My oration ground to a halt as I saw that she was laughing.
“Your Majesty? Excuse me. Did I say something funny?”
“Oh Skeeve,” she gasped, coming up for air. “Did you really think … Of course I’m not going to give up the throne. Are you kidding? I love being Queen.”
“You do? But you said . . .”
“Oh, I say lots of things,” she said, waving a negligent hand. “One of the nice things about being royalty is that you get to decide for yourself which of the things you say are for real and which should be ignored.”
To say the least, I was confused.
“Then why did you say that if you didn’t intend to follow through?” I said. “And how about your marriage proposal? Didn’t you mean that, either?”
“Oh, I meant it all right,” she smiled. “But I didn’t really expect you to want to marry me. I mean, why should you? You’ve already got wealth and power without being tied down to a throne or a wife. Why should you want to stay here and play second banana to me when you could be off hopping around the world or wherever it is that you go as the one and only Great Skeeve? It would have been fabulous for me and the kingdom to have you tied into us permanently, but there weren’t any real benefits for you. That’s why I came up with that abdication thing.”
“Abdication thing?” I echoed weakly.
“Sure. I knew you didn’t want to be a king. If you had, you would have kept the throne back when Roddie had you pose as him. Anyway, I figured that if you didn’t want it bad enough, it just might make a big enough threat to lure you into playing consort for me instead.”