“Am I to take it that I win this one, too?” Nick asked. “Do you need to count books of condolence?”
“Congratulations. You’re both heroes. Now knock it off,” I snapped.
“This is a stupid conversation anyway,” Freddie grumbled, flopping back onto the sofa.
“It’s little wonder I’ve chosen to make my life with a woman,” Bea said. “We don’t need to measure anything and then overcompensate.”
She swept out of the room. Then we heard her stop and curse as she briefly forgot which way the kitchen was. Our laughter broke the tension.
“I apologize,” Nick said to the rest of us. “We should not have made you sit through that when Gaz’s pastry work is in the offing.”
“No harm done, but let’s move on in there and give him the rave reviews he so desperately desires,” Cilla said as we all scooped up our cocktails.
Freddie sidled up to me. “I’m sorry, too, Bex,” he said. “We got carried away.”
“Thanks, Fred, but I’ve got this,” Nick said, and slung an arm around my shoulders.
“Aye, aye, captain.” Freddie saluted sarcastically before heading toward dinner.
“Don’t make the damn apology a competition, too,” I hissed at Nick, pushing his arm off. “I am over you two trying to outdo each other like we’re in some kind of stupid Royal Usefulness Pageant or something.”
“But I look so dashing in a sash,” Nick teased.
“No. Don’t you do that twinkly thing,” I said. “Go. I’ll be there in a second.”
Lacey and I watched him walk off, and then she shook her head slowly.
“They’re never going to work this out themselves, are they?” I asked. It was a rhetorical question. “Eleanor was right. It is going to come down to me.”
In truth, I’d trusted that once I got the boys talking again, their natural pull—those years of being each other’s constant—would take over and do the rest. But I’d been fooling myself. We were deep in some insidious psychological muck. It was unfair to make me be the one to start digging us out of it when they were fully capable of picking up a shovel, but I’d underestimated how stubborn two grown men could be.
Lacey walked over and entwined her arm with mine. “Happy birthday, Bex,” she said. “For once, I’m glad I’m not in your shoes.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Nick apologized profusely once the party wound down and we were curled up in the floral fiasco that was our master bedroom. He said all the expected things—he was deranged from lack of sleep, he loved me, he had not meant to sideline my birthday—and I knew he meant them, but none of it got to the heart of why I was upset. Simply put, I was embarrassed, both by him and for him. He and Freddie had sounded like the worst, most shallow versions of themselves—which I told him, sharply, and he agreed, before giving me my birthday present: a case of Cubs-branded wine and two shatterproof glasses for drinking it on our terrace. It seemed bitchy to keep yelling at him after that.
But as Nick fell more deeply into work, I fretted that he’d sidestepped my point instead of absorbing it. He accepted assignments like he was on a mission to out-king the regent himself, and when Richard responded by putting Freddie out on the trail in kind, it redoubled Nick’s desire to keep his nose to the royal grindstone. My hat was off to Prince Dick: He knew how to keep both his sons at a boil that suited his PR needs. If this was a snapshot of how Richard would run things when he really was king, the whole line would die out of exhaustion. It made me doubly antsy because of how far Nick and Freddie and I were drifting away from each other; it wasn’t so much two and one anymore, as Freddie had once described our former trio to me, but more like one and one and one—three points of a triangle with so much empty space in between.
Instead of cracking skulls to get everyone in sync again, I decided to take a warmer, fuzzier tack. I hadn’t celebrated a proper Thanksgiving in England since the year Nick and I first hooked up, when I’d gone to meet him at Windsor Castle and he’d ended a private tour—and accordingly, the platonic portion of our relationship—with a feast he’d arranged based