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I fasten my hand to his arm. “Time to go.”
“What did I do now?” asks the prince, his voice muffled by the mask as I drag him out of the tent.
“You can’t go around asking that question,” I hiss.
“Why not? I’m very curious about it. It’s not an insult. It’s perhaps your most charming quality as a country.”
I nod. “Time to move on from the public at large,” I say.
“Where to next, benevolent goddess of the tollbooth?”
His odd epithets make me smile despite myself.
“Hailey!”
I automatically whirl around, jerking my hand from Ben’s grip.
April runs up to me, out of breath. Her husband follows behind her. “I thought that was you!”
I hug my friend as she scolds me. “You said you weren’t sure if you wanted to come, but you could have told me you had a date! Hi, I’m April.”
Ben takes her offered hand and kisses the back of it. More like presses the rubbery, buggy lips to it, which has my friend in stitches. “Pleased to make your acquaintance. I’m Ben.”
April sizes him up as I introduce her husband, Bill. “So how do you know my friend? She’s told me nothing about you.”
We answer at the same time.
“We met today, here, at the festival!” I say.
“We’ve been chatting online for some time,” Ben says.
I stare at him, open-mouthed.
April laughs wheezily. “I see how it is. Bill and I met on a dating app and didn’t tell anyone for the longest time.”
Anxiety churns my stomach. The longer we stand here, the more curious April will be to see his face. She’ll recognize him for sure.
“Well, we have to go,” I say brightly. “We have dinner reservations in Charleston, and it’s a long drive.”
April eyes me skeptically, then says, “Okay. You’ll text me later, right?”
God bless skeptical friends who want to make sure I’m safe. I love her for that, but I have to get Ben out of here. It’s not that I don’t trust her not to blab about the prince if I would ask her not to. It’s that, oddly, I want more time with him. He might be a royal pain in my ass, but he’s hiding for a reason, and I want to know why.
We chat with April and Bill a bit longer before returning to Ben’s rental car. “I am sweaty, and now I smell vile,” Ben says, letting out a sigh of relief as he removes the bug-face mask revealing a mustache that’s gone fully cattywampus.
“Yeah,” I say, shaking my head as I open the driver-side door. “But it kept people from recognizing you.”
I realize what I’ve said as soon as the words are out of my mouth.
Crap on a cookie. Now, I’ve done it.
7
Torben
I should not have been so bold as to hold her hand.
Touching Hailey made me feel things.
