Of Princes and Promises

by Sandhya Menon

  It was an article on Us Weekly online about the Hindman Gala. Caterina couldn’t keep up with them all; it seemed her phone had been dinging with notifications since she got home on Sunday and now into Monday morning. Her friends were all happy and clinging to her starshine once more like they used to. With her comeback with RC, Caterina knew she’d reclaimed her crown. She was, once again, Queen Cat. Looking at Heather’s and Ava’s faces, she felt a smug sense of victory. Whatever damage Alaric and DE had done to her reputation, she and RC had papered over it thoroughly Saturday night.

  “Mm, thanks, babe,” she said languidly, looking at a message from Sara Hindman, the Hindmans’ daughter, on her phone.

  Heather continued. “Seriously, where did you find him?”

  Caterina looked up from her phone to see both her friends staring at her, agog. She felt a small thrill. They hadn’t looked at her this way since she’d announced that Alaric had told her he loved her, and that had been years—far too long—ago. She felt the power tipping back onto her side of the scale, and she liked it. She liked it very much.

  Caterina waved a hand, her glossy manicure shining under the recessed lighting in the dining hall. “Oh, RC’s just a family friend. You know, one of those connections you don’t think twice about until something just… clicks.” She smiled wide and batted her eyelashes twice, just enough so she looked like someone falling in love. “He really lives up to his title—he’s such a prince to me. And he treats me like a princess.”

  Both Heather and Ava “aww”ed and sighed, and Caterina smiled as she took a sip of her Evian.

  “So will you see him again?” Ava asked. Her shiny hair was in two buns on either side of her head today, immaculate as usual.

  “You have to,” Heather added, folding her hands on the table. Her black diamond ring winked in the light. “He’s amazing. Everyone was talking about him.” She leaned forward, lowering her voice. “I heard Alaric was so furious after seeing you two dance that he tried to get them to turn off the music.”

  Caterina took a slow swallow of water before responding, so as not to sound overeager. But inside, her heart thumped in dark pleasure. “Really?”

  “Really.” Heather sat back. “RC’s good.”

  “I’m sure we’ll be seen together before too long,” Caterina said casually, even though she was already mentally sorting through her schedule, wondering when she could fit him in again. There were a few options.

  Changing the subject before they could begin asking too many more questions, she said, “By the way, are you both going to Harper’s thing in a few weeks?”

  “The party?” Ava asked, taking a bite of her portobello mushroom burger. “Yep, I’ll be there.”

  “Me too,” Heather said, texting someone on her phone. “It’s going to be so nice to just chill in her heated pool and eat snacks and not worry about a thing.”

  “Her house in Aspen.” Ava sighed. “Is there anything more perfect? Do you think we can ski afterward?”

  “Of course,” Caterina replied. “Harper said her mother’s promised a weekend trip to the Aspen Ski Resort for all of us.”

  There was so much happy exclamation then that Caterina almost missed hearing her phone ring. The name looked vaguely familiar, so she swiped to answer and held the phone up to her ear. “Yes?”

  “Caterina, this is Roubeeni, with Glitz magazine. We spoke last year when I covered your yacht gala.”

  “Oh yes, hello,” Caterina said, trying not to remember when they’d last spoken. Roubeeni had tried her best to get Caterina to comment on the “upset on the yacht with Alaric,” as she’d called it. “I assume you want a quote about the Hindman Gala?” That’s what every journalist had called her for so far.

  “Well, yes,” Roubeeni said, a smile in her voice, “and I’m also delighted to say I’ve been extended an invitation to Harper Ingall’s party in Aspen. I’m working on a who’s-who list of young adults everyone in America needs to know. I know your schedule gets busy, but you’ll make time for me then, won’t you?”

  This wasn’t anything new. Reporters always tried to pencil in time with her at big events; a few of them had done that at the Hindman Gala event, too, even though that one was more about the adults than their heirs and heiresses. But what was throwing her off was that Harper’s party was meant to be a casual thing, just a few good friends getting together to blow off steam. And then Caterina remembered—Harper’s mom, who was a world-famous photographer, had a new collection coming out around then. She must’ve changed her mind and asked Harper to allow the press into their home for the publicity.

  Caterina took a breath. She’d been looking forward to letting her hair down a bit, and that would be impossible with reporters around. Once, Heather had gotten lipstick on her teeth at a party and hadn’t realized it, and the photos of her looking slightly disheveled (or, as one magazine put it, “like a junkie on the streets”) had run for months, with everyone zooming in on her teeth and speculating about the color of her lipstick and why Heather didn’t care about her parents’ luxury cookware empire enough to take better care with her appearance.

  But this was the life Caterina was born into, and this was the price tag on it. It had to be paid. “You must be psychic. We were just talking about that. And of course I will,” she said in her most gracious voice. The publicity would be good for her dad’s businesses and his upcoming political campaign, too.

  “Great! Well, I’m sure I’ll run into you before then. Take care now, Caterina.”

  “You too, Roubeeni.” She ended the call and looked around at her friends, her smile never slipping once as she broke the news to them.

  Crown on, lipstick perfect, shoulders back. Those were the rules that kept her in power, and she was more than willing to play by them.

  CHAPTER 10

  RAHUL

  The next Saturday, Rahul peered over his shoulder into the hallway of the senior floor as he entered his dorm room, carrying a paper bag tucked under his arm. Closing the door behind him, he walked over to his desk and set the bag down, blowing out a slow breath. Then, very carefully, he extracted his purchase from the bag: three magazines. GQ, Esquire, and something he’d never heard of before called Polished. It was ridiculously thick and shiny and had cost him almost twenty bucks, likely due to the premium-quality paper thickness and full-page, full-color photographs inside. A quick Google search had assured him it was a great magazine for “men who wanted to be more.” More what? Rahul had thought. More polished, probably. Which wasn’t a bad thing when you were Caterina LaValle’s faux romantic partner.

  It had been only a week since the Hindman Gala, and she’d told him that his reception had been spectacular—way better than she had even hoped, apparently. She hadn’t asked him to accompany her anywhere else yet, but now that things had gone so well, it was probably only a matter of time before she did, right? Rahul was feeling optimistic. He was letting himself feel optimistic because, for the first time in his life, he hadn’t been an extraordinary social failure.

  Now, at his desk, Rahul glanced quickly at his dresser, where the hair gel sat in its little jar. What had happened last week… The nicely fitted tux, the contacts, and the makeup probably had a lot to do with his transformation. And by “a lot” he meant, like, 95 percent. But if he was being completely honest with himself—as any logical person and citizen scientist should be—he had to admit at least 5 percent of RC’s… “RC-ness” had come from the gel.

  Rahul didn’t know how he knew that, but once the gel was in his hair, something had changed. It had given him a boost of confidence, of je ne sais quoi (to use one of Leo’s phrases), that had seemed to come out of nowhere. Maybe the gel had chemicals in it that contributed to a dopamine rush. Hmm. Maybe he’d make some time later to research it.

  Turning back to his desk, Rahul opened up Polished to an article about the top luxury sports cars all polished men under twenty-five should know and be comfortable talking about. Very carefully, Rahul ripp
ed out the three pages that comprised the article and taped them up to his wall, papering over his “120 Chess Openings” poster. He’d see them every day when he woke up and went to bed, thus allowing his subconscious to truly absorb the material. Plus, seeing the poster would remind him that he was capable of what he’d previously considered impossible—i.e., fitting into Caterina’s circle.

  There was a knock at his door, and Rahul shoved the magazines back into their paper bag. Hopefully, Leo or Grey, whoever was on the other side of that door, wouldn’t notice the article on his wall among all the other clutter already present. He didn’t want to have to explain this with a lie; Rahul was famously bad at thinking on his feet (except, of course, when he was RC). He strode to the door and opened it.

  It was Caterina. She looked mind-paralyzingly stunning as usual in her weekend clothes, a loose blue sweater that looked soft as a cloud and slightly sparkling dark jeans that looked like they’d been poured onto her legs. She wore ankle boots with spindly gold heels that made her significantly taller than him, but Rahul didn’t mind gazing up at her. It might be hard to explain her presence to his friends, if they happened to see her, but Rahul was so happy to have her here that he didn’t particularly care in that moment.

  “H-hi,” he managed to say once he realized he’d been staring at her without speaking for five whole seconds. Her left eyebrow had risen incrementally that entire time, an escalation from DEFCON 5 to DEFCON 1: missile incoming. “Do you want to come in?”

  “Please.” She waited for him to move aside and then breezed in, wafting that beautiful, clear perfume of hers. Rahul closed his eyes and breathed it in—just for a half second, in case she turned around and caught him.

  He left the door ajar, but Caterina reached over and pushed it closed with her fingertips. Oh shit. He realized her back was to his wall—his wall that was papered with nerdy chess posters and, now, also that article from Polished. What if she saw it and thought he was pathetic? What if she saw all his chess posters and thought he was too nerdy to ever ask to be her fake date again? He was just beginning to hyperventilate, his eyeballs hurting from the effort of not looking behind her at his wall, when Caterina’s smooth, cool voice interrupted his runaway train of thought.

  “How do you feel about being my date yet again?” she asked, folding her arms across her chest. Her thin gold bracelets clinked faintly.

  “Yes,” Rahul replied quickly and in relief, before his brain had fully registered that she hadn’t asked him a yes-or-no question. “Um, I mean, I—I geel food about it.”

  Caterina narrowed her eyes. “You… geel food?” she said slowly, as if trying to decipher a language with which she was only passingly familiar.

  “Yes. Um, no, wait. I feel good,” Rahul corrected hastily. “I’m down for that. Whatever. You have going on.” Now he sounded like a robot. It had been a few days since they’d spoken, and somehow, that was enough to hit the reset button on his comfort with Caterina. He was back to feeling like he had a wooden tongue in a mouth spun of dry cotton.

  Thankfully, Caterina didn’t renege her invitation and rush out of his room. Instead, there was a small, mysterious smile on her lips. “Good. We really made a splash with all the media that were there last weekend, so I figured it’d be wise for us to keep that streak going. You know, be seen publicly in a few high-profile spots—restaurants, clubs, more society events, that kind of thing.”

  It was like being paid to do the thing you’d wanted to do your entire life. He would get to go on dates with Caterina—even if they weren’t real in the strictest sense of the word—and he’d get to do it not as himself but as RC, a smooth, debonair, handsome royal who fit right into her world. It was what he’d wanted for a long time. It was what he’d daydreamed of when he had the flu and was running a temperature of 104 degrees. Only now it was being handed to him on a shiny princely platter, and all he had to do was say yes.

  “Yes,” he said. “That sounds perfect. What’s our first event?”

  The small smile on Caterina’s face morphed into a big one.

  That Friday Night: Outing Number 1

  RAHUL

  Rahul looked at himself in the mirror in his quiet Denver hotel room. He was back in the tux he’d worn to the Hindman Gala, and it still fit just as perfectly as it had that night. He’d also smoothed on some of the foundation that Caterina had bought for him, designed to hide his blemishes. And naturally, he was wearing his contacts. But he wasn’t done yet. He reached into the small pot of hair gel on the vanity and smoothed it back into his hair, crinkling his nose slightly at the odd smell wafting from the paste. Lilies and metal and almonds and dirt. So weird.

  He met Caterina downstairs, right outside the ballroom where they were attending a wedding reception for the older sister of one of her friends. His palms were damp; he kept wiping them on his pants, but they just instantly got wet again. He wasn’t feeling it tonight, not like he had on the night of the Hindman Gala. That night, he’d felt something sweep through him as he entered the building. He’d felt different. Now, in the bright lights of the hotel, he just felt… stupid. Like someone way too old to be playing dress-up playing dress-up anyway.

  Then he caught sight of Caterina. She stood with her back to him, her thick hair in an elaborate updo. Tendrils of silky straight hair fell in wisps down her neck and caressed her bare back. As if she could feel his gaze on her, she turned, smiling the instant she saw him, her brown eyes lighting up like fireworks on the Fourth of July.

  Almost instantly, Rahul felt RC emerge. He strode up to her and offered an arm, which she took without hesitation. This was it. This was why being RC meant so much to him. As RC, he could offer a woman like Caterina his arm and she would take it, no questions asked. Rahul couldn’t help but feel that this was who he’d been meant to be all along. That being born as Rahul Chopra had been a cosmic mistake, and this, here, was his chance to remedy it, to make it right.

  “Ready, RC?” Caterina asked as they walked into the glittering ballroom, festooned with pink and silver balloons and filled with people in elegant evening wear. “I’m pretty sure there’s a reporter from the lifestyle pages of the Times here.”

  RC grinned. “Then let’s go say hi.”

  CATERINA

  She glanced at him sidelong as they walked up to the Times reporter. His suit fit just right, his shoulders appeared broad and strong under the jacket, and his arm under her hand was completely steady. RC seemed to be glowing with good health and confidence in a way Rahul never had before. Caterina shook her head slightly and smoothed down the skirt of her gold-and-crimson cocktail dress with her free hand. What was in that hair gel Oliver had given them?

  The reporter—a slight white man with a wicked widow’s peak, whose name she remembered just in time: Bruce Amos—was smiling at her slightly wolfishly. “Caterina!” he said in faux-hearty tones. “You’re looking well!”

  He said it with so much surprise that Caterina frowned a little. “Thank you, Bruce. But did you think I was sick?”

  Bruce chuckled and stuck his hands in his pockets. She didn’t miss the way his eyes darted over to the side. A quick glance told her two things: who he was looking at—Alaric, who was here with supermodel Lizel—and that whatever was going to come out of Bruce’s mouth next would be unpleasant. He didn’t disappoint. “Well…” He stretched the word out into forty-four syllables. “I did hear from certain sources that you were so torn up by Alaric breaking up with you that you lost twenty-seven pounds and had to be hospitalized to be force-fed.” Bruce leaned in close, his eyebrows knitted together in fake concern. “Was it hard to recover?”

  Caterina drew herself up to her full height of five feet ten inches. In heels, she was much taller than Bruce. Looking down her nose at him, she said, “I didn’t need to recover because I wasn’t ‘torn up.’ Really, Bruce, you need to check your sources before you end up offending the wrong people.” She let the threat sink in slowly and watched the smile fade from Bruce’s sh
iny face before adding, “I’ve never been better.”

  “Hi.” RC spoke up from beside her, his voice jaunty and self-assured. She’d almost forgotten he was there. He held out his hand, let Bruce take it, and said, “I’m Caterina’s date, RC. Crown prince of Anandgarh.” Letting go of Bruce’s hand, RC put his hand lightly on Caterina’s back, his palm hot against her bare skin. “I can confirm that Caterina’s quite well. In fact, we were vacationing on the Italian Riviera together not too long ago. A far cry from the hospital, if you ask me.” He laughed heartily and, after a pause, Bruce joined in.

  He looked from Caterina to RC and back again. “You certainly do seem well. I saw the pictures from the Hindman Gala, of course, but I was led to believe that was just a farce. You know, to throw people off your trail.”

  Caterina shook her head, her chandelier earrings tinkling with the motion. “As I said, Bruce, you really should check your sources. And in the meantime, if you have any worthwhile questions for the crown prince and me, we’ll be at our table.”

  “I’ll take you up on that.” Bruce watched them walk away.

  Caterina smiled up at RC and took his arm again as they walked to their table. “You were good. Very good.”

  “Thank you.”

  Her mood darkening, she looked over at Alaric and Lizel as RC held back her chair. They were at a different table, chatting with someone who looked like he might be related to Leonardo DiCaprio. “I can’t believe him.” She took a seat as RC went around to sit next to her. “How dare he spread such nasty rumors?”

  “But you held your own. Don’t give him the satisfaction of getting under your skin.”

  “You’re right,” Caterina replied as a waiter in tails walked up to take her drinks order, “I shouldn’t.” She didn’t say it aloud, but the truth was, Alaric still very much got under her skin. And she didn’t know what to do about that.

  Sunday Afternoon: Outing Number 3