Which she was about to be. She really wished her grandmother was in good enough health to travel for the wedding. But there was no way Olga would be able to leave the nursing home, let alone take two planes, crossing the Atlantic for the first time in her life – she didn’t even have a passport! – land in Austria, and take a helicopter to Valtzers, the capital of Herzoslovakia, to see her granddaughter becoming its Queen.
Me, a Queen! It’s like I’m in some crazy fairy tale!
Lori shook her head in disbelief, but since this didn’t interfere with the dressmakers – who were now dragging step stools over so they could climb up and work on the upper reaches of the dress, like Lilliputians doing tailoring work on Gulliver’s fiancée – they didn’t bother to tell her to be still.
Just a few months ago, I was competing in London at the Olympics. Playing beach volleyball for the US. Spiking hard in the British rain with ‘California Girls’ playing in the background. A few months ago I hadn’t even met Joachim.
I honestly can’t believe how fast my life has changed for ever.
Lori shook her head again.
I couldn’t imagine anything more exciting could happen to me in 2012 than competing for the US at the London Olympics! It was the biggest thing ever to happen to me and Shameeka. We were over the moon to have been selected. If anyone had told me that something even bigger would happen to me this year, I’d’ve thought they were insane . . .
But one could not have happened without the other. It was the Olympics which had set things in motion, brought Lori and Joachim together at a routine meet and greet after the second heat, when they’d crushed the Chinese team two sets to nil. Lori and Shameeka had been escorted to the Corinthia Hotel, just five minutes from Horse Guards Parade, where the beach volleyball sand court had been set up for the duration of the Games; their sponsors and the US officials were all beaming with pleasure at their decisive win.
‘We even have royalty to meet you!’ one young eager-beaver cultural attaché from the US Embassy had said, leading the girls through the crowded hospitality suite, smiling faces on all sides raising glasses to their triumph.
‘OMG, is it Prince Toby?’ Shameeka, who had a huge crush on the redheaded bad boy of British royalty, had nudged Lori in high excitement. ‘That would be
beyond
awesome!’
However, though the man waiting on the balcony of the Corinthia Hotel’s penthouse suite was shorter, chubbier, and distinctly more formally dressed than Prince Toby would have been, he was also of a higher rank: not a prince, but a king. A king who clicked his heels on greeting the girls, nodding his head at each of them as he took their hands to kiss, one after the other. His navy suit was so perfectly tailored that Lori was utterly embarrassed by the ugly grey tracksuit jacket, unflatteringly baggy black trousers, and glaring lime-green trainers that were the US team’s official post-competition wear. It was the trainers she particularly hated. Tall as she was, she had feet in proportion to her height, and the neon colour made them look the size of canoes.
‘King Joachim!’ the eager beaver proudly announced, his eyes shining like stars: Lori couldn’t help smiling at his excitement.
Nothing like republican Americans for going nuts about royalty
, she thought.
‘Congratulations, young ladies!’ King Joachim said, as Shameeka giggled.
‘Wow, do all kings kiss your hand?’ she asked, never backward at being forward. ‘That is
beyond
cool! I’m gonna tell everyone back home I got my hand kissed by a real king! Hey, do you know Prince Toby?’
‘We meet at State weddings and funerals,’ King Joachim responded politely. Lori had thought this was very funny. It was only later that she had realized Joachim hadn’t been joking.
‘King Joachim is the ruling monarch of Herzoslovakia,’ the young attaché added.
‘Herz – what? Is that even a
country
?’ Shameeka blurted out, but Lori, used to having to deal with her teammate’s tendency to impulsiveness on and off court, dived in to remedy the impending disaster.
‘It’s a real pleasure to meet you, Your Majesty,’ she said, bobbing a curtsey as best she could in the tracksuit. ‘Did you watch our heat just now?’
Joachim swivelled to face her, his round blue eyes fully focusing on her. ‘I certainly did,’ he said with much enthusiasm. ‘I am a great admirer of sport, but I am not familiar until now with beach volleyball. I found much skill and athletic ability in your performance today.’
‘Oh! Thank you!’ Lori blurted out, seeing that he was quite serious. She and Shameeka, used as they were to competing in sports bras and skimpy bikini bottoms, were equally used to male spectators goggling at them while they competed, and praising their ‘outfits’ afterwards in considerable detail; April Ross, another US female basketball player, said in interviews that people were often drawn in by the women’s uniform but stayed for the sport. Lori, however, could have done without it. Competing on the beach at the University of Miami, which she’d attended on a volleyball scholarship, was one thing: everyone in Miami lived in tight skimpy clothing, and no way could you ever be as sexy as the hot, hip-wriggling Cubans there.
Outside of Miami, however, it was a different story. Leching everywhere. Lori would have loved to compete in shorts, even really tiny ones; anything not to have most of her ass on display. But sex sold, and a guy who met you straight after a heat and talked about your athletic ability instead of making coded references to your tits and ass was a prince, metaphorically speaking.
And this one’s a king! Even better!
She was positively beaming at him.
‘Thank you so much!’ she repeated. ‘Are you coming to any more heats? We play Germany tomorrow morning.’
‘I am very aware of this!’ Joachim said, nodding briskly. ‘I will certainly be present. And perhaps you will be kind enough to allow me to take you to lunch afterwards? I know, of course, that an athlete in competition will be careful what she eats, so if you accept, I will inform myself of what will be appropriate to serve you.’
‘Wow! Well, uh, thank you again!’ Lori said, dazzled. ‘We’d love to, wouldn’t we, Sham—’
She turned to her teammate, but Shameeka had already headed back into the party a while ago, seeing that Joachim’s interest was fixed on Lori, and wanting to give her a good shot.
‘Um, I guess it’s just me, then,’ Lori said bashfully. ‘Unless you meant—’
‘I would be more than honoured by your company, Miss Makarwicz,’ King Joachim said, taking her hand and kissing it once again, rendering her completely speechless.
It had been a lightning whirl ever since. A whirl of Olympic success, first of all: Lori and Shameeka had played their barely covered asses off and taken bronze, which, since they were the second-string US women’s volleyball team, was pretty damn good going. Joachim had courted Lori all through the competition, but in such a gentlemanly way, absolutely taking for granted that her sporting obligations came first, that his presence had been hugely positive rather than a distraction.
And then, after their medal triumph, Lori and Shameeka had instantly been snapped up for a sponsorship endorsement by a Swiss watch company, which had been a big career step forward for both of them. The company had paid the girls to pose for a series of black-and-white ads, in which they were both jumping to spike a ball in unison, their lean, muscled bodies gleaming in chiaroscuro, their faces intent. The watch they were advertising was a chronograph with two dials, the tonneau split perfectly symmetrically, called the Duplex: under Lori and Shameeka’s jumping bare feet ran the slogan: ‘Twice the Power. Twice the Timing.’
Not exactly original, but what did they care? They had not only been paid lavishly for the ads, but had been contracted to embark on a month-long press tour around Europe in mid-September, as soon as the required American media appearances had been completed. The Duplex press tour was an infinitely higher level of travel than anything underpaid athletes in a not-really-famous sport ever got to experience: five-star hotels, unlimited expenses, first-class flights, and all they had to do was play some small exhibition matches and hold a series of press conferences with luxury goods journalists whose idea of a probing question was to compliment the girls’ amazing bodies and ask if they’d met Prince Toby at the Olympics. Shameeka and Lori had been in sheer heaven.
Lori’s burgeoning relationship with Joachim had grown exponentially as the press tour progressed. Europe was tiny, Lori had discovered. Really tiny. You could fly from country to country in, like, an
hour
. You could drive across three borders in one
day.
It was nothing for Joachim to charter a plane and fly to Madrid, or Rome, or Berlin, or St Petersburg, wherever she and Shameeka were staying, so that he could take her out to dinner. And he did exactly that with increasing frequency. Joaquim treated her like a queen: the dinners would always be at the Italian or Japanese restaurants she liked; he made sure they served her favourite cocktail, a Sea Breeze, since her regime meant she could only allow herself one alcoholic drink a day; she only had to mention casually how much she liked flowers, and the next time he took her out there would be a guided visit to a botanical garden planned before their dinner reservation.
And he was very pleasant company. He listened, he asked questions. He heard about her childhood in a small, dying town in upstate New York, which had flourished during the days of the Erie Canal, when heavy industry had sent all its goods by water. Its population was shrinking every year; kids left for college and never came back. But Lori’s parents, loyal to a fault, wouldn’t have dreamt of leaving Dorchester.
‘I’m the only one who even went out of state to university,’ she said, over dinner in Barcelona, after Joaquim had organized a private tour of Gaudi’s Sagrada Família. They were sitting on the terrace of L’Orangerie, an exquisite restaurant in the Gran Hotel la Florida, their chairs turned so that they could see the city stretching out below them and watch the sun falling slowly in a hot red ball into the blue waters of the Mediterranean Sea. ‘My brother and sister are still back home. Both of them went to the community college, they’ll settle down ten minutes’ drive from my mom and dad. Hometown kids all the way.’
‘Family is very important to you, Lori, I can see,’ Joachim had said appreciatively.
‘Oh,
very
,’ she said wholeheartedly. ‘I don’t see enough of them. I try to get back for Thanksgiving, but, you know, an athlete gets a pretty short window at her physical peak, and they totally get that I want to go for it while I can.’
‘And what do you plan to do after you—’ Joachim smiled, which was rare for him; his expression was usually so composed. His rather plump face creased up into pleasant lines as he did so, a little dimple popping out on each side of his full lips. ‘I was about to say, after you retire, but you are so young and beautiful and full of life, it seems very wrong to say retire to a woman who looks like you do.’
‘Oh! Thank you!’
Lori found the formality of King Joachim’s compliments charming, and, frankly, refreshing, after the highly charged sexual atmosphere of the Olympic Village. Whenever an athletic event had finished, all the competitors were unleashed to party freely, and in the later stages it had been a Bacchanal, with drunken guys staggering between the Heineken and Budweiser Houses, pockets full of condoms – a hundred thousand had been handed out in the Village at the start of the Games – slurring ‘Hey, hot stuff, wanna fuck?’ at her and Shameeka.
Shameeka had; Lori hadn’t. It was all too public for her. And halfway through, she had met Joachim, and his poise and sophistication, not to mention the fact that he was over a decade older than her, had made her contemporaries seem extremely young and callow.
‘I guess I’ll coach, back home,’ she said. ‘I’d love to work with young people.’
She took a careful sip of her Sea Breeze – she’d learned years ago to pace herself – and so missed the approving look Joachim was directing at her.
‘You like children,’ he commented, sounding very satisfied.
‘Oh yes!’ Lori said ingenuously. ‘Of course!’
Setting down her glass, she missed, too, the smirk that said that Joachim had successfully crossed the last item off his list of essential qualities in a queen-to-be . . .
A short time later, the press tour wrapped up as the ad campaign raced into newspapers, magazines and billboards in order to capitalize on Lori and Shameeka’s bronze medals. It was early October, and the girls were due to return to Miami, back to their routine and training schedule, when Joachim asked Lori to postpone going back home in favour of a visit to his homeland, Herzoslovakia. A small tax haven nestling between several other European countries, all much larger but not necessarily richer, Herzoslovakia had not been included in the press tour, as it had very few permanent residents. Its hordes of passport-holders were domiciled there instead, which allowed them to benefit from its very low tax rate while not having to live in a tiny little country year-round.
‘He’s really serious!’ Shameeka had whooped on hearing about Lori’s invitation. ‘He wants his mom to check you out to see if you’re marriage material! Which you totally are,’ she added fondly. ‘And you know, he’s
ready
.’
Ever since it had been clear how interested Joachim was in Lori, Shameeka had been combing the European gossip magazines and blogs for information about him: he was thirty-seven, an only son, King of Herzoslovakia since his father had died over twenty years ago. And he had a doting mother, the Dowager Queen, who was apparently pushing him hard to marry and produce the next generation of heirs to Herzoslovakia.
‘Whenever you say some guy’s “ready”,’ Lori observed dubiously, ‘you mean that they marry the next girl who comes along once they’ve decided to settle down. I don’t think that’s really romantic—’
‘The next girl they
fall for
, dipshit!’ Shameeka did a pretend-smack to Lori’s head. ‘Look, Joachim went to, like, every Olympic event there was going, and you’re the one he asked out! I asked around the Village and no other chick got even taken on one date by him! So he liked
you –
it wasn’t some weird multiple audition process! Just tell me I can come to the wedding and hook up with Prince Toby. I want a redheaded, freckled, corn-rowed royal baby . . .’