Royally Yours

Chapter 1

Ben

Even without the frigid London air, it was an absolutely shit night to be alive.

Some of it was partly my fault for allowing one of my best friends Jack to goad me into going hard last night. Also allowing him to goad me into drink after drink being poured down my throat. Not that I'd minded at the time. It was a spectacularly good way to forget that I was announcing my engagement in a week, only barely by choice. Not that I didn't like Tessa. She was pretty enough, gorgeous in fact if we're being fair. Smart, accomplished. She had also been there for me during the toughest period of my life, losing ⅓ of my immediate family. We had bonded in therapy and while she often gave off the impression that she was a vapid airhead, she was actually pretty funny. So yes, I did like Tessa and getting engaged to her definitely shouldn't make me want to spend every waking hour in a drunken stupor. But here we were.

Because she wasn't-

No, don't you even dare think about her.

" You look like vomit," my brother, Charles, pointed out needlessly in a hushed voice while smiling for the cameras lining the entrance to the Love's Charity Gala. Charles, or His Royal Highness King Charles Montague the third as he was now known, was always good with the press even under the worst of circumstances. He was never without his registered winsome grin. I, on the other hand, could not manage more than a grimace.

" I feel like vomit," I informed my brother in a similar tone, " Just whose idea was it to have so much pink in one entryway?"

The entryway in question was adorned with pink balloons, lacy frou-frou's and fabric so gaudy and voluminous it could swallow up a body and no one would notice.
Thankfully, the doors finally opened and we were let into the - gloriously press-free- hall, with somehow even more pink vomiting over it. Great.

"Are you sure it's the decor that's getting to you?" Charles asked, " Or the fact that you crawled into your penthouse at 2:00 am this morning barely conscious?"

"Why not both?" I glanced at Piper, Charles' wife, hoping she would find this an appropriate moment to pitch in. Charles had his lecturing voice on and I wasn't sure I could tolerate it with the headache from satan I currently had.

Piper caught my gaze and like the utter darling she was, she said, " Charles your brother's not 15 anymore. Plus its been a hard few years for him after we lost your grandmother, I think he's overdue a drinking binge. "

I smiled at her gratefully. This was why I adored my sister-in-law. Not only was she the only person even semi-capable of putting up with my brother for long periods of time, she knew exactly when a man had need of a drinking binge and I had not had a good binge in...well, years.
"Thanks Pipe," I said.

"Although," she continued, " They probably should have done a better job on your makeup love. You do look positively green."

I gave her a look of mock incense. " Piper, how dare you? I'll have you know this is the face that won world's sexiest bachelor the minute I turned 18. You used to love this face." She had teased me endlessly about the magazine cover. Truth be told, I had only agreed to do it as a joke.

Also because you thought you would get some attention from a certain someone you pathetic wanker.

I said stop thinking about her!

" That was ages ago," Piper joked back, " Back when you were young and lovely. But I'm afraid to tell you love, you've aged."

I gasped. " You take that back or this is the end of our torrid affair."

Piper snorted like she usually did whenever I brought up the Daily Mail article that swore up and down that Piper and I were having an affair. In all fairness, we had been pretty close back then when she started dating my brother, but we never saw each other in that way. She was like the sister I never had and while flirting with her was a sure way to get my brother's danders up (which I enjoy doing) it never went much further than that.