Royal Match by Parker Swift (10)

I can’t believe you, like, come here for dinner sometimes.” Daphne was looking out the window of the car, nose glued to the glass as Lloyd pulled onto the grounds of Kensington Palace.

“You’re coming here for dinner,” I pointed out.

“Yeah, with you guys,” Daphne scoffed and pointed accusingly at Dylan and me, as though this was somehow something we’d done to her. “I feel like I’m on one of those reality shows, like Punk’d or The Great British Baking Show.”

“How do you figure?” asked Dylan, smirking. Daphne’s bizarre humor was both a source of confusion and delight, but Dylan knew better than to get between me and my girl.

“Like, I’m going to be tossed out if my treacle isn’t sticky enough or my sponge doesn’t bounce. Oh, what would you know?” she said with playful disdain towards Dylan. “Stuffy earl. Always knowing which fork is which.”

“Duke,” Dylan corrected in mock offense. “You have nothing to worry about, Daphne. First off, this one,” he said, pointing conspiratorially to me, “once starting clearing the plates at a formal dinner at Buckingham Palace—”

“I was nervous! The First Lady was there!” I put my hands on my hips and dropped my jaw, not believing he was outing me. Daphne, meanwhile, was laughing her ass off. “Oh, fuck off, the two of you.” I sat back in my seat, and Dylan lovingly put his arm around me, pulled me towards him, and kissed the top of my head. He began drawing circles on my hip. The dark blue fabric of my dress felt soft against my skin, and I found myself wanting to draw myself closer to him, wishing we were alone.

Inside Caroline and Zach’s private home, there was a bartender, and waiters walked about with hot hors d’oeuvres, which I was shamefully indulging in every time they passed. And there was a long dinner table set, covered in candles, wineglasses, and vases overflowing with flowers of various heights. It looked like a dream.

“Hello there.” Caroline approached with Zach and another man in tow. The man was just a hair taller than the already tall Zach. A bit broader in the shoulders, but with the same thick hair, only cut shorter, more refined. And he had a panty-melting smile. Man, what a pair of brothers. “Lydia, Dylan, may I introduce Zach’s brother, Nick. Nick’s in town from New York,” she added, looking and me and Daphne.

I reached out to shake his hand and say hello, but Nick’s gaze was not on me or Dylan. It was doggedly fixed on Daphne, who was blushing in a way I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen anyone blush before. Then, she started to laugh. Daphne was odd for sure, but this was beyond. Then Nick started laughing.

Dylan leaned down to quietly whisper in my ear, “Am I missing something?”

“I literally have zero idea what is happening now.”

“Hi there,” Nick said to Daphne, still laughing. “How’s the Peace Corps treating you?”

Daphne looked at me, and as realization dawned, I nearly lost my balance laughing. “This is Peace Corps Guy?”

Daphne’s hands were covering her face, and she was still laughing.

“All right,” Caroline said, “This requires drinks.” She signaled a waiter to bring over some drinks, and I caught Dylan subtly talking to him, surely asking him to bring me something nonalcoholic. “Now then, full marks for surprise and all, but stop fannying about and tell us what is going on.”

“Peace Corps?” asked Dylan, eyebrow raised. I could tell he felt like he was about to get some great dirt on Daphne, something that he could tease her about for weeks.

Daphne opened her mouth, but Nick took a glass of scotch from the tray and chimed in first, still looking at her. “About six months ago, I was just coming off an on-call shift at the hospital, and decided to join a friend at a bar across Seventy-Seventh street. It was a Friday—”

“Saturday,” Daphne chimed in.

“Saturday,” Nick corrected. “So I’m at the bar, waiting for a drink, and this tiny girl with a mane of blond hair in a scrap of a dress puts two fingers in her mouth and whistles at the bartender something fierce. The entire bar stopped to look, myself included.” I looked at Daphne, and she’d removed her hands from her face and was now just staring twinkly eyed at Nick. “So, obviously I had to buy her drink.”

“I bought your drink,” Daphne corrected. Nick just shrugged, smiling.

“Yes, well, we get to talking, and then she tells me how it’s her last night in New York for two years. That the next morning, she’s leaving for the Philippines, and she just wants one crazy night. And then—”

“Okay,” Daphne said, “that’s probably enough of this story.”

But Nick held up his finger, giving the universal just-one-minute sign. “Well, let’s just say you can imagine my surprise when, a month later, I found myself in line for a coffee next to this one, who was dressed in a suit and barking very fierce orders to someone on the other end of her cell phone about a legal brief. Busted.” The smile on Nick’s face as he outed my best friend’s ridiculous lie was one of delight—not spiteful delight, adoring delight.

“And from what I heard,” I jumped in, “the second she saw you, she dropped her coffee and ran out of the coffee shop.”

“Ran,” Nick confirmed. “Which was too bad, because I would have asked for her number.” We all just stood for a moment in awkward silence, watching Nick and Daphne watch each other. Then Nick seemed to regain his awareness and turned to me, hand out. “Nick Washington.”

“Lydia Hale,” I responded, and then turned to Dylan. “And this is my husband, Dylan.”

The rest of the introductions were made, and we siphoned off. No one was surprised that Daphne and Nick decided to park themselves in a corner near the bar.

We spent the next hour circling the room with our drinks and doing what everyone did at wedding events—talk about other weddings. I ended up in a too-long conversation with Caroline’s younger brother, Prince Richard, and his wife, Jemma, about the trees they’d had brought into Westminster Abbey for their own wedding. Thankfully we were interrupted by a butler announcing dinner.

We had staff at Humboldt—primarily Mrs. Barnes, the housekeeper, as well as some others—but they felt like family. The lines between “upstairs” and “downstairs,” so to speak, felt very blurred. It was only at Caroline’s where the divide still felt so stark—it was easy to forget when we were chatting alone, but she was a princess, and she had a freaking butler, who wore a suit and bowed when opening the door.

I was moving towards the dining room when the baby kicked me right in the ribs. I couldn’t help but hunch over, grab my belly, and wince in pain. But I accidentally grabbed my belly with the hand containing my drink, and as a result spilled the entire contents of the glass right onto my dress, and onto the floor. This was the last thing I needed.

“Oh my god, your water broke!” Jemma’s voice shrieked loudly from behind me, and then I felt even more liquid at my feet. I turned and realized that in her panic, she had dropped her drink. “Oh, oh, oh! She’s in labor!” Jemma, in all of her dramatic flair, began backing towards the couch while kind of flailing her arms.

“No, no, no,” I started to say, but by now Daphne had my arm, was staring at the puddle in which I was standing, and had started speaking at a crazy determined lawyer pace into my ear.

“Lydia, you’re going to be fine. We’ve got this. You’re going to be great.”

“I’m not in labor.” I said steadily, trying for some reason to be at least one person in this situation not shouting.

“Lydia, I know it’s scary, but your water broke,” Daphne said sweetly, as though I were somehow delusional about my labor status. Christ.

Then I heard someone shouting Dylan’s name over my head—Zach. “Lydia’s in labor, man.”

“What!” Dylan’s booming voice came from over my shoulder, and within seconds I felt his arms swoop around me from behind. The chatter of the entire room had gone up about thirty notches, and I could swear I heard someone talk about boiling water. How had I ended up in the twilight zone?

“Oh for fuck’s sake!” I shouted. Thankfully everyone stopped, and the only people I could see were Dylan, because he was leaning over me from behind, and oddly Nick, who was kneeling in front of me. What the fuck?

“I spilled my drink,” I said as calmly as possible. “I am not in labor.”

“Lydia,” Dylan said in his warning tone, as though I were denying I was in labor just so I could what, be polite? Had everyone lost their minds?

“I’m not in labor!”

“I still think Nick should take a look,” Daphne said from my side. “He’s an OB.”

“You are?” I said, looking down at Nick, who was weirdly sniffing a napkin.

“This is ginger ale, not amniotic fluid. Your water hasn’t broken,” he said, looking at me sympathetically.

“Yeah, I know that.”

“But I can take a look if it would make you feel better,” he added.

“No,” I said at the exact time that Dylan and Daphne said, “Yes.” Was Dylan kidding me with this? I was already completely mortified. My dress was soaked. My feet hurt. My hair was falling around my face, and I felt flushed and crowded.

I looked around the room now that people had calmed down. Caroline, a true professional at being graceful and accommodating, had stepped back, letting my husband and a doctor attend to the situation and quietly urging people into the dining room, god bless her. All that needed to happen was to get this evening back on track—the last thing I wanted was even another two minutes of conversation in which I was convincing my overprotective husband and best friend that I wasn’t pregnant. To that end, I took a deep breath and did what I would call taking one for the team.

“Fine,” I said, trying to mask my frustration. “Nick, could you please confirm that I’m not, in fact, in labor.”

He looked from me to Dylan, who was looking at me with such concern and care and bewilderment, with his eyes creased in worry, that my anger towards him melted away. My dominant controlling man did not fare well when the people he loved were at risk.

Nick was clearly a professional. He looked at me with sympathy and stood up. “No problem.”

Caroline’s maid showed the three of us to an office where there was a chaise lounge, and Nick gave me a mercifully very efficient exam.

“Well, you’re not in labor, Lydia.” He smiled as he spoke. “But you knew that already.” He looked at Dylan, still smiling. “But you are a few centimeters dilated. Any day now. When are you due?”

“Saturday,” I said, sitting up, and attempted to dry my dress with the towel the maid had given me.

Nick’s eyes widened. “This Saturday?” I nodded. “And you’re the maid of honor?” I nodded again.

I put my hand up. “Don’t even get me started.”

“Right,” Nick said in a tone that suggested this wedding was a bit beyond his comprehension, and headed towards the en suite bathroom. “Just going to wash up.”

Dylan looked at me and kissed my forehead. Then he slipped two fingers under my chin, prompting me to look up. “Sorry, damsel. This whole thing has me on edge.”

“I know,” I said, reaching up on my tiptoes to kiss him and smiling into my kiss. “You sure that’s the only thing that has you on edge?” I looked at him coyly.

“Don’t tease me, baby.” He half fgrowled as he spoke, and he put his hand firmly on my ass. “You know I could take you right here if I wanted.” Christ, that turned me on. But there was no acting on it. Not only were we technically still in the middle of a dinner party with a princess, but I became aware that Nick had reentered the room.

The guys stepped away as I took a moment to rearrange my dress a bit, but I could still hear them speaking. “Thank you, mate,” Dylan said, shaking Nick’s hand. “I’m a tad protective of her—she’s…well, she’s everything.”

Nick nodded. “You’re lucky, man. I look at you and my brother…well, I’ve honestly never seen two guys so in love with their wives, er, almost wife. And I see a lot of couples. Gives a guy something to strive for.”

That night as I lay in bed, Dylan breathing deeply in sleep next to me, I replayed Nick’s words in my mind. He’d never seen two guys so in love with their wives. I didn’t know about Zach, although from the few hints Caroline had dropped about their courtship and from the way he looked at her, I believed it. But I knew about Dylan, knew that he loved me. All the same, it’s different when you hear it from someone else’s mouth, see how visible it is, how we offer up our love for each other to the world, for others to witness.

I shifted to my other side, trying to get comfortable, and the baby threw a punch right behind my belly button. I heard myself groan in discomfort.

Please, little one, please stay in there until Sunday.