Web Desk

Prince Harry is touching upon his first meeting with Cressida Bonas as he recovered from the split with Chelsy Davy, recalling his “painfully awkward” first kiss with Bonas in his memoir Spare.

Writing in the book, the Duke of Sussex reveals he was introduced to Bonas by a mutual friend.

He writes in the memoir: “I was at a music festival and my cousin tapped me on the shoulder. Harry, this is my friend Cressida. Oh. Um. Hello. The setting was inauspicious. Lots of people, zero privacy. Also, I was still suffering a broken heart. On the other hand, the landscape was lovely, the music was good, the weather was fine.”

He adds: “There were sparks. Soon after that day we went to dinner. She told me about her life, her family, her dreams. She wanted to be an actress. She was so soft-spoken and shy, acting was the last profession I’d have imagined for her, and I said so. But she confessed that it made her feel alive. Free. She made it sound like flying.”

“Weeks later, at the end of another date, I gave her a lift home,” Harry writes. “‘I’m just off the King’s Road.’ We pulled up to a large house on a well-kept street. ‘You live here? This is your house?’ ‘No.’ She explained that she was staying for a few days with an aunt.

“I walked her up the steps. She didn’t invite me in. I didn’t expect her to, didn’t want her to. Take it slow, I thought.”

The Duke of Sussex then describes how he attempted to kiss Bonas for the first time, but fumbled the romantic moment.

“I leaned in to give her a kiss, but my aim was off. I could take out a cactus from three miles away from a Hellfire missile but I couldn’t quite find her lips,” he writes. “She turned, I tried again on the return trip, and we managed something like a graze. Painfully awkward.”

Prince Harry says he called his cousin Princess Eugenie, who introduced the pair, the next day to lament what had happened at the end of the date.

“She didn’t disagree. She’d already spoken to Cressida. She sighed. ‘Awkward.’ But then came the good news. Cressida was game to try again.”

The pair went on another date, about which Harry wrote: “We tried another kiss. Not so awkward. I had hope.”

Who is Cressida Bonas?

Model and actress Cressida Bonas is the only child of entrepreneur Jeffrey Bonas and socialite Lady Mary Gaye Curzon.

She was born in Winchester, Hampshire.

Bonas, 33, studied dance at the University of Leeds between 2008 and 2011. Bonas has worked for fashion brands, including Burberry and Mulberry, and appeared in films, such as Tulip Fever and The Bye Bye Man.