Falling in love with Connor had been a breathless, heart-stopping whirlwind. While this—whatever it was between her and Teddy—didn’t stop her heart or crush the air from her lungs.

He made her pulse race faster, made it easier to breathe. As if she’d been trapped in a sealed room and now someone had finally thrown open a window.

Teddy had started to move off the bed, but Beatrice shook her head. “Stay. Just to sleep,” she pleaded. “I wasn’t lying about the nightmares.”

He hesitated, but leaned back onto the pillows.

Beatrice yawned and nestled herself against him, her head tucked onto his chest. Teddy shifted one arm carefully around her, playing idly with the strands of her hair; as if this weren’t strange or new or unusual, as if they’d done it a thousand times before. Within minutes Beatrice’s breaths had evened out, and she drifted to sleep, safe in the circle of his embrace.

For the first time in months, she slept through the night.

Nina started toward the palace’s front drive with weary resignation.

When she got to the party tonight, she’d been so worried about Ethan—and what she would say once she saw him—that for once she hadn’t really panicked about the prospect of running into Jeff.

All week she had been replaying that kiss in her head. She’d been too nervous to text Ethan, figuring that this was the type of conversation they should have in person. Then, when he hadn’t shown up at journalism class, she’d assumed he was avoiding her: that he wanted to pretend the whole thing was a drunken mistake and move on.

But what if Sam was right, and he was only staying away out of loyalty to Jeff?

Nina sighed when she saw the line that snaked around the front steps, unruly partygoers all waiting for one of the palace’s courtesy cars. This always happened when the twins’ parties ended too abruptly.

Earlier, after her talk with Sam, she’d gone back to the party and circled the dance floor in search of Ethan. But then Sam and Marshall had decided to go and make out in the pool, and now the party was rapidly disintegrating. Nina had offered to stay the night—so she would be there when Sam had to face tomorrow’s social media firestorm—but Sam kept insisting that this was precisely what she’d meant to do. She was acting like none of it bothered her, but Nina knew better.

She blinked, startled, when moonlight glinted on raven-dark hair at the front of the portico.

“Ethan!”

Before she could think better of it, she’d stepped off the sidewalk and was trotting down the driveway toward him. He paused, one hand poised on the car door, to glance uncertainly back at Nina.

“Hey,” she breathed, tucking a strand of hair behind one ear. She felt tentative and eager and uncertain all at once, as if she were standing on the edge of a precipice and wanted desperately to jump off.

“Can I get a ride? I mean—we’re going to the same place, right?”

After a beat of hesitation, Ethan stepped aside, holding open the door for her. “Sure. Of course,” he said gruffly.

“Thanks.” Nina slid into the backseat, and Ethan followed.

“King’s College,” he told the driver.

The car turned obediently out of the driveway, and here they were, the two of them alone at last.

As they reached the edge of John Jay Park, light flickered over the tinted windows, the sharp beams of other cars’ headlights crisscrossing the lazy glow of streetlamps. A tense, taut silence stretched between them.

“I was looking for you tonight,” she said at last.

“Really?” Ethan gave one of his usual careless shrugs. “It was a crowded party. That tent definitely isn’t meant for the kind of dancing I saw inside.”

“Come on, Ethan, don’t act like we aren’t—like we didn’t—” She flushed, but went on with more certainty. “We should talk about what happened last weekend.”

“Nina…” There was a note of warning in his tone, but something else, too, that sounded almost like yearning.

“Ethan, I like you.”

Nina hardly recognized herself. Sam was always the one who wore her emotions on her sleeve, while Nina usually poured every ounce of energy into concealing those feelings, even from the people who actually needed to hear them.

Yet here she was, professing her feelings for Ethan—and the words had come out so easily, as if they’d been shaken loose from deep within her.

“I like you, too.”

At those words, Nina looked over, trying to catch his gaze in the darkened car. But his features were inscrutable as ever.

“I know it’s weird, and a little complicated—”

“More than a little,” Ethan said under his breath.

“But I also know that I don’t feel this way very often.” Only once before, in fact. Nina shoved that thought aside. “I understand if you can’t go there, because of Jeff. But for what it’s worth, I’ve really liked hanging out with you lately. Last weekend…” Nina’s pulse was going haywire. She realized that she was drawing a line in the sand—that they could have gone on pretending that last weekend was a drunken mistake, until now.

She took a deep breath. “I think there’s something here, and whatever it is, I want to give it a shot.”

Was it wrong of her to feel this way about Ethan when she had loved Jeff for so many years?

But that was the thing—she had loved Jeff since they were children, and her love for him had never really matured. It had always been a little girl’s love. Nina had never even questioned why she loved Jeff; she had just taken it as a given.

If she hadn’t been blinded by Jeff in all his dazzling princely glory, she might have noticed Ethan so much sooner.

She felt him shifting, sliding into the middle seat between them. His eyes blazed as if he was searching for something in her face.

Whatever he saw made him reach some decision, because he leaned away. “You shouldn’t want to be with me,” he said heavily. “There’s no need for you to get wrapped up in all my mess. If you only knew…”

“Knew what, Ethan?” she exclaimed, frustrated. “That you’re irritating and insufferable and also smart as hell? That you’re my ex-boyfriend’s best friend, and being with me would violate some kind of bro code? That you gave me the most intense kiss of my life and then went completely silent all week?” Nina clenched her hands tighter in her lap. “I already know all that, and I’m still here!”

Ethan hesitated. Nina could feel the weight of his conflicted emotions, and for an instant, she wondered if she should be worried. Then he leaned forward, and her concerns evaporated.

“I want to try this, too,” he said hoarsely. “No matter how complicated or selfish it is of me to say that.”

He reached for her hand, lacing their fingers. Even in the darkness, Nina could see that he was smiling.

“What?” she demanded.

“The most intense kiss of your life?” he repeated, sounding unmistakably smug.

Nina’s heart pounded against her rib cage. “To be absolutely certain, I’d need another data point,” she said, and now she was smiling, too. “For scientific accuracy.”

“Well, if it’s for the sake of science,” Ethan agreed, and leaned in to kiss her.

Nina stopped worrying about how reckless and wrong this was, or whether it would hurt Jeff, or whether she was making a mistake. There wasn’t room in her mind to think of anything but Ethan.

Unsurprisingly, Sam was summoned to her mother’s study the next morning.

When she knocked at the door, Robert Standish answered. He gave Sam a disdainful nod before settling into a wingback chair. Queen Adelaide—wearing a cream-colored top and a loose scarf, her hair tucked behind her usual crocodile headband—sat behind her desk, scrolling in silent shock through her tablet.

The queen’s study was in the opposite wing of the palace from the monarch’s, a holdover from previous centuries, when couples had married for political alliances and wanted to spend their days as far from each other as possible. It was a smaller, more intimate room, with pale blue wallpaper and delicate furniture. Queen Adelaide, like most royals, still corresponded by hand; Sam saw that her desk was littered with notes, from Sandringham and Drottningholm Palace and Peterhof and the Neues Palais.

“Well, Samantha,” her mom began. “When I planned to leave town this weekend, I certainly didn’t expect that I would have to fly back this morning because lewd photos of my daughter are all over the internet.” She held up her tablet, her voice low and vicious as she read various headlines aloud. “?‘Princess Wet and Wild.’ ‘A Bad Heir Day.’?”

In the photos, Sam’s legs were wrapped around Marshall’s waist, his hands splayed on her lower back. She hadn’t been wearing a bra, and the soaking white halter dress clung to her with all the modesty of a wet tissue. She might as well have been photographed naked, given how little was left to the imagination.

Sam waited for a flush of outrage, but all she felt was a weary disappointment. She’d expected her so-called friends to leak images of her and Marshall. And they had surpassed even her expectations.