Total pages in book: 121
Estimated words: 116759 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 584(@200wpm)___ 467(@250wpm)___ 389(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 116759 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 584(@200wpm)___ 467(@250wpm)___ 389(@300wpm)
“I don’t use my face to get out of anything,” I grumbled. I used my charm. My face just helped people to be open to my charm.
“Right. Apologize first.”
“Got it.”
“Did you check your messages from Mumsy and Pa yet?”
With a sigh, I tapped the screen on Mum’s text first.
Spoke to Lady Sarah Shrewsbury. Her daughter Lady Amelia has started at Edinburgh. I promised you’d befriend her. Very pretty girl. Here’s her number …
Irritation thrummed through me. “Mine isn’t about Christmas. She’s trying to set me up with Amelia Shrewsbury.”
“I thought she was five.”
“Almost. She’s eighteen.”
“Oh, listen to you, you old fart at twenty-two.”
“This is the third text like this in a matter of weeks. What the bloody hell is happening?”
Juno sighed. “Mother has decided she’s all about Granny and being a ‘seen’ member of the royal family. Prudent matches are now important to her. She tried to set me up with Foster Fairly last week. I told her if she gives him my number, I’m going to answer it as a fake escort service. A really dirty one.”
I chuckled despite my indignation. My whole life, my parents had skirted the edges of the royal family. We’d attended important royal functions and I’d gotten on rather well with my late great-grandfather, King Henry. My grandmother was his youngest daughter, Princess Mary. Grandmother, being a bit of a black sheep party girl in her heyday, had never bothered that Mum and Pa weren’t much for the pomp and circumstance of the crown. But she seemed happy to welcome Mum back into the fold. And apparently that meant foisting aristocratic men and women at me and Juno.
Why was beyond me. We were twenty-ninth and thirtieth in line to the throne. We provoked the bare minimum of interest from the public. Most people didn’t know who Juno and I were. Society pages talked about us only sometimes. Now and then some magazine or newspaper would do a piece on the lesser-known members of the royal family, but that was as far as our fame or importance stretched.
Otherwise, we were merely the Thornes. Children of Paul Thorne and Lady Clarissa Hanover. Our father was from Leeds, a self-made millionaire out to prove himself. By the time I was born, my father was a billionaire hedge fund manager. By the time I was ten, he’d retired our family to a country estate in Norfolk where he and my mother lived happily like landed gentry of old, checking in on their vegetable patches each day and involving themselves heavily in village society. It was an idyllic life, one mostly free of the trappings of royalty, and one filled with so much love, I’d known from the abysmal state of my friends’ family lives how lucky we were.
I still couldn’t comprehend how our family had fallen apart.
“Where did you go?” Juno asked suddenly.
“Just wondering how we got here. Do you think one of them is having a midlife crisis?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know, Bastian. But I do know that I might never forgive them for doing this to us.”
I squeezed my eyes closed. “Yeah.”
“At least we’ve got each other, little brother.”
“Yeah. At least we’ve got each other.”
“So … how are you planning to apologize to this mysterious girl who you only want to be friends with?”
I ignored her snort at the end. “I do just want to be friends with her. When have I ever wanted to be more?”
“Hmm … well?”
“She’s a psychology student. I think I might start there.”
Juno cackled down the line.
I frowned. “What?”
Her laughter filled her words. “Trust you to pick … a friend who is studying how to psychoanalyze people. Good luck with that.”
“She’s not like that.” And Lily wasn’t. Yes, I knew she planned on becoming a psychotherapist, but I never felt under a microscope with her. Which was probably why she’d make a damn good one.
“No need to get defensive,” Juno teased.
“I’m not defensive.”
“You really like this girl, don’t you?”
“As a friend,” I bit out between clenched teeth. “I’m hanging up now, Mother.”
“Ugh, that was just rude.” Juno hung up before I could.
CHAPTER THREE
LILY
Last Semester
When Beth first started the podcast Seek and You Shall Find, she ran it out of her student accommodation with very basic equipment. Now that it had gone from a uni podcast to a national show, the university provided us with the use of their recording studio at the campus radio station. The caveat was that we had to stick to a strict schedule.
It was a professional setup, much like you’d find in any professional radio station. A large booth for recording and all the recording equipment in a room separated by soundproof glass. Kenny, one of the station producers, managed the sound and recording for us for a fee. We all took turns editing, but Sierra did the final production.