Royal Chase

He treaded water, watching me. “You really want to know how many women I’ve kissed from this show?”

I did, desperately and inexplicably. “Yes.”

“Including you?”

I nodded.

“One.”

Which filled my heart with both glee and disbelief. “I find that hard to believe.”

He shrugged one shoulder. “I’ve never lied to you, so I don’t know why you wouldn’t believe me. I haven’t kissed anyone. Out of respect for you.”

I couldn’t have adequately described to anyone the twenty different things I felt when he said that. It was overwhelming, terrifying, and made me tremble.

“I know you better than that.” I had meant to sound playful, but I came across as accusatory.

“You don’t know me as well as you think you do.”

“Really? Fine. Tell me something I don’t know about you.”

“You’ve stolen my heart.”

That made the million different swirling emotions kick up into overdrive. I tried to laugh, but it came out weird. “Something real and not flirtatious,” I told him.

A strange expression crossed his face, and then his smile returned. “I don’t keep secrets from you, Limone. You know that.”

My heart palpitations were making me jumpier than a cat on a hot tin roof.

“But in the interest of full disclosure, I have a terrible credit score.”

“How can you be rich and have a terrible credit score?”

His muscled arms moved back and forth in the water, keeping him in place. I wondered how long he could tread water. I was extremely impressed by his endurance.

“I don’t get my trust fund until my twenty-fifth birthday, and I used to be terrible with money.”

“Used to be?”

His eyes twinkled with mirth. “I’m still working on it.”

“Me too,” I admitted.

“What made you more careful?”

“Meeting Kat freshman year. I felt bad being so extravagant when she had nothing. I could see myself through her eyes and how I wasted my money, so I economized.”

He cocked his head to the side. “You spend a lot of time worrying about how other people see you, don’t you?”

I crossed my arms, ready to let him know just how wrong he was, but he kept speaking. “I am impressed that you’re able to handle your money so well.”

“You should be,” I retorted. “It sucks.”

He held his arms up in a “look who you’re talking to, I get it” gesture.

Before I could ask him to clarify, he said, “Tell me something I don’t know about you.”

There were probably a lot of things he didn’t know about me. A lot of things that I thought and felt that were better kept private.

I remembered his story about breaking his arm, and thought broken bones were probably a safe topic for conversation.

“I broke my ankle skiing right before my last solo ballet recital.”

He raised both eyebrows at me. “I didn’t know you were a dancer. Given your hatred of all things exercise-related it should be unexpected, but I guess it’s not that surprising. I’ve danced with you often enough to know that you know what you’re doing.”

“Grandma Lemon wanted me to compete in beauty pageants, but I couldn’t sing, and she said twirling a baton was beneath me as a Beauchamp, so I started taking ballet and I loved it. I miss it so much.”

I had enjoyed it, the exactness and grace of it, and at the time, I wanted nothing more than to earn a solo and become a professional ballerina someday.

“Did you stop because of your ankle?”

“I stopped because when puberty hit, I no longer had the right figure for ballet.”

He waggled his eyebrows at me suggestively. “Ballet’s loss was my great gain.”

I shook my head. One-track mind. “My sophomore year, I finally got my solo. Madame La Grand let me know that it would be my last performance with them. My company was performing excerpts from The Nutcracker, and I won the part of Clara. We had rehearsals every day, and then I would go home and practice for hours every single night. I wanted it to be perfect. Then my family went skiing in Utah the weekend before the show, and that was it. I never got to perform it.”