Page 44 of Royal Cocktail

She closed her eyes and sighed. They were right, of course. “Fine,” she said, then changed out of her PJs and into real clothes before heading down to street level with Bart so they could walk the short distance to The Fix.

She’d expected looks and questions when she reached the bar. After all, the staff and many of the customers knew her—and now they knew who she’d been dating.

What she hadn’t expected was the crowd gathered outside her condo.

They shouted questions as she and Bart walked, Skye keeping her head down as Bart muttered, “No comment, no comment, come on, folks, can’t you give her some space?”

Finally, at the corner of Sixth and Congress, she stopped and faced them. Obviously, they weren’t backing off until she said something. “I … love him. I miss … him. And I … know he’ll be a … great … king.”

That was all she could manage, and she was certain she sounded like an idiot, but at least she’d spoken. She owed Leo that.

“You did great,” Bart assured her, hurrying her the next few blocks to the bar. Strangely enough, her comment seemed to have shut down the frenzy, and they arrived without any more demands for quotes or pictures or rudely shouted questions about how Leo was in bed. The answer was excellent, but that wasn’t something that Skye intended to share.

“Rough walk?” Griffin asked, as he and Bev entered the bar at the same time.

“Next time, we’ll take a taxi,” Bart said. “Idiotic for such a short distance, but it’ll at least give Skye breathing room.”

“I survived,” she said. “And it will … die down now that he’s … King.”

“Until the coronation,” Bart agreed. “Then it’ll start up all over again.”

That was true. But that was a long way off.

Bart waved to Hannah and Matthew and started across the bar, but Skye held back, tugging Griffin to the side as Bev peeled off to sign a few autographs.

“How … do you do it?” Skye asked.

To his credit, he didn’t pretend to misunderstand. He was an A-list screenwriter with a body half-covered in burns, including his face. His soon-to-be wife was an Oscar-winning actress. And he’d accepted the fact that he was going to be in the spotlight.

“I hated it for a long time,” he told her. “The eyes on me. That feeling that they would think I was lesser because I didn’t look the way society thought I should look, whatever that means.”

“But you … own it now.” She’d seen the footage from his last movie premiere. He and Bev on the red carpet, and he hadn’t been wearing his signature hoodie.

He shrugged. “This is who I am. Once I accepted that it got easier.”

“But how? How did you … accept it?”

He exhaled, then shrugged. “I weighed what was important over what wasn’t.” He ran his hand over the right side of his face. “Bev won.”

“You make it sound easy.”

“It wasn’t,” he said. “Or, it wasn’t until it was.”

“What changed?”

“I fell in love,” he said simply. “When you let it, love makes everything easy.” He smiled, only the unscarred part of his mouth curving up, then reached out to cup her shoulder. “You’ll be fine, Skye.”

He started to walk away, but she reached out and grabbed his sleeve. “Griff, wait.”

He turned back, a question in his eyes.

“Did I make a mistake not going with him?”

He shook his head, just the tiniest of motions. “Only you know that. And if you did, well, there’s this cool invention called an airplane…”

* * *

Griffin’s words stayed with Skye throughout the night, so much so that she left The Fix early because she was so lost in her thoughts she got tired of asking her friends what they were talking about.