. And my father’s supposedly been trying to bring the company back into good form legally. But they knock on my door every so often, reminding me or my father in subtle and not-so-subtle ways that they are just biding their time, waiting to get what they feel they’re due.”

  “God,” I said, not really knowing what else to say. “So until they’re apprehended for other things, you’re just holding them off.”

  “Precisely. Only tonight I learned there’s more. My father didn’t tell me everything two years ago, but he did this afternoon. I couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t just sell the company—if he sold, he’d still be rich, and since the Bresnovs are investors on public record, they’d get a cut. It would be out of our hands. And it’s not as though he’s ever actually cared about the business itself. Yet he was so bloody stubborn about keeping it in the family. I couldn’t figure it out. Now I know why.”

  “Why?”

  Dylan sighed and closed his eyes with resignation. “The Bresnovs’ second condition was that my father make Humboldt Park an asset of HS.”

  “So Hale Shipping owns Humboldt Park?”

  He nodded.

  “Why would they do that?”

  “Because they knew we wouldn’t sell if it meant losing the estate. And if we can’t sell, we have to keep helping them. They’ve been biding their time, but they’re ready to cash in on my father’s end of the bargain. They want him to get back to helping them launder money, and now they want a cut of HS profits too.”

  I was just trying absorb this. It seemed so far-fetched. So crazy. But everything now made sense. As long as the company stayed in the family, so did Humboldt Park. It had not been just anger or spite in Geoffrey’s voice that day when he talked to Dylan. It had been desperation.

  “So that’s why your dad’s wanted you so involved lately? He wants you to take over?” Dylan nodded in affirmation.

  “In his mind he’s been grooming me, trying to get me on board.”

  “But, Dylan, your father’s only in his sixties. You don’t have to take over now. We have time to figure this out. To get you out of it. You said you’re working with British intelligence. We can figure this out together, Dylan.”

  We were both quiet for a moment. I was standing, as I had been for several minutes, in the center of the room, my arms wrapped around my torso, the gown I was wearing suddenly feeling heavy and yet not enough. I wished we were home, in private. There were so many questions, so many details. But I could see, even before he spoke, that another thing was happening here.

  “Lydia, I’m not dragging you through this,” he said, so decided. “Not when I can’t be trusted to keep you safe. I was sure that it was the Bresnovs trying to put pressure on me…Fuck, Lydia. I was so distracted by that possibility, I didn’t even see Tristan coming. I can’t keep up. I should have had more security on you. I should have distributed my team better. I should have kept a closer eye on HS…All I wanted was to protect you from this.” He threw his hands up, indicating that the whole world was a danger to me. “I can handle giving up architecture. I can handle taking this on. But I wouldn’t be able to handle losing you. If anything happened to you—”

  I felt my blood cooling. It was like I could feel him removing himself from my heart, pulling us apart, convincing himself that he had to pull away. All I wanted to say was But I love you, because shouldn’t that be enough? Shouldn’t that say it all? But I couldn’t seem to get the words out.

  “I never wanted to burden you with my life, my family, a father who would bribe his son’s girlfriend to leave him, the need for a bodyguard, the presence of the criminals trying to take my family down, for fuck’s sake. I’ve seen before what this does to people.” Grace. He was talking about Grace. But we were different. We had to be.

  “And then tonight. Tristan…The worst part is that in my gut, I knew it. I knew we should have stayed a secret. I should have just enjoyed you as long as I could and then let you go. Or I should have just controlled myself from the beginning. I was being selfish. I—”

  No. He couldn’t do this.

  “Stop!” I said, finally finding my words.

  “Lydia. Even you must see that everything I feared has come to fruition. You think I haven’t felt your anxiety over the past few months? Your doubts, your fears about my stress and what I wasn’t sharing with you? About what I was sharing? About the media, the photos? You think I couldn’t feel how, even slowly, the mess that is my life was breaking us down?”

  “But you weren’t being open with me! And you’re not giving us a chance. If you’d just—”

  “No, Lydia. I can’t do it all. It’s time to face reality—duty has come calling, and tonight has made one thing perfectly clear: You’re not safe in a relationship with me. I can’t give you what you deserve. The truth is that you were always going to be out of my reach. I just couldn’t help myself. I needed you. You’re the fucking love of my life, and all I’ve learned is that I was a fool for ever thinking that mattered.”

  A tear glided down my cheek. No wracking sobs, just quiet defeat. It turned out it wasn’t me who was flailing. It wasn’t me who was screwing this up. I was fighting. I was clawing at the walls, digging my fingers in, determined to hold on to this, because I knew it was worth it. But he wasn’t clawing at the walls. He didn’t know we were worth it. He couldn’t. He was giving up. I couldn’t be strong enough for both of us. This wasn’t my life I was trying to reckon with. It was his, and only he could save it.

  I took a deep breath, this time calming myself down. I had a choice, and really there was only one thing to do. I took a deep breath and began talking, the words like ice as they rolled off my lips, because I knew where they were taking me. “Dylan, I could keep fighting you. Fighting for you. For us. I could stay here in this room in Buckingham Palace and try to convince you that we’ll always be stronger together than alone. I could try to force you to see that. Because you’re wrong. I know you’re wrong. I look at you and I see something you don’t—I see a future you deserve. One where you’re not alone. One where you’re the incredible architect, the good man you are, and the Duke of Abingdon. I have faith in you—you can figure this out.” He was looking at me and his head was shaking, almost imperceptibly, but there it was. “The only problem is, of course, it doesn’t work if I’m the only one who believes that. Believes in this.” I gestured to the space between us. Then I closed my eyes, and another tear fell. I knew I was about to let the best thing in my life die in Buckingham Palace. “So okay,” I said, crying steadily but hunting for my resolve.

  He looked up, slight
ly shocked that I was giving in. “You deserve more than this. Than me.”

  Deserving more than him was an impossibility. It wasn’t about deserving a person. It was about deserving what we had, and I knew in my gut I’d never find what we had with anyone else. Although I guess in one way he was right—I did deserve someone who could see me through the muck, who would fight for me. So I tamped down every screaming retort, every begging plea for him to open his eyes and see what he was throwing away, and I nodded. “You deserve more too.”

  Dylan looked up at me, standing before him. I was wearing the most gorgeous couture gown I’d probably ever wear. I’d been styled by a team of experts. I had started that evening looking more beautiful than I’d ever look again, and I was ending it with the feeling that for the second time that year I was losing the most important man in my life.

  Dylan rose from his seat and started to approach me, but I couldn’t let him touch me. If he touched me, I’d lose all composure, all ability to do what he needed me to do.

  So before he could get to me, I turned and walked away.

  Chapter 26

  I walked back into the hallway, and I saw a gaggle of giggling girls scurrying from the bathroom back towards the ballroom, happy on Champagne. We’d missed the toasts, the party, but these people hadn’t. We’d all been in the same gorgeous palace, but they’d toasted to love, and I’d left any hope of love behind. There would be no beginning. This was an end.

  I ducked into the ladies’ room and took stock. I quietly wiped the smudged makeup from under my eyes. Patted my cheeks with cold water. Adjusted my dress. And forced a smile—did I look like I’d just been having a grand old time? Not even close, but no one would notice.

  Dylan had the tag for my coat, and honestly I didn’t have the energy to explain and try to get it back without it. And I certainly wasn’t going to go back to Dylan and ask for the tag. I just needed to get out of there. I slipped out the door into the cold night. There was the odd driver standing by his car, a guard standing by the door, but otherwise it was quiet. The photographers who’d been approved were all inside, and the party still had an hour or so to go. So no one noticed me as I went down the steps and over the gravel. I didn’t even feel the chill in the air, not yet, anyway.