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Meghan Markle Shares Tender Moment With Harry in Never-Before-Seen Throwback From Early Courtship

Meghan Markle's throwback revisits a simpler time when she and Prince Harry were just two smitten lovebirds, before they became a family of four.

Meghan Markle delighted fans when she shared a sweet summer carousel on June 9, offering a rare peek into her low-key family life in Montecito. The photos showed Prince Harry immersed in fatherly duties as he played with Prince Archie, while Princess Lilibet sported a stylish T-shirt that was a nod to Beyoncé. But it was the final image with an intriguing timestamp that had royal watchers do a double-take. The black-and-white photo showed Markle embracing her beau with their backs to the cameras, capturing a moment from their early romance in 2017.

In the sweet carousel posted on Instagram, with the caption, "Springing into summer," Markle and Harry appear to be sitting by the beach as she leans into him. The timestamp on the image, March 31, 2017, shows it was taken about a year into their romance and roughly eight months before they announced their engagement in November 2017. The couple began dating in July 2016 after being set up on a blind date by a mutual friend. In their Netflix docuseries, Harry & Meghan, they revealed they hit it off instantly and went on a second date the very next day, and the rest, as they say, is history.

That being said, during their engagement interview with the BBC, Markle revealed that she and Harry had dated privately for six months before their relationship got plastered in the headlines. She said, "We met for a drink, and then I think very quickly into that we said, 'Well, what are we doing tomorrow? We should meet again." It means the March 2017 photo was taken when tabloids had already caught a whiff of their romance. It would also coincide with their attendance at Harry's friend Tom Inskip's wedding in Jamaica the same month, before they made their first official appearance at the Invictus Games in Toronto.

As for Markle's dreamy post, other images in the carousel showed Harry playing with Archie using an oversized football in a garden. Another featured 5-year-old Lilibet wearing a white T-shirt that read, "B is for Beyoncé," complete with an illustration of the 35-time Grammy winner. The collection also included serene nature shots, a basket of fresh fruits and vegetables alongside jars of As Ever jam, and a photo of a handwritten note reading, "the one and only," presumably, a sweet message from Harry to his wife.