He collapsed next to me and crawled over to press a kiss against my clavicle. “We should have done this sooner,” he said. “No one told me how hot you’d look in a cowboy hat.”
“Yeah, I finally understand the upside of a long overseas tour,” I told him.
He sat up to face me. “The thrill of international travel?” he asked. “Meeting world leaders? Getting to sample all the local delicacies?”
“Hotel sex,” I said. “It’s the best.”
Nick laughed. “And without even a single binder to guide us.”
As promised on its shirts, Canada was for lovers. After each jam-packed day of meet-and-greets and charity engagements and touristy excursions, I expected to collapse with exhaustion until it was time to get up and do it again. But instead, it was invigorating, and every night we fell on each other like one of us had just been released from prison. The third day of the tour, I woke up with a hickey. (It was, thankfully, on an area of my body no one else would see.) The sex fast was definitely over, and we were making up for lost time.
Nick and I were pulling off the public-facing aspects, too. We began in Ottawa, where we were greeted by the prime minister, some rowdy well-wishers, and a bouquet of roses that photographed beautifully against my white dress. We swept through the capital city in two days before moving on to Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland, and Quebec. We met homeless teens going through job-training programs, visited sick children in shiny new hospital wards and brave adults tackling the mental health issues that had become Nick’s priority, learned to make poutine, and raced dragon boats in Anne of Green Gables country, where even my predictable “Lady of Shalott” joke went over a treat. At every stop the crowds were large and welcoming, save for a few anti-monarchy demonstrators and one environmental group protesting that we flew private—a problem I understood, but couldn’t solve, given how often I was expected to change my clothes in transit. Lady Bollocks was on a high: The onslaught of photos from the week (me celebrating my victory on the low seas, Nick sieving gravy, both of us having earnest conversations with adorable tots) were so winning that even that cranky old stooge Xandra Deane had to admit we were killing it. Finally, Nick and I were doing something right.
We’d arrived in Calgary early that morning and spent an entertaining day at its Stampede, world renowned for its rodeo but also for the raucous party at its fairgrounds (scientists once tracked an uptick in both STDs and pregnancies after it ended). A photo of me and Nick feeding each other funnel cake while wearing cowboy hats was currently trending on Twitter. Everyone loved it. Almost.
Do feel free to leave the hat in Canada, Eleanor had texted me from her new iPhone. She’d followed it up with a link to one @KingIdrisElba—avatar still an egg—who’d tweeted that we looked like rodeo clowns.
No way. I’m bringing it home for Richard, I replied.
Good. It can keep him warm after I get my crown back.
Eleanor had been making good strides in her recovery, but her gait remained halting and her right side didn’t routinely obey her commands. Richard insisted she shouldn’t return to her duties yet, and to her profound irritation the doctors agreed, so all the Queen could do was sit and stew. Eleanor was getting a taste of the waiting Richard had done for a lifetime, and she didn’t care for it one bit. It was hard to tell if this was The New Eleanor, who’d shed her filter, or a natural clash between two people who had, in their own ways, each been bred to rule.
After the Stampede, Nick and I had been flown by copter up to Jasper, a town in the Rockies with a beautiful resort where Eleanor and Henry had stayed back in the early ’60s, shortly before he died. The mountains wore their snowy caps proudly even in midsummer, and the greenery was lush, hugging the perfectly clear blue lake around which the Jasper Park Lodge was built. We’d been placed in the same charming log-and-stone cabin Eleanor and Henry had taken—a quaint, freestanding building on the edge of the property, overlooking the lake and the vast expanse of natural wonders surrounding it.
“I wish we could go for a ramble,” Nick said, gesturing out the window. “Get lost in the woods.”
“Or eaten by bears.” I walked over to the chilled bottle of local Chardonnay that was waiting for us, next to a plate of cookies. I poured a glass. “One of the magazines they left in the bathroom has a story about a sassy local bear who keeps playing with the lobby’s sliding doors.”
“We could sneak out, you know,” Nick mused, sliding off the bed and stepping out onto the balcony.
“And give Popeye a heart attack?” I said as I joined him. It was cool and still outside, the lights of the far-off lodge reflecting onto the lake, and the stars above us as bright and bountiful as I’d ever seen.
“Our PPOs are asleep—”
“Popeye never sleeps.”
“So we could pop out into the wilderness—”
“Is there actual wilderness at a five-star resort?”
“And get up to no good.” His fingers crept under the waistband of my jeans.
“You’re bold in Canada,” I told him, running my hands up his chest to lock them behind his neck.
“It’s all this fresh air,” he explained.
“But you’re also forgetting that we can get up to a lot of no good right here, without worrying about wild animals.”
“Besides each other,” he teased, lowering his lips to mine. Neither of us said anything else for a long time.
We weren’t the only ones who felt the touring life agreed with us. BuzzFeed wrote an entire listicle called “Here’s Forty-Five Photos of Nick and Bex Eye-Banging All Over Canada,” while People’s website went with the more delicate euphemism “The Look of Love.” When the tour moved west to Vancouver, even
