American Queen (New Camelot Book 1)

“You have to hold still,” Abilene fussed at me. “I keep messing this one up.”

I sighed and forced my body to stay still, even though I was so excited I could barely breathe. In just a few minutes, a hired car would pull in front of the London hotel Grandpa Leo had put us up in and take us to a large party in Chelsea, a party with adults and champagne. There would be diplomats and businessmen and maybe even a celebrity or two—a world away from the stale beer and crackling speakers of the hill parties back at school.

It was my sixteenth birthday, and as a special treat, he’d allowed us to tag along with him to the party. Or rather, he’d invited me and only reluctantly allowed Abilene to tag along—he could hardly invite one granddaughter and not the other, but we both knew (even if we didn’t say it aloud) that bringing Abilene to something like this carried a significant risk of embarrassment. She’d nearly been thrown out of Cadbury multiple times for a host of crimes—drinking on the premises, breaking curfew, a nasty incident that led to another lacrosse player with a black eye—and every time, Grandpa Leo had quietly paid the right money and pulled the right strings to keep her installed there.

The last thing he wanted was for her to disgrace him at a party full of his friends, but I promised him that I’d keep her on her best behavior. I promised him that I’d keep her from drinking too much, from talking too much, from flirting too much, just as long as he’d let her go, because she would be so hurt if I was able to come along and she wasn’t.

And Grandpa Leo, who used to terrorize senators and petroleum executives, who helped shape the strongest environmental legislation on record and publicly excoriated his enemies on a daily basis, relented to my pleading with a gruff smile and let Abilene come along.

And that’s why Abilene and I had spent our evening in an expensive hotel getting ready, why I was currently trying not to squirm in a chair as Abilene carefully pinned my final curl in place.

When she finished and I stood up to give myself a final once-over before strapping on my high heels and going downstairs, she made a noise behind me.

Worried, I spun around to the mirror. “What is it? Is my bra showing?” I tried to turn this way and that, positive that Abilene had seen something potentially disastrous.

“No. It’s…it’s fine.” Her voice sounded choked. “Let’s go. Grandpa’s waiting.”

I shrugged and sat down to pull on the strappy heels that matched the blush pink gown Grandpa had bought me earlier that week. The tulle and organza dress had a narrow waist and form-fitting bodice, a delicate sash in back, and a skirt that erupted from sedate layers into luxurious drapes and loops. With a matching tulle flower set into my hair and metallic pink heels, I felt like a princess, even though I knew I wouldn’t look like one compared to Abilene.

Tonight, she wore a tight dress of electric blue, with a keyhole in the center of the bodice displaying a swath of creamy-pale skin, and her glossy red hair was down in loose waves. She looked years older than she was, mature and sophisticated, and I stifled the usual pang of weary resignation that came along with seeing Abilene dressed up.

I was used to being in her shadow, after all, the companion to her Doctor, the Spock to her Kirk, and so it shouldn’t bother me tonight. Even if it was my birthday. Even if I was in the most beautiful dress I’d ever worn. But after looking at her, so polished and alluring, it was impossible to look at my reflection and see anything other than the faint cleft in my chin, the ridiculous beauty mark that refused to be covered up, the flatness of my eyes even after the most strategic uses of mascara and eyeliner.

So I did one final check to make sure my strapless bra wasn’t showing, that I hadn’t accidentally smeared pink lipstick across my face or sat on Abilene’s half-eaten Galaxy bar, and then opened the door. Abilene pushed past me without a word and refused to speak to me on the ride down to the lobby.

The mirrored doors opened, and she strode out of the lift, her heels clicking on the marble floor. “Are you angry with me?” I asked.

I racked my brain trying to think of anything I could have done to make her mad and came up with nothing. But sometimes that didn’t matter with Abilene. For all the times she hugged me out of nowhere, made sure I was invited to a party, or defended me to her friends, there were other times when she’d plunge suddenly into a dark, sullen mood, when her stare would burn like acid and her words char my skin like fire. I’d learned not to negotiate with these moods or try to appease them, even though they seemed to happen more and more frequently. There was no point—you couldn’t argue with a storm cloud, you could only wait for it to blow past.

“I’m not angry with you,” she said, still walking fast. I could make out the stout shape of Grandpa Leo through the front doors and, overlaid on top of him, our reflections: Abilene all scarlet and sapphire, and me shell-pink and gold.

She must have seen it too, because she froze, staring at the door. Then she turned to me. “Just stay out of my way tonight,” she mumbled. “Just stay away from me.”

Stung, I watched her walk through the doors as the doorman opened them for her and give Grandpa Leo a big hug, a fake smile plastered onto her face. I wanted to yell at her, tell her that I was the only reason she was going to the party in the first place. I wanted to scream and kick, because couldn’t I have one night, just one, that wasn’t all about her, that she didn’t upstage or steal or poison with her drama?

And most of all, I wanted to cry, because Abilene was my best friend, maybe my only friend, and the whole world felt off-kilter when she was like this with me.

But what could I do? What could I say or scream or beg that would make her understand?

So I did what Greer Galloway usually did.

I quietly followed in her footsteps.

I went through the doors and into Grandpa’s arms and then climbed into the car with her. We sat shoulder by shoulder, my skirt overflowing onto hers, her soft hair brushing against the skin of my arm, and we didn’t say a word to each other the entire drive.

Within minutes of arriving at the party, Abilene disappeared. I made to go find her, but Grandpa Leo held me back with a hand on my arm and a shake of his head. “She’ll be fine after a few minutes,” he promised. “Some space to cool down will do her good, and besides, I’d like to introduce you to a few of my friends.” I knew introduce was Grandpa Leo-speak for planting me as his spy, that he would want me to circulate and listen, or stand by his side and observe people while he talked, and I wanted to do that, I really did, but I also wanted to fix whatever was wrong with Abilene and me before the night grew any older.

I bit my lip, scanning the crowd for any sign of dark red hair, but I saw nothing. She was long vanished into a sea of tuxedos and circulating cocktail trays. I reluctantly allowed Grandpa to pull me deeper into the party.

Women cooed over me and men complimented me, their eyes trailing along my body in a way that I wasn’t used to, and I knew it was all because Abilene wasn’t next to me. They couldn’t see how marred my face was, how boring my body, without a gorgeous redhead the same age standing beside me for comparison. This thought should have made me happy, that without Abilene’s radiant charm, I could finally bask in the kinds of compliments she gathered so effortlessly, but it didn’t. I only felt more miserably aware of her absence. After an hour of this, I excused myself from Grandpa and a circle of guests to go find her, and that’s when I ran—literally—into Merlin Rhys.

He reached down to steady me by the elbow, keeping the amber drink in his other hand from sloshing as he did so. “Pardon me,” he apologized, even though it was my fault.

“No, it was my mistake,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

He peered down into my face and something shifted in his expression. “You’re Leo Galloway’s granddaughter,” he said. No inflection, no follow up. Just that one fact, the one fact that identified me wherever I went, as if the ghost of President Penley Luther was standing right behind me.

“Yes,” I said. “We met once, you and I, but I was a little girl.”

You predicted my parents’ deaths.

You warned me never to kiss anyone.

“I remember,” Merlin replied, and the way he looked at me almost made me feel as if he could read my thoughts. Like he’d heard them as clearly as if I’d spoken them aloud.

“Merlin!” A man in military attire appeared next to us and clapped a hand on Merlin’s shoulder. Merlin smiled tightly at him. “I was wondering when I’d catch up to you. How have you been?”

Merlin turned to answer the general, and I took the opportunity to vanish, my heart pounding in my chest.

Merlin unsettled and frightened me, and through all these years I thought it was because I’d met him as a little girl, at an age when almost anything can seem scary. But he still scared me at sixteen. There was something about him…not hostile necessarily, but aggressive. You felt his mind pushing at yours, challenging the walls around your thoughts, slithering through the defenses you kept around your feelings. It made me feel exposed and vulnerable, and I’d had enough of that from Abilene tonight.

I found my cousin in the townhouse’s library—a large lovely room with open French doors leading to a wide patio outside—with an empty champagne flute dangling from her fingers as she let a man older than her father kiss a trail of sloppy kisses down her neck. I cleared my throat and he straightened up, embarrassed. He beat a hasty retreat with a muttered apology in Italian, leaving Abilene against the wall looking livid.

“Who the fuck do you think you are?” she demanded once he left the room. “I told you to leave me alone, not barge in here and ruin my life!”

“I’m not trying to ruin your life!” I exclaimed. “I just wanted to make sure you were okay.”

She snorted in disgust. “Yeah, right.”

“What is going on with you tonight?” I asked. “You’ve been angry with me since the hotel.”

“I’m not angry,” she maintained, her nostrils flaring. “I just don’t want to be around you right now. God, why is that so fucking hard to understand?”

“It’s not—”

“And you know what, you always do this,” she went on, her eyes starting to shine with unshed tears. “You always push and push and push, like you have to know fucking everything, and one of these days, you’re not going to like the answer.”

I raised my hands, as if to show I meant no harm. “I don’t want to push you. But I know you’re angry. And I know it has something to do with me. I want to fix it, Abilene, let me fix it, please.”

“You can’t fix it,” she hissed. “Just stay away—”

“I’m not going to do that, I can’t do that—”

“Just leave me alone!” Her shrill voice rebounded through the room, and as if to punctuate her statement, she threw the champagne glass to the floor, where it shattered like ice on the polished parquet.

“Abilene,” I whispered, because I had never, ever seen her like this, so angry that she would act like this in someone else’s house, and there seemed to be a moment where it caught up with her too, where her eyes widened and her pale skin went even paler.

And then she stormed out of the room.

For a long minute, I stared at the mess on the floor. It glittered and flashed in the deafening silence that followed her exit, and it filled my vision, filled my mind and my throat and my chest, until it shrank back to normal size and I could breathe again.

My eyes burned with tears and my throat itched with all the things I wanted to scream at my supposed best friend, but I didn’t do any of that. I didn’t cry and I didn’t yell. I dropped to my knees and began picking up the shards of glass, sliver by tiny sliver, picking up after Abilene like I always did.

“You’ll cut yourself if you’re not careful,” an unfamiliar voice said from the patio door.