Page 4 of Regal Feather
“I don’t actually know how to turn it on, but yeah.”
My mother had left a notebook with instructions somewhere, so I technically could. It just felt like too much of a waste. Even more than having me live in this monstrosity as a single person.
Danny and Jaime were more silent in their perusal. It was nerve-wracking. All the bags of clothes had been propped against the arch that opened into the living room. I thought then that I should’ve grabbed them. It would’ve given me something to do with my hands instead of just sitting on one of the couches while waiting to hear their initial verdicts.
“You live here alone?” Danny asked first.
“Yeah.” I swallowed down the knot in my throat. “Well, at least until next week. My parents are hiring Santos as my live-in bodyguard. Kind of. It’s all just an excuse, really.”
And probably not the best way to segue into this conversation by all the widened eyes now staring—and rushing—at me.
Sergio was the first to leap on the couch. “Are you okay? Is someone stalking you? Trying to kill you? What the fuck—I didn’t even know live-in bodyguards were a thing!”
“Of course they are,” Jaime snorted. “I’d hate to have someone on my ass 24/7, though.”
“Ohh, yeah.” Sergio nodded. “Are you okay with it? We can move in with you if you’re okay with cats. Well, one cat. My cat, I mean. I’m sure I can convince Daddy. Until you get used to it or something?”
“You just want to live here,” Danny deadpanned. He had sat down in an armchair facing the couch and had his arms propped up on his knees. “I can ask León for the place where he learned MMA, if you want. I’m sure they teach self-defense, too.”
How the fuck had this derailed so much?
“N-no, no.” I cleared my throat. “It’s all good. Nothing’s happened. As I said, it’s just a formality. And my parents getting tired of me ditching every protective detail they try to throw my way. And Santos is like my childhood best friend. We’re still in touch, so I mean, you can stay here if you want; there are plenty of rooms, but I’m more than okay with him being here.
“And,” I hated the sort of attention that came from what was starting to feel like a monologue, but I didn’t want them to misconstrue this more than they already had. “The protective detail thing is also a formality. Always has been. It comes from, uh, being part of the royal family. I’m too far down the line to really matter at all, but my parents are big royalists? I mean,some of the names you’ve seen on TV have had a much more relaxed childhood than I have.”
I grimaced when Sergio jostled my arm right as I’d finished. “Okay, okay, you know I would never kill you, right? Like, I know I’m all about abolishing the monarchy, but it’s nothing personal against you, I swear?—”
“It’s fine.” I snorted. “If it helps, I’m against it, too. It’s just…I hate it, but if I went through the headache that would come with abdicating when I’m not even considered for shit, my parents would one hundred percent cut me off, and it’s not like I was raised to have the skills that actual jobs ask for.”
Managing an estate—two of them, really—involved lots of skills that I thought would be valuable in the job market. I’d tried, though, back in the day. Maybe I didn’t have the perseverance, but I’d rather have my monthly allowance while I could swing it, and do my little deeds to offset the injustice of it all.
“So…you’re a prince.”
“No.” I shivered. “Just a Baron something. I never bothered to keep track of it once my father gave up on his bonus schooling.”
“That sucks.” Sergio frowned. “But I’m glad you’re one of the cool ones.”
Jaime got comfortable on the couch eventually, sprawling on it with their head on my leg. It was probably the physically closest they’d been with me since we’d met, which meant I short-circuited for a second, but I managed to relax.
“So. Back to that childhood best friend.” He mused. Oh, no. Why had I forgotten to not lower my guard around them? “Is it a childhood bestie, or more like a childhood crush? And follow-up question, is the crush still part of the equation here?”
“Oooh. It’s right, you blushed a lot when you said that,” Sergio pointed out. Could the couch swallow me whole now? “Not that it’s a bad thing, but I have questions too.”
I grimaced.
Danny reached out to kick my foot. “What’s more uncomfortable, talking about your crush, or about the state of the monarchy?”
Well, if he put it like that…
“He’s… It’s always felt like it was him and I against the world, you know?” I sighed. Talking about him with others came with a layer of strangeness I hadn’t accounted for. All these years, I’d kept everything so separate. I hadn’t considered that the people around me would just roll with it like they were doing. “We actually made out…a lot. We shared a room in boarding school, so he was the first person I came out to, and it went from there? But his family was pretty bad, so they basically stopped coming to all the events and outings we’d meet at when we weren’t at school. They didn’t take away his phone or anything, so we stayed in touch, but it was a whole ordeal. And it got even worse when they basically had him enroll in the Air Force.”
“Damn.” Jaime whistled. “That got dark fast.”
“Respect.”
“Rich people suck,” Sergio muttered. “No offense.”
“None taken.” I snorted. It was going to take him a while to get used to it, wasn’t it? “Anyway. He’s walking out now, and my parents heard about it because they have ears everywhere, so they’re the ones who came up with the plan to hire him?”
