All Chapters of Puck Me, One More Time: Chapter 191 - Chapter 198

Liam's POVThe message came through on a number I did not have saved.‘It's Eric. I know you have no reason to agree to this. But I would like to talk. Somewhere neutral. Not the palace and not the school. Just a conversation. You can say no.’I read it twice.Then I put the phone face down on the table and sat with it for a few minutes, which was something I had gotten better at over the last several months … sitting with things before responding to them rather than acting on the first instinct that arrived.The first instinct was to say no.The second instinct was to wonder what he actually had to say.I picked the phone back up.‘Name the place,’ I typed.*****He chose a small café on the east side of the city … the kind of place that had no particular connection to either of our worlds, which was probably the point. Ordinary tables, ordinary noise and I could bet that nobody would recognise either of us or care if they did.I got there first.He arrived 7 minutes later, which tol

King Ken's POV.I got to Jenny's office and knocked on her office door… that was 7AM.She looked up from her desk with the expression she wore when she was already 3 hours into her day and was not surprised to see me but was waiting to find out what I needed."I need you to clear tomorrow," I said.She looked at me. "Clear it entirely?""No engagements," I said. "No council. No press. No schedule whatsoever."She held her pen over the page for a moment. "For the full day?""Yeah, for the full day." I confirmed.She wrote something in the margin of the schedule in front of her … not on the schedule itself, in the margin, which was Jenny's way of noting something she was going to handle without it becoming part of the official record. Then she looked up at me."Anything else?" she said."No," I said. "That is everything."She nodded once and looked back at her work, which was Jenny's way of telling me the conversation was concluded and she had what she needed.I had not explained furthe

Liam's POVQueen Helen's private sitting room was smaller than most of the rooms in the palace that I had been in for official purposes. No long table. No formal arrangement of chairs designed to communicate hierarchy before anyone sat down. Just a room that a person actually lived in …with books on the shelf that had been read rather than displayed, a writing desk with papers that had not been tidied for our arrival, two armchairs and a small sofa arranged around a low table.It felt more like her than any other room I had been in.She was standing when we arrived, which was the formal version of receiving us. She gestured to the sofa and waited until we had sat before she sat in the armchair across from us … not the one at the head of any imaginary table, just across, the way people sat when the conversation was meant to be between equals rather than between a queen and two people who needed something from her."Thank you for agreeing to meet with us," Ken said."You are the King,"

Prince Ken's POVThe statement had been written and rewritten four times.Not because I did not know what I wanted to say. Of course, I had known that for weeks now…right in that afternoon at the cove when I had told Liam I was going to ask him something properly when the time came. But because the words that lived in my chest did not always translate cleanly into the kind of language that stood on palace steps and reached a country, and I had wanted to get it right.Jenny had reviewed the final version that morning. Then, she had made two small adjustments and returned it without comment, which was her way of saying she approved.My mother had read it the evening before. She had looked at it for a long time and then looked at me and said, "It is good, Ken. Say it simply and mean every word." Which was the most direct writing advice she had ever given me and also, I suspected, the most important.Liam had not read it.I had asked him if he wanted to and he had said no. He said he woul