aren’t talking about Christian and Clementine,” I muse out loud. “I don’t care what the headlines say about them. They’re in love. And if they aren’t, don’t tell me. It would be too hard to design their biscuits if I knew it was a fractured fairy tale.”
“Oh, God, no, not those two—they’re sickeningly in love,” Xander says. “So are Liz and Roman. All real, I assure you.”
I exhale and pretend to wipe the sweat off my brow. “Thank goodness. I wanted to believe they were all real.”
We walk in silence for a moment as his cottage grows closer.
“Don’t you want to know the real scandals?” Xander asks, his voice laced with surprise.
“No. Not today, anyway. You don’t know me well enough to share your family secrets with me. You have to be cautious with what you tell people, and I respect that. I don’t need to know. It’s not my business.”
Xander abruptly stops walking and gently puts his hand on my arm to bring me to a stop, too.
I suck in a breath the second his fingers grasp the fabric of my white trench coat, his tanned skin a beautiful contrast to the stark fabric. The mere sensation of his hand on my arm sends a heat burning through my skin.
“You are such a breath of fresh air,” Xander says, the words tumbling out of his mouth, and I sense this is a rare, unguarded moment for him. “Everything about you is contrary to all the women I’ve known before. You haven’t presented an image of yourself to me with a goal of trapping me. You don’t laugh at everything I say or agree with me at every turn. You’ve challenged me, and I’ve only known you for a bit more than a day. Now I’ve practically opened the door to Buckingham Palace for you, and you didn’t even peek inside. Hell, you walked right on by without blinking. And all I can think as I stand here is how bloody lucky I am that I get to be with you this evening.”
The heat from his touch now turns to a warmth in my body that is purely fuelled by happiness. Xander wants to be around me, exactly as I am. With my narratives and biscuit artist career and all the things he’s discovering about me, he enjoys me.
As much as I enjoy him.
I smile up at him, as I can’t contain the joy that is bubbling up inside of me.
“Well, I have other things I want to know. More important things. Like why are you wearing a Stonebridge United hat?”
Xander glances down at me. “You really don’t pay attention to my news coverage, do you?”
I flush. He flashes me a brilliant smile.
“I’ll explain as we walk,” he says.
We continue on.
“I did a charity event with Stonebridge United last month,” Xander explains. “It’s to support a new initiative of making fitness accessible to everyone. It’s part of the House of Chadwick Charities, our foundation which pulls the squad together for our initiatives. We all support each other, but right now, the most active members are Christian and Clementine, Liz and Roman, and me. We each focus on a different area to have the greatest impact, and now that I’ve left the military, I’ve had to think about what causes I want to support. It had to be a genuine fit, or I’d have a long, miserable life supporting it as the Prince of Wales.”
We round the path, and his cottage is not far ahead.
“So, I thought about the things that matter to me, and I’ve always been athletic. I love sport and fitness and working out, and I thought about how lucky I was to have all these things accessible to me for my entire life. How sport has helped me stay fit, both physically and mentally. It levels the playing field. Or makes it worse. Some guys came at me harder because I am royalty. But I welcomed it. Nobody was handling me with kid gloves, and it was damn liberating.”
I sense how much Xander craves any bit of normality that has come into his life. From the potato smiley faces when he was little to peers wanting to rough him up and make him prove himself. In these small confessions, I see how different his life as a royal truly is from that of anyone else in the world.
“Anyway,” he continues as we head towards the cottage, “I thought about how I wanted everyone to have access to