She looked over her shoulder at him, her eyes wide. “That was fast.”
“The hard part’s done, anyway. I still need to drown it in antibiotic ointment, then bandage it.”
“Thank you,” she said, and then waited, as if she wanted him to say something.
So he did. Even as he reached for the ointment and gauze that he’d already picked out for her bandage. “When I kissed you,” he told her, “I wasn’t thinking about Ted.”
“I wasn’t either,” she said. “Because—”
He cut her off before she got off up to speed with her explanation, because why really didn’t matter. “But we should’ve been. Especially you. And part of me is freaked out. My judge-y inner grandpa, I believe you call it. The part of me that’s a traditionalist. The part that learned right and wrong—without a lot of wiggle room—from my grandmother. So I’m not sure how to process the fact that you weren’t thinking about him. That you were so okay with kissing someone else when just a few days back you were on the verge of getting engaged to him.”
Tasha shook her head, no. “But you’re not someone else and I wasn’t... I mean, I was, but I wasn’t...” She took a deep breath and started again as he opened the paper wrappers on the gauze. “It wasn’t going to be a real engagement. Ted and I had a... well, I know this sounds insane but... it was a business arrangement.”
Okay, he wasn’t sure what he was expecting her to say, but it certainly wasn’t that.
She kept going. “His mother was pushing all these women at him—women who would make acceptable—” she gave the word air quotes “—wives for the crown prince. And God, it just really exhausted him. He hated it. He wanted her to stop, so... I was working as his personal assistant—we’re friends, but I needed a part-time job so he paid me to organize his life.”
Thomas remembered hearing about Tash’s assistant job from Mia, and disapproving—yo, Judge Gramps—because, in his opinion, she’d clearly settled badly, in terms of her post-college career. Now he just let her continue as he opened the gauze pads he’d chosen.
“But then this gossip blog posted a picture of us together—we were laughing at something—and they were all Who’s the redheaded vixen wrapping Prince Tedric around her little finger? or something equally ridiculous and demeaning, and he got the brilliant idea to just run with it. And after that worked so well, he decided what he really needed was to get engaged. You know, to shut his mother down even more completely. So we set this up. But it’s a hundred percent pretend. It’s like, I’m playing at being a princess again. We live together, yeah, but we have our own bedrooms—Ted snores.” She shook her head, as if annoyed with herself as he attached the bandage to her arm with tape. “But that’s not... What I mean is, we don’t sleep together.” She got even more precise. “We don’t have sex. We’ve never had sex. We’re friends.”
Friends. Pretending to be lovers.
As he helped her pull her bathrobe back up and over the gauze, Tasha added, “We play to the cameras, to annoy his mother. And to fool the world. That’s all it is.”
Play to the cameras. That video Thomas had seen, where she’d seemed to look directly at the paparazzi’s camera before giving the prince a Hollywood-worthy PDA...
Suddenly it made sense.
And yet.
“It sounds like something straight out of a rom-com,” he said.
“I know, right...? But that’s totally Ted’s MO. He’s... quirky and eccentric is the way you’re described when you’re next in line to be the king.” She’d tightly refastened the front tie of her robe, and had already slipped down off the stool to rifle through the first-aid kit for bandages for her knees. “So that’s why I wasn’t thinking about Ted. Because our relationship isn’t real. Outside of our friendship. Which of course is real.”
Thomas went back to the sink to wash his hands again. She was talking about this crazy arrangement—about Ted—carefully. Choosing her words to make sure he understood, instead of just letting the truth fly in her normal ebullient manner.
Either it was tremendously important to her that he believe what she was telling him—the caveman part of his brain liked that—or...
She wasn’t telling him quite all of the truth.
You’re leaving something out. If their roles were reversed, she wouldn’t have let it slide. She would’ve said that to him. Directly.