“Evening, Margot,” Nick said, greeting me at the door in an apron with a sketch of a carrot on it, his sandy hair sticking up haphazardly. “How’s the shop?”
“Hi, Steve,” I said, kissing him deeply. “You taste like butter.”
“All good cooks sample their ingredients.”
I wiped a smudge off his face. “But you’re technically not a good cook.”
“Not yet,” Nick said. “But I’ve come a long way from burning lasagna.” He made a voila gesture at the dining table, where two charred circles sat on mismatched, chipped dishes. “Now I’m burning meat pies.”
“These look almost edible!” I said.
“See?” Nick clapped adorably. “I’m really improving.”
I tossed my glasses onto the table, where they landed next to a copy of the Mirror. I didn’t look. Instead, I poked at one of the pies. Black flakes matching the ones on Nick’s cheek came away on my finger.
“Yes, unfortunately, they are indeed only almost edible. The second lot are in the oven now.” He frowned. “They look a bit better. Maybe? I keep wanting to text Gaz a photo, but…”
He didn’t need to finish.
“I missed you in the shop today,” I said. “You and your saucy new mustache.”
Nick wrapped his arms around me from behind. “I took my mustache into town for a bit,” he said. “Steve had a lot of advice for the butcher’s assistant about her rude girlfriend who deletes everything prematurely from the DVR. And then Steve popped round the off-license for a new box of wine and ran into Keith from the betting shop. You will not believe what his landlord is trying to pull.”
“Hang on,” I said, swiveling in his arms to face him. “We’ve only been here a few days. How do you know all these people already?”
He grinned. “I have always wanted to be some village’s busybody,” he said. He dipped his head and kissed me. “Isn’t it sexy?”
My laughter was lost in the clash of our mouths. Both our pulses quickened. So did my breathing.
“Margot,” he said, pulling away. “I approve of where you’re going with this, but if I ruin this second lot of pies, I might pull off your wig and weep into it.”
I nipped at his lip one last time. “Fine. I’ll go collect myself elsewhere.”
“Send my wife Bex out in about fifteen minutes for her pie, please,” he said, hurrying over to the oven. “These are going to blow her mind.”
Grinning, I headed into our tiny bedroom and pulled off my blond hair, plopping it onto the top of the dresser next to a pile of romance novels Nick had bought downstairs. One of them was called Fancy Ladies, and I itched to take a picture and send it to Freddie, who could spin it into a solid month of brotherly teasing.
But I couldn’t. We weren’t telling Freddie, or anybody else, a thing. After our wedding-day fiasco, Nick and I went off the grid, hoping to start our married life anywhere other than amid the ashes of a tabloid tire fire. It had been hard. I missed my sister, my mother, our friends. I even missed Marj, the boys’ personal secretary, and the way she would hiss through her front teeth whenever one of them ticked her off (which was often). I especially missed Freddie. But missing Freddie was more complicated, because Freddie’s feelings for me didn’t stop at friendship. He and I had once crashed impulsively into a kiss; we’d agreed it was a careless, confused mistake, and I’d believed it. He apparently hadn’t been so sure, and now, thanks to a combination of betrayals both accidental and chillingly deliberate, everybody knew it.
Nick and I had both decided we couldn’t draw anyone else into our escape. It was better for them to know nothing, and safer for us to keep it that way. No texts, no emails, no check-ins, nothing that risked getting leaked to the media and threatening the peace of mind that we had found by hitting the road incognito, ambling sociably through small country towns, and now selling books to people who had no idea they were passing their bills to a royal cuckold and his faithless wife—the most hated person in Great Britain, if not the world.
Stop it, I told myself. The whole point is to get away from all that. But the damn bells had really thrown me off tonight. I shoved aside my feelings and dragged a hairbrush roughly through my own brown hair, matted and tragic from a day of being shoved into Margot’s flaxen disguise. With every night that Nick and I climbed into someone else’s lumpy old bed, our adrenaline surging from another day of going undetected and our hormones rising to match it, the shitshow that had erupted in London felt farther away. The ruse was working—both for us and on us.
With a tug of the brush, one of my hair extensions got caught in the bristles and came free. One more vestige of Duchess Rebecca that I could leave behind. I tossed it into the wastebasket and followed my nose back out into the kitchen, where Nick was taking two faintly less charred objects out of the oven. He set a pie in front of me with a flourish.
“This one might even be mediocre,” he said.
“High praise,” I said, and with a grateful sniff, sank into a dining chair. It did at least smell like meat. Of some kind. “Oh, our last customer of the evening sent his regards. It’s a good sign that he’s met us both and didn’t twig to anything. Your mustache is really effective.”
“We’re also not front and center in as many papers anymore,” he said. “Or at least our faces aren’t.”
He nodded toward the Mirror as he joined me at the table. I stabbed through the lid of my pie, and as it belched steam, I reluctantly pulled the paper toward my plate. The lead story was about an MP being found passed out in a shrub,
