But the world was not full of Vickys. We were a rarity. And we were considered rude.
Mike crossed his impressive arms over his chest, his muscles bunching under his shirt as he did it, and his expression darkened.
“Christ, can we just get this over with then?” he snapped. “I wouldn’t want to waste any more of your precious seconds than strictly necessary.”
I stared up at him and blinked. “I have cleared my entire day for this delivery,” I said, yet again, blindly stating the truth without thinking through the consequences.
His eyebrows shot up. “For fuck’s sake, why?”
I opened my mouth to speak but then closed it again, just catching myself in time before I could blurt out that I’d spent the entire morning making myself look “normal,” and that I was hoping he would be willing to negotiate terms with me this afternoon.
“You say the f-word a lot.” This observation is what popped out of my mouth instead, and from his eye roll, it wasn’t a lot better than the other options. It’s not that I minded swearing; I didn’t. But for me, it was too difficult a minefield to negotiate. If you incorporated swear words into your regular vocabulary, you had to have the social awareness and emotional intelligence to know when it was appropriate and when it was not. I had neither social awareness nor emotional intelligence, so I chose to simply avoid swearing altogether.
“Sorry if I’ve offended your delicate sensibilities, Lady Harding. But if we could move this along, my sweary uncouth carcass will be out of your hair a lot sooner.”
He saidLady Hardingthe same way he’d said princess—with undisguised contempt. I wasn’t sure if it was just contempt for me or for the peerage system as a whole. I mean, he was friends with my half-brother Ollie, who was the Duke of Buckingham, so I doubted it was only the peerage he objected to. No, Mike Mayweather simply didn’t like me.
I doubt he remembered, but he’d never liked me. It had been obvious even on the handful of occasions I was around him as a child. And, back then I had been far less objectionable. I didn’tgo around stating obvious truths as a child. In fact, I did not speak at all. It was one of the many ways in which I was a disappointment to my mother.
After I stopped speaking, she decided she’d had enough of my constant silent presence in her new family and started dropping me off at my biological father’s house for part of the summer holidays.
The trouble with that was that my biological father, the previous Duke of Buckingham, wasn’t that keen on me either—and he also wasn’t home a lot. This meant that I became his wife Margot’s problem, which seemed supremely unfair, seeing as I was the product of the affair Margot’s husband had while still married to her. But she couldn’t very well put a six-year-old child out on the street, so I was welcomed, however grudgingly, into the family home for a maximum of two weeks every summer.
The first time I saw Mike Mayweather was at Buckingham Manor, and he was carrying a hedgehog in his bare hands.
“Sorry, Lady Harding,” he’d muttered to my stepmother, when blood dripped from his hands onto her rug. “It’s just, I found it out in the daytime, and that can mean it’s sick.” The sight of that large, rough boy gently cradling a tiny creature and not caring that the spikes were ripping his hands to shreds has stayed imprinted on my brain ever since.
The handful of times I followed Ollie to the Mayweather cottage, Mike scowled at me from across the small kitchen, clearly unhappy that I was invading his space. Mike’s mum was an extremely kind woman and didn’t seem to mind that I didn’t talk, or that I only ate the tops of the Jaffa Cakes and would only drink tea out of one specific mug. She also gave the type of hugs I could tolerate—brief, tight side hugs.
I really,reallyliked Hetty Mayweather.
Despite Mike’s obvious dislike of me, even back then, he still fascinated me. And unfortunately, I hadn’t fully mastered myhabit of staring at things I found fascinating as a child. In fact, I hadn’t really been able to mask at all—my only saving grace being the mutism.
“I’m not a Lady,” I told Mike as he continued to stare down at me.
He shook his head once. “What are you?—?”
“I’m not Lady Harding,” I explained. “My father didn’t pass his title onto me because I’m illegitimate.”
His scowl dropped slightly, and he shifted on his feet. “Oh,” he said as his arms uncrossed, before he reached back to grip the back of his neck, revealing that glorious chest even more, as his flannel shirt pulled to the side. He cleared his throat. “Right, sorry, love. Didn’t think.”
At the use of the word love, my gaze shot from its fixation on his chest, to his eyes. There was a softness about them now as he looked down at me, which hadn’t been there before. That, combined with his use of an actual endearment, short-circuited my brain again. I could feel my pulse beating in my ears as a wave of light-headedness swept through me. Seconds ticked by until eventually, Mike had enough.
“Okay, if you could move back a little, then I’ll…”
It happened when he put his large hands on my shoulders in order to manoeuvre me out of the doorway, as I’d clearly lost the ability to do this myself. He didn’t grab me; his touch was gentle, and there was nothing threatening about it. But I wasn’t prepared. Ihaveto be prepared when people touch me. So, despite how much I’d been dreaming about Mike putting his hands on me, when it actually happened, I yelped and wrenched away from him.
My hands went up, and it took all of my effort and training to stop them from flapping and pressing onto my ears. When I finally got my breathing under control and was sure I wasn’t going into a meltdown, I looked up at Mike to see he’d backedaway from me with his hands up, a horrified expression on his face.
I swallowed and tried to speak, but as was often the case when I was stressed, no words would actually make it past my tight throat.
“Bloody hell,” he snapped. His horror now bleeding into anger. “Chill the fuck out. I wasn’t going to attack you. You’re the last woman I’d—” He broke off then, but I knew what he was going to say.
I desperately wanted to explain my reaction to him, but aside from the fact I physically couldn’t speak at that moment, even if I could, what would I have told him? That I wanted him to touch me more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life, but that I needed warning because I was so unbelievably weird? The whole point of today was to try to convince him Iwasn’tweird so he’d agree to my terms. Admitting to all my ridiculously complicated quirks would hardly be working towards that aim.
Chapter 2
Empty inside
