The Heir Affair

Book 2: The Royal We

by Heather Cocks, Jessica Morgan

Genres: Women's Fiction; Romantic Comedy; Royalty Romance

Synopsis

Making it up the aisle was the easy part: Rebecca "Bex" Porter must survive her own scandals and adjust to royal British life in this "timely and positively delicious" follow-up to The Royal We that's "just as fun, charming, and delightful as the first" (Taylor Jenkins Reid)

After a scandalous secret turns their fairy-tale wedding into a nightmare, Rebecca "Bex" Porter and her husband Prince Nicholas are in self-imposed exile. The public is angry. The Queen is even angrier. And the press is salivating. Cutting themselves off from friends and family, and escaping the world's judgmental eyes, feels like the best way to protect their fragile, all-consuming romance.

But when a crisis forces the new Duke and Duchess back to London, the Band-Aid they'd placed over their problems starts to peel at the edges. Now, as old family secrets and new ones threaten to derail her new royal life, Bex has to face the emotional wreckage she and Nick left behind: with the Queen, with the world, and with Nick's brother Freddie, whose sins may not be so easily forgotten — nor forgiven.

Release date: July 7, 2020

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 480

Sample

CHAPTER ONE

Pardon me, lass, but could you help me with a wee spot of murder?”

I jumped. I hadn’t heard anyone enter the store. The peeling P. G. Wodehouse hardbacks I’d been alphabetizing tumbled onto the floor.

“Absolutely, just one second,” I said over my shoulder. Could I help with murder? Please. It had become my specialty. P. G. could wait.

I knelt, ostensibly to reorganize my pile of books so that I could return to it easily, but mostly to take a stabilizing breath. That had become my pattern: Whenever I had to interact with someone for longer than a moment, I caught myself pausing first, wondering whether that second of anonymity was my last. All it would take to blow my cover was one keen eye or ear. One person whose tabloid habit meant they’d recognize the contours of my face, one person to hear through the shaky upper-crust British accent I’d adopted. Assuming a new identity was thrilling, but the accompanying dread never fully went away.

My customer turned out to be a stooped older gent in a thin beige cotton cardigan, his hand wobbling on a cane, light age spots making a mosaic of his balding pate. Not the archetype of a Hello! addict, though if there’s anything I’ve learned over the last eight years, it’s that you can never tell. But from what I could see through my own (fake) glasses, there was no spark of recognition behind his.

“What precise kind of murder do you fancy?” I asked. “Real, or fictional?”

“I’ve always been a fan of the truth,” he said with a thump of his cane.

“Who isn’t?” I squawked, too loudly. MI6 was missing out on a once-in-a-generation talent. But his face was calm and open. No traces of double meaning. I smiled and added, “Follow me.”

The back of the bookstore was a tight warren of blond-wood shelves, and smelled invitingly of yellowed pages and sixty years of shopkeepers making themselves a cup of tea. Right now, we had ample secondhand Agatha Christies, and I’d spent my first day here working on an intricate window display paying tribute to her lesser works; a day later, after that engendered some buyer interest, I’d enlisted Nick to help me rearrange the whole Mysteries and Crimes section. I’d become an expert in every flavor of murder we had to offer.

“Have you read this?” I said, handing him Ann Rule’s The Stranger Beside Me. “She worked with—”

“Ted Bundy,” he said, scoffing mildly. “Everyone’s read that one, love.”

“So I assume you’ve also read Helter Skelter, and In Cold Blood,” I said, poring through the shelves. We were in the section Nick called Enormously Famous American Murders (Brutal). He’d insisted on reorganizing the books first by where the murder happened, then by exceptionally specific genre, and then alphabetically. It had been a long night that nearly ended in Small-Town Royal Murder (Justified).

“Here’s a good one,” I said, scuttling past Assassinations and into Bloodless Crimes. “The Gardner Heist. No one dies, but there is a massive unsolved art theft.”

He chewed his lip, then nodded. “The wife does think I need a break from slashers.” He chuckled and zipped his cane through the air for emphasis.

I left him browsing the stacks, the book tucked under his arm, and took the long way back to finish up with my Wodehouse. Nick and I had gotten unbelievably lucky with this Airbnb, which allowed its tenants to live in a flat above the bookstore and run the business for the duration of their stay. It was typically full up years in advance—there are a lot of people in the world itching to play bookseller for a week—but there had been a last-minute cancellation. So after three weeks of skipping like pebbles across England, putting as much distance as we could between ourselves and the mess we’d left behind in London, we’d found a sanctuary: a short-term rental of what our lives might have been like if he’d been born plain old Nick, lover of bad snacks and worse TV, rather than Prince Nicholas, future king.

I ran my fingers idly across the spines of the books I passed. My twin sister, Lacey, had always hated used books; she wanted everything brand new, born into this world for her alone to make her mark on it. I’d never minded a little scruff. I liked that used books brought with them their own history—every dog-ear, every stain, every crease. Maybe a book was slightly faded because someone had left it in the sun on their honeymoon. Maybe page ninety-eight was turned at the corner because it contained a glorious insult, or the perfect romantic turn of phrase. Maybe the person who’d highlighted nearly every line had graduated at the top of her class. Secondhand books could have lived in tiny walk-ups or hotel rooms or the White House—or, here, even in Balmoral Castle itself. Each book was a mystery, its secrets hidden in plain sight.

Kind of like me.

Most shoppers in Wigtown, known officially as Scotland’s National Book Town, were so immersed in its bookstores that they barely looked at the human beings working in them. No one appeared to notice the beauty mark that to me seemed so obviously to be made of eyeliner; the fact that I could see the register better if I looked over, rather than through, the lenses in my matronly frames; or that I was, appropriately, wearing an actual wig. And whenever Nick joked that there might be a village somewhere called Booktown that specialized in wigs—which was often—no one realized they were laughing politely with the second in line to the throne. The store itself was part of our disguise.

My elderly murder aficionado eventually met me at the register with my recommendation and a couple of grim offerings from Creepy French Murders (Historical). I rang him up with the promise to set aside anything else obscure that came our way.

“Much obliged, Miss…?” He peered at me expectantly.

“Margot,” I said.

He touched his hat. “Name’s Duncan,” he said. “Remember me to your husband. He helped me find a very naughty bodice ripper yesterday for the wife. Best recommendation of the year so far.”

“Ah, so you’re a regular here,” I said.

“Too right. This shop is like a telly program! New every week,” he said. “You wouldn’t believe the variety. Just last month we had a Danish lass who’d left her fourth husband when she found him shagging her second husband.” He wiggled the twin thickets above his eyes in gossipy glee.

“Sounds like this place is a book in itself,” I said. “Maybe you should write it.”

“Not enough murder, lass.” He studied me. “What brings you here? Don’t suppose you’re on the lam?”

I held a neutral expression amid a flutter of nerves. We’d sketched out a story, but this was the first time anyone had looked me square in the face and asked.

“Steve left his job,” I said. “We’ve been traveling. He’s looking for inspiration, and I’m…”

Duncan cocked his head and waited.

“I guess I’m looking for inspiration, too.” I shrugged apologetically. “I hope our chapter in your book isn’t too boring.”

“Nonsense,” Duncan said. “No one is boring.” He hooked a thumb back toward the bowels of the shop. “There’s stacks of inspiration right here. You’ll find it soon enough.”

He left with a ding of the bell over the door. From my perch behind the cash register, I watched as he touched the brim of his hat in the direction of the owner of the café across the street. The sun didn’t fully set in Scotland at this time of year until late, but around closing time every night, I would glance out the window, and my hand would itch to sketch its slow descent. Nick had joked that the soft light of the Scottish evenings made his face more luminous, like the lead actress on Outlander—which he’d been binge-watching—and I had laughed, but he was right about its effect, both on his face and on everything else. The Bookmark wasn’t even on Wigtown’s most picturesque stretch of road, but the waning rays still suffused a singular glow onto its buildings, and the street took on a gentle quality, as if it were easing you into its arms for a good-night hug.

The woman across the street finished sweeping the patio and leaned on her broom in a moment of fatigue. She was winding down for the night; with a swell of satisfaction, I too locked the door of the shop. Our shop. For now, anyway.

I flipped the sign on the door to CLOSED, and then my body took over, instinctively tensing my muscles to brace me for what it knew was coming. Right on cue, the church bells clanged, and I was no longer in Scotland. They ceased being the bells of Wigtown and became those of Westminster Abbey, ripping through the temperate London air in a celebratory aria I will never forget—because nobody was celebrating with them. The crowd, which practically screamed off the roofs when I’d arrived, was quiet. No cheering. Not even any booing. Just staring, either at us or at the devices in their hands, in icy silence.

For six sonorous clangs, I was back in front of that church. Exposed. Loathed. Ashamed.

The church bells made it hard to forget.

*  *  *

I trudged up our narrow staircase toward the smell of something burnt, as usual. The flat above the shop was, in many ways, an echo of the books below: tattered, torn in parts, but well loved. The ancient appliances were tricky to regulate even for an experienced chef, which Nick was not, and so the aromas wafting from his general direction come dinnertime were always just left of tempting. Nick had been raised in a place where chores were done before he would ever realize they needed doing, and in these few weeks on our own, I think he’d enjoyed playacting as a civilian—running to the market, doing laundry, scrubbing down the kitchen counters. What was a drudge for most people was a novelty for him, as was the concept of cooking dinner for us every night.

“Evening, Margot,” Nick said, greeting me at the door in an apron with a sketch of a carrot on it, his sandy hair sticking up haphazardly. “How’s the shop?”

“Hi, Steve,” I said, kissing him deeply. “You taste like butter.”

“All good cooks sample their ingredients.”

I wiped a smudge off his face. “But you’re technically not a good cook.”

“Not yet,” Nick said. “But I’ve come a long way from burning lasagna.” He made a voila gesture at the dining table, where two charred circles sat on mismatched, chipped dishes. “Now I’m burning meat pies.”

“These look almost edible!” I said.

“See?” Nick clapped adorably. “I’m really improving.”

I tossed my glasses onto the table, where they landed next to a copy of the Mirror. I didn’t look. Instead, I poked at one of the pies. Black flakes matching the ones on Nick’s cheek came away on my finger.

“Yes, unfortunately, they are indeed only almost edible. The second lot are in the oven now.” He frowned. “They look a bit better. Maybe? I keep wanting to text Gaz a photo, but…”

He didn’t need to finish.

“I missed you in the shop today,” I said. “You and your saucy new mustache.”

Nick wrapped his arms around me from behind. “I took my mustache into town for a bit,” he said. “Steve had a lot of advice for the butcher’s assistant about her rude girlfriend who deletes everything prematurely from the DVR. And then Steve popped round the off-license for a new box of wine and ran into Keith from the betting shop. You will not believe what his landlord is trying to pull.”

“Hang on,” I said, swiveling in his arms to face him. “We’ve only been here a few days. How do you know all these people already?”

He grinned. “I have always wanted to be some village’s busybody,” he said. He dipped his head and kissed me. “Isn’t it sexy?”

My laughter was lost in the clash of our mouths. Both our pulses quickened. So did my breathing.

“Margot,” he said, pulling away. “I approve of where you’re going with this, but if I ruin this second lot of pies, I might pull off your wig and weep into it.”

I nipped at his lip one last time. “Fine. I’ll go collect myself elsewhere.”

“Send my wife Bex out in about fifteen minutes for her pie, please,” he said, hurrying over to the oven. “These are going to blow her mind.”

Grinning, I headed into our tiny bedroom and pulled off my blond hair, plopping it onto the top of the dresser next to a pile of romance novels Nick had bought downstairs. One of them was called Fancy Ladies, and I itched to take a picture and send it to Freddie, who could spin it into a solid month of brotherly teasing.

But I couldn’t. We weren’t telling Freddie, or anybody else, a thing. After our wedding-day fiasco, Nick and I went off the grid, hoping to start our married life anywhere other than amid the ashes of a tabloid tire fire. It had been hard. I missed my sister, my mother, our friends. I even missed Marj, the boys’ personal secretary, and the way she would hiss through her front teeth whenever one of them ticked her off (which was often). I especially missed Freddie. But missing Freddie was more complicated, because Freddie’s feelings for me didn’t stop at friendship. He and I had once crashed impulsively into a kiss; we’d agreed it was a careless, confused mistake, and I’d believed it. He apparently hadn’t been so sure, and now, thanks to a combination of betrayals both accidental and chillingly deliberate, everybody knew it.

Nick and I had both decided we couldn’t draw anyone else into our escape. It was better for them to know nothing, and safer for us to keep it that way. No texts, no emails, no check-ins, nothing that risked getting leaked to the media and threatening the peace of mind that we had found by hitting the road incognito, ambling sociably through small country towns, and now selling books to people who had no idea they were passing their bills to a royal cuckold and his faithless wife—the most hated person in Great Britain, if not the world.

Stop it, I told myself. The whole point is to get away from all that. But the damn bells had really thrown me off tonight. I shoved aside my feelings and dragged a hairbrush roughly through my own brown hair, matted and tragic from a day of being shoved into Margot’s flaxen disguise. With every night that Nick and I climbed into someone else’s lumpy old bed, our adrenaline surging from another day of going undetected and our hormones rising to match it, the shitshow that had erupted in London felt farther away. The ruse was working—both for us and on us.

With a tug of the brush, one of my hair extensions got caught in the bristles and came free. One more vestige of Duchess Rebecca that I could leave behind. I tossed it into the wastebasket and followed my nose back out into the kitchen, where Nick was taking two faintly less charred objects out of the oven. He set a pie in front of me with a flourish.

“This one might even be mediocre,” he said.

“High praise,” I said, and with a grateful sniff, sank into a dining chair. It did at least smell like meat. Of some kind. “Oh, our last customer of the evening sent his regards. It’s a good sign that he’s met us both and didn’t twig to anything. Your mustache is really effective.”

“We’re also not front and center in as many papers anymore,” he said. “Or at least our faces aren’t.”

He nodded toward the Mirror as he joined me at the table. I stabbed through the lid of my pie, and as it belched steam, I reluctantly pulled the paper toward my plate. The lead story was about an MP being found passed out in a shrub, but at the bottom, there I was. Allegedly. It was really a random brunette in one of the royal Range Rovers, her face obscured by giant sunglasses and a copy of the Times. I wondered how much she knew. And how much her silence cost.

The teaser next to it caught my attention. “Yikes, Freddie and Richard did an event together again? What’s that, six now?”

“Seven.” Nick shuddered. “Better him than me. That’s a lot of Dick.”

I nearly choked on a piece of what seemed like chicken.

“Imagine having to spend so many days in a row with Father, talking about God knows what,” Nick continued, not noticing. “I can think of no worse punishment.”

I couldn’t tear my eyes from Freddie’s face, which smiled up at me underneath the headline, APOLOGY (TOUR) NOT ACCEPTED. I searched it for a sign of what he was really feeling, whether his smile was real, or—as was so often the case when the brothers were around the Prince of Wales—wilting at the edges, merely pasted on top of a lifetime of resentment. Suddenly, I burned to know if he was okay.

I forced myself to push the paper aside. “So. What’s on for this evening?”

“I thought I might get my hands all over some dirty dishes,” Nick said. “Then, I don’t know, coffee and biscuits, perhaps a quiz show?”

“Wow, we’re really starting our married life with a bang,” I teased.

“This is, in fact, a perfect start to our married life,” he said with a contented sigh. “I had a long chat with the greengrocer today about courgette, and then walked to the chemist to buy dandruff shampoo. In person. I’ve never been able to do that.”

I grinned. “And your nearly adequate food is far superior to anything I’ve ever made.”

“Don’t sell yourself short,” Nick said, raising a piece of pie on his fork. “Your toast is exquisite.”

We clinked forks. It was quiet again for a bit, interrupted only by the sounds of my chewing. I noticed Nick was spearing the same pea over and over again, so I fixed him with an expectant look and waited for him to meet my gaze.

“Bex,” he began, staring at the table.

“Nick,” I said. Then I lowered my voice. “Steve.”

He giggled. “I do love the way you say that,” he said. “It makes me feel like I’m my own evil twin.” He looked up at me. “We need to talk about what happens when our week here is up.”

“It’s so unfair. We just got here.” Every tick of the walnut carriage clock on the bookshop desk, its glass so fogged that the sound was our only proof it still told time, reminded me that this domesticity had an expiration date. “On to the next, I guess?”

“That’s just it.” Nick leaned toward me, a flush in his cheeks. “Maybe not. Maybe we don’t even have to go anywhere,” he said. “Picture it: you, me, a thatched roof, a garden in the back with tomatoes and plenty of room for you and an easel, me and my knitting…”

“You’re knitting now?” I asked.

“I read a very interesting book about it yesterday at the shop,” Nick said defensively. “How hard can it be?”

“Okay, well, that aside, this all sounds idyllic,” I said, “but how is it going to work?”

He scooted to the left and strained to grab his laptop from the nearby counter, then woke it up and turned it to face me. There it was: a thatched roof, a garden, a modest bedroom with a surprisingly big lead-paned window, a warmly shabby kitchen, a sitting room with a TV nook. I leaned closer.

“Is that an antenna on that thing?” I asked. “Can you live without satellite TV?”

“No,” Nick said. “I shall attend to that. But as for the rest…what do you think? It’s down the road near the edge of town. The owner hares off to Lisbon every year and it’s wide open.” He pushed the laptop away and took my hands. “We’ve been on the go for weeks, Bex. What if we just…stop?”

“Stop,” I echoed, turning the word over in my mouth and the concept over in my mind. We hadn’t stopped since we’d left the palace. This flat was the first time we’d even bothered to unpack our suitcases. A moving target would be harder for Queen Eleanor to hit, and the weight of her fury had been so crushing that I wasn’t keen to relive it. “Stopping feels like a mistake. Like we’re going to be found out.”

“I don’t think so. Certainly not now that I’m planning to let myself go.” He patted his stomach. “No one looks twice at us here. If they do, it’s to wonder how that crispy blonde snagged such a foxy continental toy boy.”

I snorted. “Be serious.”

“I seriously am,” Nick deadpanned. “Look, we’ve pulled it off, Bex. We’ve spent weeks being whomever we like, with no one the wiser. And now that we’ve managed to get lost up here, I want to relax for a bit. I want a slow pace and a kitchen full of groceries and a routine. I love you, and us, and this, and I want to focus on that. Don’t you want that, too?”

As I searched his face, considering what he’d said, suddenly I was back at Nick’s long-ago birthday party at Buckingham Palace—an event where he’d backed out of introducing me publicly as his girlfriend—and I was looking into the eyes of my father. I really do love him, Dad, I’d said then, my way of promising that the pain of loving Nick in secret was made right by the sincere depth of our feelings, and that the oddities of his life, of this life, were worth bringing into mine. My dad died before I got the chance to prove it. He’d missed my happiest hour, but also my lowest—the day I let myself get so lost that I nearly turned that promise into a lie.

The bizarre turns of the last few weeks had in so many ways brought me and Nick closer, both to each other and to the seeds of ourselves that wanted to grow outside the confines of the palace walls. If our former friend Clive hadn’t become the kind of reporter he’d always taught me to mistrust, if he hadn’t dug until he found a half-truth about me and Freddie that he spun into what I could only classify as an international sex scandal, then Nick and I would have had a week in paradise and then gone right back behind the curtain. I wasn’t glad for Clive’s betrayal, but I could still find optimism in the wreckage.

I half stood and shifted into Nick’s lap, cupping his face in my hands and then kissing him slow and soft.

“I really do love you,” I said. The echo was deliberate. I wanted this to be a new promise—a fresh one to Nick, to my dad, to myself. “And I love this idea. Let’s stay. Steve and Margot can make it work.”

“In life, as in the kitchen,” Nick said, then popped a triumphant piece of pie crust into his mouth. “Please note that Steve’s pastry did not have a soggy bottom.” His hand slid down my back. “And how’s your bottom today? I’d better check that, too.”

I looped my arms around his neck. “You are getting cornier every day.”

He shrugged. “Steve is a very basic man with very basic urges.”

“I said cornier, not hornier, but apparently both are true.”

Nick wound his hands in my hair. “It turns out Scotland is a much more convenient aphrodisiac than the Seychelles,” he said. “My only problem is finding bedsprings that can stand up to our needs.”

I ran a finger down his neck to where his shirt buttoned and flicked one open. “That’s why God invented floors.” Another button. “And showers.” A third. I moved again so that I was straddling him. “And dining room tables and chairs, and…”

“Mmm,” Nick said, running his hands around me and pulling my face to his. “God is good,” he murmured between kisses. “Very, very good.”

CHAPTER TWO

I could hear Nick even through the juddering of the bathroom pipes, which complained every time I used the old chrome hand shower. His whistling always got more elaborate when he was in a good mood, and he was apparently feeling extra carefree this morning, because his rendition of the Pointer Sisters’ “Jump” was note perfect and flashy.

“Need any help out there?” I called to Nick as I heaved myself out of the yellow porcelain tub and wrapped my hair in one of the cottage’s thin, rough white towels.

Between the whistling and clanking noises emanating from the kitchen, Nick didn’t seem to hear me, which I decided to take as a no. Smiling, I crossed the slim hallway from our bathroom to our bedroom, pulled on shorts and a T-shirt, and curled up with my laptop on the bed. An email from my mother waited, updating me on various shenanigans with the Iowa Business Council—Mom had taken over my late father’s fridge-furniture enterprise—and passing along the hometown gossip that Laundry Bill from Bill’s Laundry had caused a scandal when he had an affair with Diner Sue from Sue’s Diner, who was married to Cowboy Lou, who owned a hair salon. We’d been on the lam for almost two months now, and I’d decided a few weeks ago that my mother at the very least deserved occasional proof of life, even if it lacked specifics. She tiptoed around the situation via politely vague statements like “I hope married life is treating you well,” which didn’t beg for answers, and my replies were nothing more than benign confirmation that we still existed. I dashed one off and then wound my hair into a bun as I scanned the longer list of unread messages and spam that I hadn’t touched. An all-caps subject line from two weeks ago jumped out at me: CARE TO COMMENT?

The sender: Clive.

I almost cried out, but caught myself. Bile rose in my throat. In the other room, “Jump” had segued into “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” so I knew Nick was still occupied. Shaking, I hesitated, then opened the email. All it said was, Your Royal Highness: We’ve been through a lot together, and you’ve had a trying month. If you’d like the world to hear your side of the story, I’d be pleased to give my old friend the chance to tell it. Best, Clive Fitzwilliam, Royals Columnist, The Sun.

“You have got to be shitting me,” I hissed at my laptop. Been through a lot together? A trying month? As if he hadn’t been the architect of it all? His email said he worked for The Sun, and not his dream employer the Daily Mail, but that was small consolation for the fact that selling out his friends had given this infected wart of a human (nearly) everything he’d ever wanted.

I closed my eyes and inhaled. The morning of my Abbey wedding, my best friend Cilla had suggested maybe Clive would loom less scary to me if I reduced him to something more human, more fallible, by picturing him as he was before: Nick’s childhood friend, the kind and flirty guy I’d met at Oxford who’d been a hapless but hungry local reporter, writing about Tube station loos and the nun who claimed to see the Virgin Mary in a pancake, rather than a person who’d attempted to blackmail me.

But my mind’s eye couldn’t see that Clive anymore; all I could conjure was the bitter, twisted Clive who’d vibrated with spite when he confronted me and Nick about his claims that Freddie and I were having an affair. He was fueled by a lifetime of buried resentment and throttled hate. What did that Clive, the only Clive who would ever exist for me now, think he was doing emailing me?

My worst impulses won out, and I Googled him. He had tucked into his new gig with vigor: THE CHEAT, THE CAD, AND THE CUCKOLD, one of his headlines read, as if he were telling a bad joke over a whiskey. I snorted derisively.

I knew I should stop reading. But on the internet, you are only ever a few easy clicks from a horror show, and I could not turn away from mine. One story about Freddie at the opening of a distillery had me studying his face again for signs of stress, and that led me to an older one theorizing that he was drowning his sorrows in socialites. Another click took me to a report that Queen Eleanor might exile us. The tabloids had pulled whatever photos they had of me and Freddie and turned their body-language experts loose to find proof that he was checking me out, or vice versa. I fell further and further down the wormhole, all the way back to those grainy early morning photos of Freddie leaving my apartment, which Clive had used to bolster his claim of an affair. Eventually, I landed on the BBC’s video of my entire wedding—right down to its abysmal end. I’d never seen it. Why would I have? I’d lived it.

I hit play.

Everything started out brilliantly. The commentators lapped up the décor, swooned over my dress, and—in a twist of dramatic irony I would find delicious if it were on one of my soap operas—extolled me as a perfect future queen.

“She looks stunning,” the BBC lip-reader caught Freddie saying to Nick as I came up the aisle. “You’re a lucky man.”

(That explained the headline of one of Clive’s pieces from the aftermath, ‘LUCKY NICK,’ SAYS TRICKY PRICK.)

You could pinpoint the second the news broke, even before the lead commentator’s sharp intake of breath. Nick and I had emerged from signing the register behind the altar when, amid the choir’s gorgeous elegy to our love, a light murmur started to creep through the Abbey.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the commentator said, “we’ve received word of the most astonishing story…”

As I curtsied to the Queen, you could see from above how many people had ignored the directive to switch off their cell phones. Their screens lit up one after the other, sweeping like fire all the way down the pews of the church, apace with the realization I remembered washing over me with every step toward the Abbey door: Clive had called our bluff. Or maybe we’d called his.

Reflexively, I hit mute to see, rather than hear, the next part. Incredibly, our veneer never visibly faltered. If you had somehow missed the headline OPEN-DOOR DUCHESS: BEX SCANDAL BLINDSIDES BUCKINGHAM, or slept on the Mirror’s poetic FREDDIE NICKS NICK’S BRIDE, then you’d have assumed our happy ending was delivered on schedule. The newly minted duke and duchess, who seemed a lifetime removed from me and Nick even thou