Royally Crushed (18 page)

Whoa.

This thought zaps my brain back to reality. I have it bad for him. Way bad. I can’t stop thinking about his various
body parts, and we went out—officially—for the first time, what, Friday night, and it’s only Sunday?!

Maybe I’m wigged out because this is the first time I’ve ever had a real boyfriend (since I don’t count Jason Barrows, whom everyone thought I was going out with because he kissed me on a dare in seventh grade. Puhleeze.). Maybe it’s because Georg’s a prince, and no matter where he goes, he always has this prince-like aura around him.

But even so, this is not good because Georg and I are trying to keep things low-key, or at least make it look that way for the time being.

Given the way my synapses are firing right now, though, if Georg and I get within fifty feet of each other, I’m going to be all over him. On top of it making me look totally desperate, which would be bad because Georg has no idea I’m a little, um, inexperienced, it would blow the whole low-key thing out of the water.

“I know you’re kidding, but if I thought we could get away with it, I would,” Georg tells me. “But it’s nearly midnight. My father said the fund-raiser would be over around one a.m., which means everyone will be back soon. Until your father’s not suspicious about the cigarettes anymore . . . well, we have to be careful.”

“I know.” I twist one of my sheets into a little whorl
with my fingers, then glance at the bedside alarm clock. “I still can’t believe we got busted.”

We weren’t even smoking them when my dad walked in on us Friday night, and we weren’t going to. Really. Georg was just showing me where he keeps an emergency stash, behind the paper towel holder in the handicapped stall of the men’s restroom that’s below the palace ballroom. He’d even hidden them back away before my dad came in, but they’d fallen on the floor.

Major oops.

I must be pretty desperate, though, because I add, this time only half-joking, “I still think you’d be okay, if you really wanted to come over. Now that Dad’s had a day to chill, he’s beginning to understand that I wasn’t trying to corrupt you with cigarettes.”

“And get him fired.”

“Exactly.” Europeans are pretty lax about smoking, just not when it comes to their royalty. Apparently, Georg getting caught with cigarettes—say, by the press or something—would be a pretty big deal.

I pull the covers up over my shoulders like a cape, then cradle the phone a little closer to my ear. “I told him they were on the sink when we got there, and one of us must have accidentally knocked them off when we were, ah,
talking
in there.”

If it’s possible to hear someone smile over the phone, I can hear it. “Well, that’s good news, at least. So he seems to think it’s okay if we’re going out?”

“Hey, all we’re doing is engaging in a little soccer talk, right? Nothing that will jeopardize your reputation as the next leader of Schwerinborg.”

He laughs, but it dies out pretty quickly, which means he’s thinking about something serious. “Well, that’s what I was getting to. Some of the guys were talking yesterday after we got out of practice.”

“Yeah?”

“Well, remember how Ulrike’s dad was at the dinner on Friday night? He must have mentioned seeing us together to Ulrike, because the guys were asking me about it.”

Uh-oh. I know exactly where this is going. Ulrike is this really nice girl at my new high school who’s the president of everything. One of those girls with white-blond hair and a perfect Crest smile, and who I usually write off based on her looks alone, because 99 percent of girls who look like Ulrike are just heinous. Snobby and mean and they think they’re God’s gift to the world. But Ulrike’s actually really smart and friendly—and not just to other beautiful people, but to everyone.

On the other hand, Ulrike has this equally beautiful friend, Steffi, who’s the world’s biggest bitch. One of those
fake, manipulative people no one—especially naive, trusting types like Ulrike—ever
get
until it’s way too late.

“Let me guess—”

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure Steffi already knows we’re together.” Georg sounds irritated by Steffi’s mere existence as he talks. “If not, she’ll know soon. Thought we should figure out how we’re going to handle it when she asks us about it.”

Great. It’s not that I really care if she knows. Maybe it’ll knock her down a peg to realize that just because she’s tiny and brunette and popular, she can’t get any guy she wants. Like Georg.

But chances are, rather than simply acting like a normal person with hurt feelings when she hears that the object of her crush has a new girlfriend, she’ll get totally ticked off, meaning she’ll be more aggressive than usual about giving me backhanded compliments when everyone’s around . . . making offhand comments about how I must have some wonderful hidden traits if Georg is willing to take the time to introduce me around the school when he’s such a busy person.

As if whatever good traits I might have aren’t obvious, or as if Georg is doing me this huge favor because I’m clearly not good enough to be around him.

Steffi’s like that. You can’t really pick apart anything she
says as being nasty and call her on it, because she says it in this fakey-nice, syrupy way. But I know she wants me to get the message, especially because she makes genuinely nasty little remarks to me under her breath when she knows no one else can hear. She’s so quiet with it, I can barely hear her.

So I say to Georg, “Well, you know how I usually deal with Steffi. I ignore her. But what do you think?”

As much as I’d like to rant to Georg about what Steffi can do with her opinions, I don’t, because I know it’ll only make me sound like a whiner. Georg tries to be nice to Steffi—since he’s a prince, he’s stuck trying to be nice to everyone or else risk his family’s good reputation, which really sucks if you think about it—but he’s the one guy in school who sees right through her.

And I love that about him. We have this funky-cool connection, where we just look at each other and
know
we both see the world the same way. As deranged as it is, the fact we both understand Steffi and her little games—when no one else does—just makes our connection that much stronger.

“Well, I figure we have three choices, assuming she actually asks us what’s going on. First, we can play dumb. Second choice, we act like it’s no big thing and say we were at the reception together because we both live under the same roof and thought it’d be fun.”

“And third?”

“We come clean, and who cares if Steffi knows we’ve hooked up.” I can hear the smile in his voice again. “And that’s the fun option, because it means if I feel like kissing you between classes, I can, which definitely has its appeal.”

“So what do you want to do?” No way am I making this call. I like option three, for the same reason Georg does. Frankly, a quickie make-out session with Georg—of course where Steffi can see—would totally strengthen my ability to deal with her and all her crap. But Georg knows Ulrike, Steffi, their friend Maya, and all the rest of the kids at school way better than I do. So I figure he’s the one who should decide.

“I’d prefer to be honest about it.” His voice has that tone that makes it sound like a
but
is coming, and it does. “But the more I think about it, the more I think it wouldn’t be smart.”

I make a face at the wall. Ooo-kay. Georg was the one who said he didn’t care if Ulrike’s father saw us dancing together, or who knew about us. And now he does?

“So I shouldn’t say anything around school?” I guess it would pretty much be the gossip of the week if we confirmed it to anyone. But why should he care?

Then I realize that I’m the hypocrite of the century. I’m freaked about him not wanting to tell his friends, even
though I still haven’t told my friends about him, let alone about my mother and everything else. And they’re thousands of miles away.

I’m about to apologize, and say we can do whatever he wants, when he says, “School isn’t really the problem. It’s the people outside of school. Okay, Steffi’s a problem, but it’s not her attitude around school that worries me. It’s who else she talks to.”

He gets quiet a second, and the lightbulb turns on in my head. Now I get it. Tabloids.

There’s this one reporter assigned to Georg who walks about twenty yards behind him on the way to school a couple times a week. The poor guy’s probably the bottom of the food chain at
Majesty
magazine. There really isn’t much to report about Georg—his parents crack down on him hard, so he really can’t get in any trouble, and he doesn’t go out partying. And I’m willing to bet most of the world’s population couldn’t find Schwerinborg on a map, let alone identify its prince. Not like they could identify Prince William or Prince Harry.

But still, Georg is always careful, so that most of the reports this guy files are about fairly innocuous things, like last week’s story, “Teen Prince Risking His Smile,” which ran alongside a snapshot of Georg ducking out of a coffee
house on his way to school, but mostly talked about how if you drink coffee or tea for years and years, your teeth can get stained.

“Valerie, I don’t want you to think I’m embarrassed to be with you, or that I don’t want anyone to know—”

“Hey, no problem. Really.” And I mean it. I don’t exactly want to be on the front of some trashy rag either. I’m beginning to realize that keeping things low-key goes with the dating-a-prince territory, even if you weren’t almost caught smoking.

“You know how I feel about you. It’s just that—”

He sounds so concerned about it, I can’t help but laugh. I know I shouldn’t—my dad would probably tell me it’s against some very important rule of protocol—but I can’t help it. “I told you, no problem.”

He’s quiet for a sec, then says, “If I hurry, I can be over there in five minutes, stay for maybe twenty, then get back before my parents are home from the fund-raiser. I just need to watch the clock so I have a five-to-ten-minute cushion.”

“And what if we get caught?”

“Have your Chemistry book out, maybe?”

This time I’m really laughing, because my dad knows—and so does Georg—that I’m a total geek and there’s
no way I’d put my Chem homework off until midnight Sunday. I can hardly stand to have homework that’s not done by Saturday at noon.

Is it any mystery why I haven’t had a boyfriend before?

His voice is low and completely hot as he tells me, “I’ll be there in five minutes, like it or not.”

“Not!”

Exactly four minutes and thirty-two seconds later, there’s a knock at my apartment door. And I definitely like it.

I SUPPOSE IF I MARRY GEORG SOMEDAY, I MIGHT
actually be a princess. Someday being very, very far away and not even remotely on my brain, especially given the wonderful example of wedded bliss I’ve witnessed with my parents recently.