“Jesus Christ on a cracker! Lucy Rhodes! You saw Crown Jewels with your two own eyes?”
“My vagina’s eyes. First hand account.” I cover my face with both hands, leaning my lower back against the top step as I crack up.
“You’re grinning like the Cheshire Cat!”
“Am I?” I’m blushing, too.
“So he was good. Amazing. How on Earth…?”
I shrug, then hop up, practically skipping to my lounge chair. “It just happened.”
“Holy fucking cow! I need the details. Right now!”
I’m surprised to find I’m glad to give them. It feels good to have a story of my own for once. It feels good to…live…I guess is what I did last night. That Bryce was there, well, all the better.
When I left Liam’s room, I found that it was being guarded by his own security detail.
“It was kind of like a fairy tale,” I tell her smugly.
“What a lucky little ho.”
I stick my tongue out, but I can’t help grinning.
I spend the next hour re-hashing every detail, from my Bryce freak-out to the way Prince Liam played with my hair.
“I know it sounds insane. It just felt right, though. He was just…I don’t know. He made me feel safe.”
Amelia smiles over the rim of her Manhattan. “This makes my day.”
“It was just a one-night stand.” Even so, I’m still riding my high a few hours later when Char and Maggie drag themselves outside, both in dark sunglasses, chasing Advil with Gatorade.
Within five minutes of their arrival, everybody knows almost everything. It’s embarrassing. It’s ridiculous. It’s fabulous.
“I almost want to see your pussy, Luce. Like, get its autograph or something,” Charley grins.
“That’s super gross, and no way.”
As I’m getting up to flip from front to back on my chair, Maggie jumps up from her seat, walking to the lawn’s edge with her phone pressed to her ear. We’re still discussing just how beautiful the crown jewels were when she turns back toward us, phone in hand. Her face is slightly pale, her mouth gaping.
“Oh God,” Charley says, at the same time I say, “What’s wrong?”
She shakes her head, waving her phone around. “Everybody sit down. And don’t worry. Nothing that bad. Just…” she blinks, “surprising. Luce, down on your ass.”
I sink onto my chair. “What?”
Maggie’s eyebrows shoot up. “Bryce,” she says sharply, “is in the ICU. He got his ass kicked last night. On the beach behind the Parsons’ place.”
My heart rises up into my throat, where it flutters for a sick second, then sinks slowly into my belly. “What happened?”
Maggie shakes her head. “Nobody knows. That was Dec on the phone. He’s being very strange about it. But it wasn’t him. I mean…” She chews her lip.
“I guess you’re his witness,” Amelia murmurs.
“Lucy, were you with Prince Liam then?” Mags asks me.
I nod, and don’t correct them when I realize that I wasn’t. Not all night, anyway. I woke up at 4:15 alone in Liam’s room and didn’t leave until close to 5. When I stepped into the hall, one of his guards told me he had something urgent come up and was sorry that he had to go. I figured it was probably what he had them tell all the one-night stands, but it didn’t put a damper on my spirits.
“I heard Bryce has been gambling,” Charley says. “Since he’s been here, since he got here yesterday. I wonder if he lost a hand.”
Amelia shrugs, her lips pulled downward. “What goes around comes around.” That’s how I know she loves me, that my super sweet best friend would say something so callous. “I’m just glad it wasn’t me, because it might have been.”
“Karma’s a bitch,” Charley agrees, picking her cuticle.
Maggie’s still looking down at her phone, now texting. “Luce,” she glances up, “Dec says the cops may ask you questions. Just because…” She shrugs.
No need to spell it out; we all know why.
I nod, and Maggie’s head bows again.
“He says tell them security footage has you upstairs with ‘your guest’—” she rolls her eyes— “until 6:10 a.m.”
“But that’s not right,” Amelia says.
My stomach tightens.
Maggie’s eyes find mine.
“Did you see Bryce?” Charley asks me. “Did Prince Liam see you see Bryce?”
I shake my head. But he’d seen me lose my shit.
“He knew something, didn’t he?” Amelia asks. That girl can read me like a book.
“Does he have a blue and white jet?” Maggie asks me.
“How would I know?” I stand up, pressing my martini glass against my hot cheek.
“One left earlier today. Eastward bound,” Mags says. I was leaving Dec’s house then. That’s when I saw it. Isn’t the Isle of Gael’s flag white and navy blue?”
My mind is spinning.
“I’m not going to say that would be romantic,” Maggie starts.
“I’m not going to say knight in shining armor, either,” Amelia puts in.
“Lucy, did you give some killer head…or like…what happened?” Char can’t stop the grin from spreading over her face.
I squeeze my eyes shut, rubbing my temples. “You guys. I need a nap, I think.”
“I think the prince just avenged your honor, darlin’,” Maggie drawls.
I don’t know what to think. But I know how I feel. That night, I dream of him draped over me, his body like a shield. When I wake up in the morning, I realize that I didn’t take my Ambien. I slept all night.
*
We spend three weeks in Southampton, like old times. A few days after we find out about Bryce, Maggie lets me know the police won’t be coming my way, and Bryce is going to recover. No one mentions him again, and I don’t think about him too much. Only on the tail end of a thought about Prince Liam.
I can’t imagine a cosmic purpose behind our encounter at Dec’s party—other than my own healing. We barely talked, and yet we slept together and shared amazing sex. He was dominant but not dominating, gentle but not patronizing, kind but not phony. He left his guards by my door and went and did something no one else would have been able to do: he kicked Bryce’s ass.
Who would make Liam pay? The authorities in his country? Yeah, right.
The press has yet to get wind of the story, but in our circle, everybody knows Prince Liam did it.
As I walk through the Denver International Airport, clutching Grey’s cat carrier to my chest while I stride along one of those moving conveyer belts, I pass a man holding what I swear is a picture of Prince Liam. I turn slightly as his belt whisks him in the opposite direction, and I notice there’s some animal in the background. A horse? It must be a horse mag. The Isle of Gael is known for breeding horses.
I probably have almost all the popular horse magazines waiting for me in the mailbox at my place in Estes, but I stop at an airport bookstore anyway. Turns out, there’s a whole wall devoted to magazines. I find Liam’s gorgeous, bestubbled face smirking at me from beneath a cowboy hat on the cover of The Competitive Equestrian.
So yeah, I will have this at home. And I’m totally buying it here and now.