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He did not know if she was remarking on the fact that he hadn’t merely sent a driver—as he should have—or if she was complaining that the king himself was not on hand to roll out the red carpet. “The king regrets that he could not be on hand this evening to personally welcome you. He had some last-minute business to attend to in Riems, which you may or may not know is on the other side of the country. He is—”
“Yes. There’s a secondary Morneau factory in Riems,” she said, interrupting him.
Though why should he expect anything less from someone like her? He practiced his breathing.In through the nose, out through the mouth.Just once, though, so he didn’t look a fool. It helped. He picked up where he’d left off, not acknowledging the substance of the interruption. “He is, however, looking forward to meeting you tomorrow. In the meantime, I am equerry to His Majesty. Are you familiar with the role?” He asked because many people weren’t. Americans in particular often thought he was a butler. Not that there was anything wrong with being a butler. It was an honorable way to make a living performing an important service.
“Yes. I’ve seenThe Crown.”
God preserve him. His impassive facade almost slipped.In through the nose, out through the mouth.
“As far as I can tell,” she went on, “being an equerry is like being an executive assistant. Everyone thinks you’re a secretary, but really, you make the entire ship go.”
“The ship? I beg your pardon?”
“It’s a Star Trek metaphor. The captain can talk a good talk, but the person who actually makes the ship go is the engineer. Ifthe engineer can’t make the ship go—or doesn’t want to—it’s not going, no matter what the captain says.”
Hmm. What a curious, and unexpected, analogy.
“But choose your metaphor,” she went on. “The wind beneath your boss’s wings. The man behind the throne.” She cracked a smile, which she held for a beat, clearly trying not to laugh. She lost the battle and let loose a high, musical, delighted laugh that seemed at odds with her crushing-handshake, rudely-interrupting, corporate-goth persona. “Which I guess is not a metaphor in this case, because you literally are that.”
“Well, not literally.”
“What?”
“I don’t literally stand behind the throne.” There wasn’t even a literal throne, at least not in the way she imagined.
She rolled her eyes ever so slightly. He would have expected “Don’t roll one’s eyes at the client” to be a basic principle. “You may not be aware,” she said, “that many English-language dictionaries have revised the definition ofliterallyto includein effect, orvirtually.”
He tried not to bristle overtly. He spoke English as well as or better than your average educated American, thank you very much. “I am aware, but that doesn’t mean I approve. A word cannot also mean the opposite of itself simply because enough people agree.” Another fact of which he was aware: he shouldn’t be speaking to her like this, not when the king had expressly asked him to see her comfortably settled.
She stared at him for a beat too long before saying, “I see how this is going to be.”
“Do you?” He was still doing it. He couldn’t seem to stop.
“I do.” Her voice had taken on a tone—probably to match his—and her eyes, which were the deep, dark blue of a mountain lake, flashed.
All right. Enough. He had one task here, one simple task, and that was to welcome Ms. Delaney. He had other, more important work to do, so he was anxious to tick her off his list. “Shall we go collect your bags?”
She nodded at the small suitcase of doom she’d been pulling behind her. “This is it.”
“That is all you have for such a long stay?”
“I travel a lot. I have packing down to a science.”
She probably had everything reduced to “a science,” including how she planned to strip Eldovia of its identity and traditions. She was likely a card-carrying member of some efficiency cult or other that had a lot of Greek letters in its name but really did nothing more than teach you how to write a to-do list and drill into you the discipline to carry it out. “Well then, shall we?”
“We shall.”
In through the nose, out through the mouth.
“Maybe we can use this time to get started?” Cara asked once they were settled in the back seat of a black BMW and Mr. Benz—he kept calling her Ms. Delaney, so she was thinking of him as Mr. Benz—informed her that the trip from the airport to the palace would take almost two hours. “I thought we could go over a few things.”
“I believe your contract commences tomorrow.”
“Right. Regardless, I’m fine to start informally now. Can we get up to speed?”
“Get up to speed?” he echoed, a quizzical expression on his face. He nodded toward the driver, who was separated from them by a clear plastic partition. “I assure you that Mr. Walmsley is as expeditious a driver as you could hope for and, more critically for when we begin our ascent into the mountains, a careful one. He’s former Eldovian army.”
“That was an idiom. To get someone up to speed means to catch them up.” Was that a bad way to explain it? Another metaphor that might not make sense to a non-native English speaker?
