She bit back a laugh, which the photographer interpreted as a devastatingly flirty grin.
“Hold that! Hold that!” he shrieked, snapping away like a paparazzo on espresso.
The shutters clicked furiously.
“Do you ever get used to it?” Emilia asked, shifting her weight—not nervously, just deliberately breaking the pose.
Alexander exhaled. “No. You just get better at faking serenity while contemplating death.”
She looked at him sideways. “That’s bleak.”
“That’s monarchy,” he replied.
Emilia tried not to laugh again. Alexander, King of Caledonia, purveyor of sardonic doom, didn’t flinch. He just adjusted his cufflinks like a man reconciling with fate.
Overhead, a news helicopter buzzed like a particularly nosy wasp.
Emilia let out a slow breath, not allowing herself to shrink under the weight of it all. She’d signed up for this—or at least, she’d signed up forhim.It just hadn’t fully occurred to her that loving Alexander meant loving the endless public gaze, too.
“Hey, don’t worry, you’re doing great,” Alexander murmured. To the watching press, it probably looked like a whispered declaration of love.
“Easy for you to say,” she whispered back. “You have your royal ‘serene face’ loaded and ready.”
He chuckled, low enough only she could hear it. “I’ll teach you. It’s like anInstagram filter but for your entire soul.”
She choked on a laugh. This time, the smile was real. And the camera caught it—the way she glowed when she looked at him, the quiet way his hand hovered at the small of her back, the impossible intimacy of people trapped together under a microscope.
The way he gently tugged her closer looked incredibly romantic, but in reality, he was mainly just trying to shield her from a crew member tripping over a light reflector.
A voice murmured from somewhere behind a hedge, “…an enchanting fairytale moment…”
Emilia resisted the urge to roll her eyes.
But Alexander’s hand was steady on hers, and when the photographer barked for them to walk along the path “like you’re having the best conversation of your lives,” he leaned down and murmured in her ear, “Let’s talk about something important.”
“Like what?”
He grinned. “Which wedding cake flavor would scandalize the palace most?”
After thinking for a minute, she said, “Probably, Chocolate Guinness.”
“Yes. Revolutionary choice,” Alexander declared, eyes shining with mock solemnity. “They’d have to exile us. We’d move to a small picturesque village and raise goats.”
“Goats seem reasonable,” Alexander said solemnly. “Better than Eleanor’s corgis. Those things are trained assassins.”
He laughed—a proper, unguarded one—and Emilia allowed herself to enjoy it. Let them capture that.
The rest of the shoot blurred—posed laughter, artfully timed petals, and a vague sense of being a human prop in the palace public relations campaign. Every time her nerves spiked, Alexander had her back: a muttered joke, a smirk, a perfectly timed eye-roll.
By the time they were dismissed, Emilia was high on exhaustion and defiance. She and Alexander collapsed onto a hidden stone bench just out of frame, while a grim-faced palace spokesperson droned on about love andtradition.
Emilia kicked off her heels with a groan. “Remind me again why we didn’t just elope?”
Alexander shrugged, tugging his tie loose. “Because the nation would never forgive us for depriving them of a royal wedding.”
“True and because your mother would’ve sent the corgis after us.”
She leaned back. The press was still snapping her expressions. Some poor intern was probably live-tweeting her hydration level.