Royally Crushed (36 page)

My dad is a freakin’ miracle worker. As I pull on my ski helmet just outside the lodge, I shoot him a smile. He’s sitting on a bench about fifteen feet away, closing the latches on his boots and watching me at the same time. I mouth a “thank you” and give a little pull at my pants so he knows what I mean. He just winks at me and goes back to work on his boots.

Not only did he come home with dinner for me on Wednesday night (leftover cordon bleu from some government dinner that was way better than the preprocessed hunk o’ meat I nuked in the microwave and ended up tossing in the trash can), he also brought four pairs of ski pants. He took part of his afternoon off from work to buy them, then rushed back to the palace for an evening meeting with Prince Manfred about an upcoming state visit from the Georgian President (not Georgia as in plantation tours and the Atlanta Braves, but Georgia as in the former Russian republic, and apparently a very important trade partner of Schwerinborg), meaning no time to call or e-mail. He walked into the apartment around eight thirty, right after I fired off that last e-mail to Christie, and tossed a shopping bag at me like it was no big thing, telling me to choose whichever pair fit best and he’d return the others.

And I look incredible. In ski pants! The ones he chose are even better than the ones Christie suggested. When I
sent her a pic of me in the new pants, she got all excited about them.

Good thing, because I need something to distract me (and Christie) from the David Anderson issue, which has been plaguing me for two solid days and is now threatening to ruin my Saturday, too.

Somehow I’ve gotta get over it. Just forget Christie ever brought it up.

“You ready?” Georg asks. He looks completely comfortable with his ski gear, like he could go down any slope without worrying that he’ll crash and burn the way I worry. He has his boots on and he’s carrying his skis over his shoulder, pointing toward the nearest chairlift with one pole. “We can put our skis on once we’re closer to the lift line.”

He’s so gung ho, I just know he’s going to be disappointed by my skiing skills. I hope he doesn’t get too annoyed waiting for me when I panic at the top of every section that looks the least bit icy or steep.

“Sure,” I say. “Let’s wait for Dad and what’s-her-name, though. They’ll want to know where we’re going.”

Georg grins, letting his skis slide down in front of him so the tails rest in the snow. “Her name is Fräulein Putzkammer. But she said you can call her Miss Putzkammer if you want.”

I roll my eyes. I cannot, cannot say “Putzkammer.” Please. It’s hard enough just to think of her as The Fräulein—which is now my mental nickname for her—because
fräulein
is a strange enough word itself. The French
mademoiselle
is so much cooler. “I still don’t get why the press office felt like they had to send someone along.”

I’m sure The Fräulein is nice enough. She’s probably in her late thirties or early forties. She’s also way prettier than her name makes her sound, with blond hair and a fairly athletic bod—nothing sagging too far south—which I assume also means she can keep up while we ski. And she seemed okay on the way here last night. She let me and Georg choose what music to listen to in the car, and she didn’t seem to mind when I took longer than everyone else at the gas station, trying to count out the euros correctly to pay for a candy bar so I could get my chocolate fix. She even translated some of the wall signs for me when we checked into our cutesy little guesthouse last night here in Scheffau.

But something about her isn’t sitting right with me. It’s more than the fact that she’s obsessive about telling Georg to keep his ski cap on whenever he’s not wearing his helmet, just to improve the odds that no one will recognize him this weekend and we can have a more relaxing, private vacation. More than the fact that she flirts with my dad, because
pretty much all women over voting age flirt with my dad.

Scary, I know, but the guy
is
decent-looking in a parental sort of way. He goes to the gym every morning to keep his buffed-up muscles, plus he has the whole etiquette thing going for him. Women get into that.

I glance over as the unnaturally blond Fräulein brushes a piece of lint off the side of her ski jacket, resolve to be my nicey-nice self and not make a crack about how lint won’t matter once she’s skiing, then turn toward Georg, who’s messing around with the bindings on his skis. Without even looking up, he whispers, “Don’t worry about her, Val.”

“Easy for you to say.”

My bullshit detector is pretty finely tuned, so it doesn’t usually go off without reason. The fact that I can’t pinpoint why is driving me bonkers. But I don’t want to get all bitchy about her and then find out I’m way off base, either.

“She’s been working for my parents and traveling with them for almost five years now. She even came on my Zermatt trip over winter break to keep an eye on me. She’s cool.” Georg’s voice is low enough that she can’t hear him from where she’s sitting on the bench, pulling on her ski gloves. “And she’s really helpful, Val. If any media types show up, she’ll work with them to arrange a time where they can ask me questions or take photos somewhere here
at the base lodge. Otherwise, they’ll all buy ski passes and try to snap pictures on the slopes, which is dangerous for everyone. Or worse, they’ll try to follow us in the evenings to see if something is up with you and me so they can write about it.” He raises his head and his eyes meet mine for a brief moment. “I don’t know if my parents would have let me come without her.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know.” Dad explained it all last night, once we’d checked in and Georg was in his room next door to ours and The Fräulein was in her room across the hall. “But it still sucks. I was hoping it’d just be you, me, and Dad. Mostly just you and me.”

“It will be,” he assures me. “We’ll split off from them when we get to the summit. As long as we check in every so often, we should have plenty of time to ourselves.”

The smile he gives me as we follow Dad and The Fräulein to the lift line makes me want to crumple right there in the snow. Especially when he adds, “Hey, nice ski pants. Those new?”

Gotta love a guy who notices.

Dad and The Fräulein are ready to go, so we head to the lift line. As we snap on our skis, Georg asks me how Christie, Jules, and Natalie are doing, just because that’s the kind of guy he is. And he’s never even met them.

He’s just so amazingly perfect.

And I’m so
not
. Just thinking about Christie ties my stomach up in knots again.

How could I possibly have cheated on Georg?

Okay, it’s not like I was
cheating
cheating on him in Virginia. He did tell me he wanted us to cool it (his exact words) right before I went home on break, so what did he expect? And my friends set me up with David, totally without my knowledge, so it wasn’t as if I initiated the date at all. And they did it in a way that would have made it rude for me to back out.

We only went out one time after the initial setup date, and that was it. Over and out. I figured out pretty fast that, for one, I was still crushing pretty bad on Georg even if he did want to cool it (and even if it turned out I misinterpreted what he meant), and for two, once I actually went out with David, he just didn’t do it for me. Even when he kissed me, it wasn’t anything as good as Georg’s kisses. No zing. No flair. No ooh-baby-do-I-want-you-now.

I think David and I would still be really good friends if I lived in Virginia. However, even if he kissed better than Georg, we’re too different on the inside to be an actual couple. I firmly believe this, despite the fact that I had a massive crush on him for so long, it could probably be in
Guinness World Records
, assuming they covered such things.
David simply looks at the world in a different way than I do.

Specifically, in a way that wouldn’t include my mom.

I can’t blame David for his views, especially since he idolizes his father, who’s this hotshot Republican lobbyist I’m constantly seeing on CNN talking about the importance of strong conservative Christian families in holding together the fabric of society. (Really, he said that. In prime time.)

Frankly, I don’t expect anyone to be all happy-happy-happy that my mom’s a lesbian or anything like that. I’m still having trouble dealing with the fact that my parents aren’t together anymore, let alone the whole Mom-is-living-with-another-woman thing.

But the entire David incident drove home to me that I really need to be with someone who can understand my family and its quirks and still be okay with it all. Someone who can be okay with
me
, exactly the way I am. Even on the days when I’m not okay with who I am.

And that someone is Georg. My heart has been with him the whole time. If he’d intended to break up with me during our whole “cool it” thing, I know deep down inside that I’d still be devastated.

Mom assured me that it was fine that I went out with David while I was home and told me not to feel the least bit guilty. She said I wasn’t cheating on Georg. That I was
learning what I don’t want in life, which is as important as learning what I do want—or some psychobabble along those lines.

At the time, it made perfect sense. After all, it’s not like I’m thirty and married to Georg and still trying to figure out what I want by messing around with another guy. I’m fifteen, I just started going out with my first-ever boyfriend, and we haven’t been together very long at all.

But now, waiting in the lift line with Georg next to me and Dad and The Fräulein behind me, I have to wonder if I handled things the right way. If I really should have been listening to Mom, the Self-Help Book Queen of the World, instead of my own gut. And if I should have ’fessed up to Georg the minute I got home and realized that he didn’t want us to be broken up, but simply wanted us to keep things low-key.

Georg and I get up to the front of the line. Thankfully, I don’t take a header as I scoot to the red STOP marker and wait for the chair to come around behind me so I can sit. Once we’re airborne and Georg has pulled the safety bar down in front of us, I close my eyes, enjoying the morning sunshine and the soft breeze blowing on my face. I can hear the swoosh of skis against snow as we sail over the heads of the skiers who arrived here before us and have managed to squeeze in a run or two already.

This is so much better than just hanging out in the palace scribbling essays for school or killing time vacuuming the apartment for Dad while I wait for Georg to get home from a soccer game.

That thought instantly makes me picture Georg in his soccer shorts. Yummy, yummy, yum, yum, yum. His legs are all muscular without being bulky. The kind you can just run your hands over and—

Georg’s arm bumps against mine. “Perfect day, huh? The snow’s just glittering. And it’s not too cold, either.”

I turn and look at him. He’s so gorgeous I can’t stand it. His helmet is covering most of his dark hair and he’s pulled his goggles down over his eyes, but I can still make out a devilish gleam through the lenses that makes me go all loopy. Mostly ’cause I know that gleam is one hundred percent for me.

“You know I love you madly, right?”

It just blurts right out of my big mouth, right there with my dad all of twenty feet behind me on the next chair.

We’ve never done the “I love you” bit. I made a pact with Christie, Jules, and Natalie years ago that if any of us ever felt that way about a guy, we’d wait for him to say it first. But I couldn’t help it.

And now that I’ve had two shocked seconds to think about what I just said, I don’t want to take it back.

Even though we’re totally in public here on the lift and Dad and what’s-her-name are on the chair right behind ours, Georg eases his hand across the seat and slips his gloved fingers over mine.

“You have no idea how much I want to kiss you right now,” he whispers.

Oh, I can guess.

I scoot just a little closer to him on the chair, lace my fingers up through his, then squeeze. We let go quickly, since neither one of us wants a lecture from Dad or The Fräulein about how inappropriate it is for a prince to engage in a public display of affection.

“We’ll find an empty section of the trail after we ditch them.” There’s enough urgency underlying Georg’s scrumptious accent to have me scanning the slope immediately, trying to see what areas are in view of people riding the chairlift so we don’t do anything stupid in any of those places.

We get off the lift and decide to take one of the easy runs, just to warm up.

On the good side: Even after nine months off, I pick up right where I left off from skiing. I glide right along. I don’t fall or even wobble on the way down. I manage to do this even though I know Georg’s watching me and even though I can practically feel him kissing me, I want him so bad.

On the not-so-good side: Dad and The Fräulein stick to us like glue the whole way down. Even when I pause at the side of the trail and fake like I need to adjust my goggles, they stop and wait.

Can they tell Georg and I are dying to jump each other or what?

When we get to the lift, I tell Dad that I think Georg and I are going to head to another part of the slope now that we’ve done a practice run, but we’ll make sure we don’t draw any attention to ourselves. Georg adds that we can meet them for lunch and that if they need us before that, we’ll both have our cell phones.

Dad agrees (hooray!), but then he maneuvers in the lift line so I end up riding with him this time while Georg’s stuck with The Fräulein.

I feel bad for Georg, but better him than me.

“You looked pretty good there,” Dad says as we take off. “Must be the new ski pants.”

“Very funny.”

“Look, Val, I wanted to ride with you for a reason.” His voice is quiet, like he’s afraid what he’s saying might carry to Georg and The Fräulein on the chair behind us.

Damn. Time to do a preemptive strike against his fatherly instinct to lecture me. “I promise, Dad, Georg will keep his helmet on. I don’t think anyone will realize
who he is. And we’ll definitely behave if we go—”