“Oooh, twins, eh?” Gaz said, wiggling his eyebrows.
“Get off it,” Cilla scoffed. “Gaz thinks he’s dead suave, but his father is a disgraced finance minister, so it’s more like dead broke. He still owes me thirty quid from last term.”
“I make up for it with piles of charm,” Gaz said. “And this bloke here,” he said, gesturing at Nick, “is…Steve.”
He adopted a deep, dramatic intonation, lingering on the word like it was a rich dessert to be savored. Nick buried his face in his beer, but the telltale bubbles gave away his laughter.
“Steve,” I echoed, trying on Gaz’s tone for size. “Sure. I can roll with that, Steve.”
Gaz slapped the table, which reverberated under his meaty hand. “You told her?”
“She’d have figured it out anyway,” Cilla said. “So take it down about three point sizes, please, Garamond.”
Clive was back and sliding the drinks onto the scarred coffee table. “‘Gaz’ is short for ‘Garamond,’ of the Fonty Garamonds,” he explained.
“As in, the actual font,” Joss piped up. “His grandfather invented it.”
“He’s mad as pants. Won’t even read anything in sans serif,” Gaz said. “Couldn’t he have invented something cooler to be named after? Like Garamond the Time-Traveling Motorbike, or Garamond the Lady-Killing Love Tonic?”
“I thought you were Garamond the Lady-Killing Love Tonic,” Cilla cracked.
“Well, as long as we’re talking stupid names,” he said irritably, “somebody tell me why we bother with Steve if none of you uses it.”
Nick rubbed the top of his head absently. “It’s not really supposed to fool anyone,” he said. “It’s more for if I’m caught in trouble or doing anything embarrassing.”
I met his eyes. “Embarrassing, like joking to a prince that all his relatives have an STD?”
“Exactly,” he said. “Although no one in polite society would actually do that.”
We smiled at each other.
Clive turned to me and pretended to study me deeply, as if my eyelashes were tea leaves he could read. “And you are…Rebecca Porter, almost twenty, from Iowa, father invented a sofa that employs a mini-fridge as a base—”
“Can you get us one?” Gaz interjected.
“…and you once got arrested for public indecency and trespassing because you accidentally tore off your trousers while climbing a barbed-wire fence,” Clive finished.
“I maintain it tried to climb me,” I quipped. “What else does my dossier say? Or do you just have ESP?”
“Of course there’s a dossier,” Gaz said, clapping a hand on Nick’s shoulder. “The Firm has to know who’s living twenty feet from the future of the bloodline.”
Nick’s discomfort was clear (one of his tells is that the tops of his ears start to vibrate—it’s the strangest thing). He drained the last of his pint. “While you lot are busy frightening Bex, I need to go say hello to some people.”
“Yes, right. Back to the grind.” Clive grinned, nodding toward a giggling, coquettish cluster of blondes across the way.
“There are probably worse fates,” Nick said. “I hear syphilis is a beast.”
He slipped off into the room, but didn’t make it far before he was waylaid by a cranky-looking patrician brunette in a high-collared blouse, who pulled him over to whisper in his ear.
Clive whacked Gaz on the arm. “You know he’s sensitive about the king stuff.”
“But it’s exciting!” Gaz argued. “Big intrigue. I’m very respectful.”
Cilla looked doubtful as Joss checked her cell phone. “I’m meeting Tank at the new punk bar over by the Ashmolean,” she said. “Anybody want to come?”
I glanced around for guidance. Cilla shook her head.
“Suit yourselves,” Joss said, leaving behind a quarter of a pint.
“Don’t mind if I do,” Gaz said brightly, reaching over and swigging it.
“Really, Gaz,” Cilla nagged. “You’ll be sweating lager next. My great-grandmother’s great-uncle Algernon had that happen when he was courting the Spanish infanta and—”
“Ah, yes, here we go again,” grunted Gaz.
“Cilla has more stories than Nick has stalkers,” Clive told me. “I’ve no clue if any of it’s true, but it’s bloody entertaining.”
“…and then of course she broke it off with him by trying to thrust a letter opener into his ear at her brother’s coronation,” Cilla was saying.
To better bark at him, Cilla clambered into the empty chair next to Gaz. Clive responded by settling into her old spot, smashed up next to me, our thighs touching. It wasn’t unpleasant. He was the Hollywood archetype of a sensitive yet smoldering Brit—wavy jet-black hair, strong jaw, and a voice that was smooth and husky all at once.
“So, Bex, what are you reading?”
“Reading?”
“Studying,” he clarified.
“It’s not in my file?”
Clive smiled. “We only got the juicy bits,” he said, sipping his drink and then licking the froth off his lip in a way that suggested he enjoyed my watching him do it.
“Well, theoretically I’m reading British history, toward my degree at home, but what I really want to do over here is draw,” I said. “I mostly work in pencils, and so much of the architecture here lends itself to dramatic gray and black areas. The arches, the carvings, the gargoyles…”
“Did I hear you say gargoyles?” Gaz interrupted. “That reminds me.” He pointed at the stern brunette. “That is our other floor-mate, Lady Beatrix Larchmont-Kent-Smythe. Otherwise known as Lady Bollocks, because of her initials, and also, she can be a bloody load of it.”
Lacey later described Bea as looking and acting exactly the way you would expect a Lady Beatrix Larchmont-Kent-Smythe to look and act. Her posture is as impeccable as her tailoring, she never loses her keys nor her cool nor so much as a chip from her manicure, and I believe she intentionally waxes her eyebrows so that she always appears to be raising them at you with deepest skepticism. Clive explained that Lady Bollocks was a lifelong friend of Nick’s family, and in fact, as we alternated pints and gin-filled highballs, he turned out to be full of tidbits: that Cilla’s ancestors lost their money in a lusty Downton Abbey–style scandal; that the girl tending bar once had a pop hit called “Fish and Chips” about a memorable weekend with a famous boy band; that two hundred people had money on whether Cilla and Gaz would sleep together or murder each other (he had a hundred pounds on them doing both); and that Joss’s continued enrollment was a mystery to everyone, because she rarely did anything except follow around her boyfriends and make clothes in her room, to the consternation of her pushy father—the Queen’s gynecologist.
“She’s a good enough sort, but we don’t see her much,” Clive said. “Her father requested she be on Nick’s floor, to light a fire under her or some such, and you don’t run afoul of a man who has such, er, sensitive personal information.”
“Keep your friends close, keep the secrets of the Royal Birth Canal closer,” I said.