Prince Harry has recalled his “painfully awkward” first kiss with Cressida Bonas in his memoir Spare.

On Tuesday (10 January), the Duke of Sussex’s long-awaited autobiography finally hit the shelves.

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In the book, Harry details how he came to meet Meghan Markle, as well as his past relationships.

These include the late Caroline Flack and actor Bonas, who he was introduced to by Princess Eugenie and dated from 2012 to 2014.

Harry writes about having dinner with Bonas on their first date, during which “she told me about her life, her family, her dreams” of being an actor.

“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.”

Harry 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.”

The royal says he rang 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.”

Bonas is now married to real-estate broker Harry Wentworth-Stanley, with whom she welcomed a son in late 2022.

Last week, ahead of the release of Spare, Bonas shared a first photo of her newborn baby to Instagram.

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