even if Leo wasn’t just weeks away from announcing his engagement to someone else—well, that fact didn’t change the other fact, which was that it had still been the best date Edvin had ever been on. A fact that was true even with the horrid paparazzi interruption at the end, where Edvin had been even more terrified of saying the wrong thing and embarrassing his prince than he’d been of the vicious harpy who’d been so cruel to him.
Er, the prince, Edvin meant, obviously.
Well, one of them, at least… but definitely Edvin’s favorite one.
“What time is he going to be here?” Astrid, his youngest sister, asked as she burst into his bedroom without knocking (as always) and just about gave him a heart attack.
“Soon,” Edvin said, an answer that elevated his pulse rate to alarming levels, because—
“Oh my God, Eddie, why don’t you have a shirt on yet?” Astrid shrieked, pushing him aside to riffle through the six shirts lying on the bed that he’d already rejected for being just as boring as Hans had found Edvin himself to be. Astrid obviously agreed. She huffed indignantly, then whirled to face his minuscule closet. “Tilde,” she hollered, calling for their seventeen-year-old sister. “Eddie doesn’t have anything good to wear! Go get something from Ollie’s room!”
Well, yes, that was true, he didn’t. And that was part of the reason he felt like he might faint, but also—
“Eddie can’t wear Ollie’s stuff,” Tilde said, poking her head into his room with a furrowed brow. “He’s too skinny. Ow.”
Oliver had come up behind her and cuffed her on the back of the head.
“O-O-Ollie,” Edvin said sternly, giving his brother a look that had no effect whatsoever… possibly because Edvin couldn’t quite pull off stern with the way his stomach was jumping and twisting at the idea of seeing Leo again.
Oh Lord. He was about to see Leo again.
“What?” Oliver grinned unrepentantly. “She called me fat.”
“Did not.”
“Did too.”
“Did not.”
“Children,” Astrid, the youngest of all of them, shouted, jumping up onto Edvin’s bed. “Focus. Prince Leopold van Rosavia is taking our brother on another date, and Eddie needs something to wear.”
“It-It-It’s not a date,” Edvin said as flutters exploded inside him. “He just needs my… my help.”
“He sent you flowers from the royal gardens, Eddie,” Linnea said, appearing in the doorway behind Tilde.
Eddie’s cheeks flushed. It was true, and it may or may not have made him swoon a little, but the flowers had been sent—brought to the door by a stuffy-looking man wearing the palace crest and accompanied by a horrid-tasting but surprisingly effective “hangover cure”—as a sweet but totally unnecessary apology for the way their dinner had ended. Not as… well, not as anything else.
“And he had lunch delivered for you at the library,” Oliver said, arching a brow as Linnea pushed both him and Tilde into the room, then followed after, making it suddenly feel like a sardine can.
Linnea squeezed past her siblings to get to Edvin’s closet, grinning over her shoulder as she added a gleeful, “All week!”
Edvin smiled before he could help it. Because okay, yes, that… that part was also true. Leo had done all of that. And it had been sort of amazing. He’d also kept up, maybe even stepped up, sending chatty little messages to Edvin’s phone, had dispatched a tutor from the palace to help Astrid with the biology homework that Edvin had felt so inadequate to help her with the other night, had somehow expedited Tilde’s university applications, had arranged for someone called Mabel from the royal gardens to get in touch with Linnea and give her some tips on how to save the roses she’d been trying to nurse along on their postage-stamp-sized balcony, and had even, Edvin suspected although Leo had denied it, topped up Oliver’s tram pass account. Although how he’d known that Edvin was short that month due to an unexpected school field trip emergency for Astrid, he had no idea.
But basically, Leo was well on his way to making the entire Blom family fall for him, so it was Edvin’s job to keep a level head and remind them all that it was… it was just… that their date today… no, the lunch Leo had asked Edvin to join him for, was only because…
Well, honestly, Edvin wasn’t sure why the prince had gone out of his way for all of them like that, but since he did have another appointment with the prince—one he felt a little guilty about looking forward