Marrying Up (35 page)

Alexa’s hands were pressed against the mattress, forcing herself up in excitement. ‘Not . . . the King!’

Barney chuckled. ‘No, although it wouldn’t be unknown. Some kings have
very
kinky tastes. But no. This old leather queen isn’t the actual monarch.’

‘So who?’ Alexa had sunk back against the pillows.

‘All in good time, my dear.’ Barney was examining his polished fingernails complacently. ‘So I met him at Madame Whiplash.
Very meaty boy. Nervous, but warmed up in the end. Said he was called Henri, but it turns out he’s actually Jacques Hippolyte.
Private secretary to the King of Sedona, no less.’

‘Really?’ Alexa had shot upright again. She was starting to feel dizzy, especially given all the champagne.

‘That’s right.’ Barney grinned. ‘There was a tiny picture of him in the paper, behind the royal family. He looked different
without his leather executioner’s mask, admittedly. But I lost no time in calling him.’

‘What did he say?’

Barney took another long draw on his glass. ‘He thought the pictures were absolutely kosher and that you’d really met the
Prince at the party. I had to explain that there’d been a little artifice and that there might be a spot of resistance. He
then got worried about what to do when the Prince said you’d attacked him and he’d never seen you before in his life.’

‘And?’ Alexa demanded from the bed.

‘Simple!’ Barney was gambolling about the carpet. ‘I told him to tell the King and Queen that you two had been having an affair
for some time. But that the obsessively secretive Prince’s first line of defence would be to deny it.’

Alexa rolled her eyes. ‘But no one’s going to believe that,’ she wailed.

There was an expression of self-satisfaction in Barney’s blue eyes. ‘Aha but they will. My friend Jacques reckons the King’s
so desperate he’ll believe anything. And if he does, the Queen will too.’

‘But . . .’ Alexa tried to interrupt. Barney held up his plump little palm. ‘No buts,’ he said lightly. ‘Jacques has a big
incentive
to make the story work. Otherwise his august employer gets to know all about his naughty tastes.’

‘Blackmail!’ She felt a kind of thrill. Barney’s utter ruthlessness was compelling.

‘Quite so!’ Barney was as relaxed and carefree as if he was planning a picnic. He was clearly enjoying himself immensely,
and Alexa could not help but admire his nerve.

‘And I’ve worked out another little plan with him,’ he now announced. ‘You’re going to make a visit to the chateau!’

‘The chateau?’

‘Yes. Meet the folks.’

‘The King and Queen, you mean?’

‘Well who else?’ Barney drawled. ‘You have to meet them. They’ll be your parents-in-law.’

Alexa closed her eyes. Images of crowns and thrones reeled through her mind. Could Barney really make it happen? She looked
at him in awe. From Florrie’s kitchen – to this. They had come a long way.

‘Henri – I mean Hippolyte – will get the paps there,’ Barney was continuing. ‘They’ll take pictures of you, and the story
will keep going.’

Javelins of triumph shot through Alexa. ‘I could be a princess!’ She imagined Lady Annabel’s furious face.

‘Could?’ Barney looked stern. ‘
Will
.’

The Queen’s sitting room commanded the best view of the gardens of any room in the chateau. A pair of fine white gauze inner
curtains fluttered gently about Astrid as she sat on her little balcony gazing down at her rose garden.

Astrid was pleased with her roses. It was an exceptionally good year for blooms. The new assistant royal undergardener had
been right in his view that the older bushes should be uprooted and new ones put in their place. ‘Keeps the stock vigorous,’
he claimed.

But Astrid’s thoughts soon wandered to another, less happy subject. One with just as many thorns, but no blooms whatsoever.

She was now convinced that the proposed marriage to Lady Alexa was a terrible mistake. Everything about it felt wrong. Engelbert’s
unseemly rush for one thing; and Max’s denial that he knew Alexa at all. And then the convoluted reasons Hippolyte claimed
were behind this. Had Max really been seeing the woman for months? It seemed increasingly unlikely to the Queen.

But what could she do? Especially as, for his part, the King wanted the whole business concluded as soon as possible. A date
had even been fixed for Lady Alexa to visit them at the chateau.

But who was Lady Alexa, anyway? Astrid felt increasingly suspicious about that too. Yet she could hardly launch her own investigation;
it would take time, for one thing. And who would
help her? Max was speaking to no one. Engelbert, for his part, hardly cared who she was any more. He was happy with all the
publicity and desperate for the economic boost a royal marriage would bring to Sedona. He also wanted to settle the succession.
But did this justify forcing his son to do something he was obviously opposed to?

Something she had been forced to do herself, long ago.

She pressed both hands to her eyes as the memory flooded back.

The recollections that, over the intervening years, she had almost buried seemed now more alive than they had ever been. The
genie had escaped from the bottle; the only thing that had escaped, she reflected bitterly. That last night together, that
most secret of meetings. In the morning she was to leave her parents’ palace for Sedona and her marriage to Engelbert. He
had climbed up the drainpipe and swung over the balcony into her room, like Romeo after Juliet. She had let him make love
to her, knowing they would never see each other again.

Astrid pressed one long white hand against her forehead, as if to push away the pictures crowding in. That last evening when
they had clung to each other, knowing that it would be the final one.

They could not know how final. Shortly afterwards, he was dead, killed in a road accident in America. Astrid, the new Crown
Princess of Sedona by then, had had to hide her grief in the alcoves and corners of the chateau. Allowing anyone to see how
hysterically distraught she was would have provoked suspicion, as well as possibly endanger the baby, the new Crown Prince,
that she was by then carrying.

If Astrid shut her eyes, she could see her student lover: tall, dark, handsome and with those broad shoulders and deep-set
eyes. That smile. But increasingly, she no longer needed to shut her eyes. Her lover was not dead. He lived again, through
his son. She had given up the struggle to persuade herself that Max’s lofty dark looks were a reference to an earlier, taller
generation of
de Sedonas. The point at which she had admitted defeat was when the determination to be a vet had surfaced. Her lover had
been a medical student . . .

She made a final effort at devil’s advocacy. Was the resemblance just a coincidence? And even if it wasn’t, how could she
prove it?

The evening sun spread golden over the white walls of her room and burnished the gilt to a rich blaze. Still she sat there,
thinking. Eventually it sank behind the mountains, and as the yellow-coral sky deepened to lavender, the slender moon appeared.

Should she rock the royal boat? If he married Alexa, Maxim would become accustomed to his fate in time, just as she had to
hers. He would adapt. He would have to make do, as she had. Perfect happiness was not a condition members of royal families
should aspire to.

On the other hand, Alexa was not like Engelbert. Not in any way. He had become a good husband. Would Alexa become a good wife?
Astrid felt she knew the answer to that.

The hotel’s restaurant was magnificent, almost oppressively so, its painted ceiling busy with flowers and cupids and the business
of supporting an enormous, glittering crystal chandelier. The cavorting deities on the mosaic floor were obscured at regular
intervals by evenly spaced white-draped tables filled with silver, crystal and fashionable diners. The walls were ablaze with
gilt-framed mirrors intended to allow customers not only to check their appearance but also to spy on other diners unobserved.

As Alexa appeared at the door, there was a pause in the conversation. The faces behind the table candles swivelled in her
direction. Well, let them look, she thought proudly. Let them remember the first time they ever saw the future Crown Princess
of Sedona. The plan Barney had described to her this afternoon was audacious and even shocking. But precisely because of that,
it had the promise of real success.

Alexa stood proudly, knowing she looked breathtaking in her perfect evening gown. It was new; she had treated herself as they
moved from the apartment to the hotel. What did her credit card bills matter now?

The dress was absolutely black, long and plain, perfectly cut to fit flatteringly closely and made of a rich, thick material
somewhere between silk and satin. It was elegant, the furthest remove imaginable from her revealing outfit at Bigski’s party.
It was a dress fit for a princess.

Her shoes were – apart from the stunning six-inch platinum heel – as sober as the dress, and even more expensive. With her
hair high in an up-do fixed with a glittering pin Alexa felt every inch the royal. Probably more inches than Barney would
have preferred. Beside her, he looked short but proud in his new black tie. The light of satisfied self-congratulation shone
in his small blue eyes.

As she followed the fawning maître d’ to a table, Alexa was suddenly stopped. A hand at the end of a gold silk arm had shot
out and blocked her path.

‘Alexa, isn’t it?’ The voice was unmistakable. No one else had quite the same supercilious iciness to their tone.

Alexa looked down at the set mahogany features; the lips clamped together and trembling with emotion. ‘Lady Annabel!’ she
exclaimed in a high voice unlike her own. ‘What a pleasant surprise!’ She glanced at Florrie, who was sitting opposite yawning
extravagantly. Then amazement shot into her violet-blue eyes.

‘Omigod, it’s you, Heirfix. Didn’t recognise you in that getup.’

Alexa’s every nerve was so singing with tension she could almost hear it. What would her hated enemy do? Stand on the chair
and denounce her to the whole restaurant?

Her Ladyship’s well-shaped lip curled. ‘I saw the newspapers,’ she spat. ‘Don’t you think you’re setting your scheming sights
a
little
too high this time? Stealing the man intended for my daughter!’

She had, Alexa realised, mere seconds to save her entire future. Her devious brain whirred and clicked, searching desperately
for a solution.

Florrie looked up from the iPad parked by her bread roll. ‘Omigod, calm down, Ma,’ she said vaguely. ‘I didn’t want to marry
him anyway. Heirfix,’ she waved breezily at Alexa, ‘is welcome to him.’

Lady Annabel ignored this. Her nostrils flared and she was almost visibly snorting. It seemed to Alexa she might any moment
leap from her chair, dragging tablecloth, china and crystal in her wake, and charge her like an enraged bull. ‘I will,’ she
snarled, ‘be calling Their Majesties tomorrow morning to explain exactly who you are – or aren’t.’

Her mouth opening and shutting with terror, Alexa still sought the words to extricate herself from the greatest crisis of
her career. Then something small, pink-skinned and blue-eyed shimmered to her side.

‘My dear Lady Annabel!’ murmured Barney, kissing the redoubtable matron’s hand, which, as it was not offered, he had had to
bodily lift from the table and press to his lips.

Lady Annabel snatched it back and glared at him.

‘You know Alexa’s wonderful news, of course,’ Barney beamed. ‘She is to be married to Prince Maxim de Sedona!’

Lady Annabel’s diamond-studded fist slammed hard on the snowy-white linen of the table. She glared up at them both. ‘
Marriage!
I didn’t realise things had got that far!’

‘Oh yes,’ Barney twinkled merrily. ‘Alexa is meeting Their Majesties at the chateau the day after tomorrow.’

‘Never!’ Her Ladyship’s voice was so low and acid, Alexa felt it was burning her ears. ‘Not if
I’ve
got anything to do with it.’ Her brittle, tanned chest heaved violently up and down. ‘If you think I’m going to watch an
imposter . . .’ her eyes, brilliant with hate, turned on Alexa, ‘cheat my daughter out of a throne, you’re very much mistaken.’

Alexa felt her nerves about to snap. It took all her self-control to suppress the urge to scream hysterically. Barney, meanwhile,
placed a reassuring – or was it controlling? – hand on his adversary’s thin and somewhat crêpey brown arm. She shook his hand
off as if it were a toad.

‘Cheat, Lady Annabel?’ Barney sounded both hurt and astonished. ‘Far from it. You see, Alexa was very much hoping that if
–
when
,’ he corrected himself hurriedly, ‘the wedding comes to pass, your beautiful daughter Lady Florence . . .’ given his short
stature, the deep and chivalrous bow Barney now made
in Florrie’s direction caused him to disappear entirely from view for several seconds, ‘might do her the great honour of agreeing
to be her bridesmaid.’

Alexa’s fingers crept to her ears to protect her from the explosion she felt certain would come. What was Barney thinking
of? He was risking everything.

She cast a frantic glance round the restaurant; amazingly, the other diners seemed unaware of the near-nuclear drama. Candles
were burning steadily. Waiters in buttermilk jackets glided about bearing silver domes and trays.

Lady Annabel was ashen with anger beneath her tan. ‘
Bridesmaid?
’ she repeated, in much the same manner as Lady Bracknell mentioned handbags. ‘Never!’

She stood up and towered over Barney in her bronze heels. ‘Lady Florence,’ she snarled, placing her face close to his, ‘is
the daughter of an earl, descendant of a long and noble line. There is absolutely no possibility that she would ever—’

‘Such a shame,’ Barney cut in smoothly. ‘Because of course Prince Maxim has a younger brother, Prince Giacomo, who at the
moment remains unmarried and extremely eligible.’ He paused briefly. ‘And I’m sure Their Majesties would be only too delighted
if someone as beautiful and socially elevated as Lady Florence were in the frame . . .’ He let the rest of the sentence drift
elegantly.