Page 34 of Bridget & Gabe Are Not Okay

“Hello,” Gwen said, sitting down next to him, looking very flushed.

Gabriel dragged his eyes away from the doorway, long empty of Arthur and Florian. “How’s Bridget?”

“Um,” Gwen said, a little wildly. “What? Good. I think.”

“And you two are…”

“In negotiations,” Gwen said, with great resolve. “Where is everybody? We’ve lost half the table.”

Gabriel shrugged, chewed on his too-dry lower lip for a moment, and then said, very quickly so as to have plausible deniability, “Do you think Arthur and Florian like each other?”

Gwen was tucking back into her pie. “Like each other? I think they get on quite well. They have a lot in common. Sir Hurst, on the other hand, doesnotlike Florian. I had to tell him off today for berating the poor man—honestly, he acts like Florian’s the devil incarnate.”

Gabriel was still stuck on the first part. “What do you mean, they have a lot in common?”

“Both brought up mostly away from court, their fathers were horrible,andtraitors to the crown, and I suspect they’re both maudlin little romantics. I mean, I don’tsuspectthat about Arthur, I know how he gets, but I’m gathering evidenceabout Florian. It’s the poetry that I find particularly suspicious. Besides, tragedy brings people together.”

“Our father died,” Gabriel offered, and Gwen paused with some game pie halfway to her mouth and gave him a withering look.

“Yes, I was invited to the funeral. What’s your point?”

“Nothing.” Gabriel flushed, wishing he hadn’t spoken at all.

“Oh,” Gwen said. “Oh, sorry, I thought we were having a different conversation. Let me start again. Do I think Arthur and Florian have been drawn together—by harrowing circumstance, and having very nice hair—to forge a bond that greatly outweighs any sort of emotional connection he could’ve had with you, thanks in part to the fact that you are, very inconveniently, the King of England?”

“You’re mocking me. I’m having one of the worst weeks of my life, which is really saying something considering how bad some of the other weeks have been, and you’re mocking me.”

“I’m keeping you grounded,” Gwen said, picking up her fork. “And anyway, no, I don’t think that’s what’s happening with Arthur and Florian. They might just be friends.”

“They’re both too handsome to be friends.”

“I think we need to normalize the idea that two handsome men are allowed tojustbe friends,” Gwen said, still making fun of him, because she was cruel and relentless. “I know it’s rare, but ithasbeen known to happen.”

She followed his gaze to Sirs Leonard and Bowen, who were speaking to each other as if they hadn’t noticed there was anybody else in this very packed hall, and laughed. “All right, maybe notthosehandsome men. If you’re so worried, why don’t you just ask?”

“Ask? Ask Arthur if he’s in love with our cousin?”

“In love? It’s been a fortnight, Gabriel, not even Arthur…”She trailed off, thinking too hard about this possibility, and Gabriel felt a surge of panic somewhere beneath his ribs.

“We shouldn’t have put him on the round table,” he said, as if it were her fault, which it sort of was. “This is just making everything worse.”

“Excuse me,” Gwen said, wiping her mouth daintily with the table linen. “Did you not hear that speech? Vulgarity aside, it was perfect. We need him.”

“And if it kills me? Having him here?”

“It’s not going to kill you,” Gwen said, finally affecting some sisterly sympathy. She patted him on the arm and then glanced over to the door, which had just opened to reveal that Lord Fentman had survived his toileting and was about to return to tell them all about it. “It’s just going to be horrible. But so is everything else! So it’ll blend right in.”

Sixteen

Bridget awoke the next morning feeling very strongly that she had been tricked. She couldn’t believe she’d been willing to exchange a few kisses for deeply painful and embarrassing personal information, and wished now that she could take it all back. Luckily there wasn’t much time to ruminate, because Neil had slept on a cot at the foot of her bed, and the second she opened her eyes he was jumping up like a hound begging to be walked.

“I’ve been awake for ages,” he groused. “That was the itchiest blanket in the world. It felt like sleeping under ants. What was yours like?”

“Normal. Normal blanket.”

“Normal?”

“Not ants.”