“But even a pompous King can get lost,” Amelia shot over her shoulder. “Another five minutes, and I would have dispatched a footman to find you.”
“One of ours or yours?” I teased.
She laughed. “Darling, every footman here is on loan from one or another family. We don’t keep a compliment of staff, since the house is so rarely opened.”
The ballroom had polished wooden floors and chandeliers dripping with teardrop electric bulbs from a high ceiling, but it appeared a trifle small for Amelia’s ambitions. The clusters of seating arrangements around the edges took up half the dancefloor space and there had to be at least four dozen guests, many of them spilling in and around the dedicated seating. The music played from a raised platform at the far end, a pianist accompanied by three violinists and a cellist.
I skimmed over the crowd, searching for familiar faces to orient myself in the company. The mayor, his wife, their unmarried daughter. That was the primary purpose of these balls, of course, the quest for a suitable match. And probably why I saw quite a few uniformed soldiers—young men were always in demand. My flitting gaze found General Sunderland and my lip curled.
“It’s quite a crush, I’m afraid,” Amelia said, mistaking the distaste on my mouth for something else. “Half of them are the barony of Ross, the other half is Ferndale.”
A slight exaggeration, but I knew the Ross and Ferndale baronies flourished. They bred well and didn’t send their sons and daughters off when they got married—they built smaller manor homes and farmsteads on their estates, kept them close to the head family and society limelight. Each manor home required more staff, each farmstead more labourers. Over the generations, this had resulted in two distinct enclaves within the kingdom that were not without their own power and loyalties.
Nathanial and James joined us, bringing glasses of wine they’d swiped from a passing server.
I took a glass from Nathanial, smiled, sipped, thoughtful as a long forgotten conversation surfaced. It had been around the time my father had just started inviting me to the map room for his meetings with Jarvis, Lennard and Markus, and Jarvis had hinted Lord Ferndale might be sympathetic to our cause. My father had shut the conversation down. He wouldn’t provoke an attack and did not require allies…so long as the King left us in peace. Jarvis never brought it up again, not to my father, not to me once my father was gone—by then, his attention had obviously turned to plotting a silent assassination.
I’d never really considered if the question of Lord Ferndale’s loyalty was mere speculation or inside knowledge, but now I was doing exactly that. There’s a war coming, Nathanial had said. I’d dismissed the notion as ridiculous, Nathanial reaching for excuses to justify his actions.
I touched Nathanial’s arm to get his attention. “When you mentioned the possibility of a war inside the kingdom,” I asked him, “were you talking about the Barony of Ferndale?”
Nathanial regarded me with sharpened interest, then his brow cleared. “If you know of reason for me to doubt Ferndale, I’d love to hear it. But not tonight.”
“Absolutely not tonight,” I said lightly, glad for the reprieve to refine my strategy. I wanted information from him, not the other way around.
The music stopped and Amelia sidled closer. “We’re about to open the dancing.”
“There’s good news and bad news,” James said, taking a quick pause to drain his glass. “Good news first.” He winked at me. “You and Nathanial get to lead us with a solo.”
“That’s the bad news,” Amelia said, slapping him on the arm. “It’s only for a couple of strains,” she told me, “then James and I will join in as a sign for everyone to take the floor. The good news is, I’ve scrapped the River Waltz.”
“You’ve been speaking to Markus,” I said quite happily.
“I didn’t have to,” she declared. “You’ve been out on the road with me all week and there weren’t enough hours left over to master the chaos of the River Waltz. All you have to do is float in Nathanial’s arms and try not to stomp on his feet. Although that last part is entirely optional,” she added with a laugh.
“Thanks,” Nathanial said dryly. He took my hand and drew me aside, a grin sliding over his mouth. “Finally, I get five minutes with you in my arms and you have to pretend to like it.”
“Who says I’ll be pretending?” I returned, a deliberate flirtation to unsettle him but without hooks and barbs. Maybe I would enjoy it, if I managed the full five minutes without maiming his dancing toes.
The music started up again and Nathanial guided my other hand to his hip. He looked into my eyes as he put his hand on my hip and he didn’t lead me onto the dancefloor, he danced us there. The crowd had parted to clear the floor for us, but I barely had time to register how effortlessly Nathanial choreographed my body to flow with his before they joined us again, couples whirling all around us. I picked up the natural rhythm and by the end of the music, I felt like I’d been waltzing all my life.
Amelia and I swapped partners and James glided away with me.
“I don’t know what all the fuss was about,” he said when the music slowed, eyes creased with his infectious humour. “You dance like a seasoned castle urchin.”
I arched a haughty brow. “That’s Queen to you.”
“Queen Castle Urchin is such a mouthful.”
I was still laughing when I was handed off to another partner, a silver-haired man with a pinched face who introduced himself as Arthur George Hamilton, nephew-by-marriage to Lord Ross. Talk about a mouthful.
Then I was back in Nathanial’s arms. Only this time, I really was in his arms. His hand slid from my hip to the hollow of my back. A crescendo of violins bled into the intermediary cello solo and he stepped forward into the dance, his arm firming around me, sweeping me into the slow Waltz.
We moved as one, our hips and thighs brushing, and, once again, I was intensely aware of how dominatingly male he was. Every look that passed between us lingered with a flush of heat. Every fleeting touch stayed on my skin and spread the sensual warmth. His scent and heat washed over me. His muscled thigh strummed mine like that resonating bass cello and the way he looked at me, his gaze sinking into me as if I’d intoxicated him and nothing existed beyond our bodies swaying to a secret beat.
I felt a tide rise up inside me that I was reluctant to resist. I probably should have. This had to be indecent, a seduction of sorts that belonged behind closed doors. I should have, but I didn’t. It was as if I were mesmerised into this moment in time, no past, no future, no consequences, no regrets, just me and Nathanial and the languid heat building between us. He was an exotic elixir I could never possess and the man who’d always been mine. His body was so foreign and hard, mine so soft, and where we met was a perfect fit that shouldn’t exist.
Long before the dance ended, Nathanial slipped his hand into mine, our fingers entwined, and tugged me from the dancefloor, out through the French doors and onto the terrace. Traces of him still lingered all over me. His spicy scent on my skin. The warmth of his breath brushing my cheek. Lean muscle stroking the tenderness of my inner thighs.
We weren’t alone on the terrace. A young couple danced to their own rhythm beneath the full moon. A small circle of men and women murmured between themselves and sipped on their wine.
Nathanial didn’t pause. He led me down the steps and onto a path of stepping stones that thread between the thick press of ancient oaks and elms.
“Where are we going?” I said with a breathless laugh, and then the trees thinned into scrub and bush and then tall water reeds at the edge of a murky pond that couldn’t even reflect the moonlight. I glanced up into the inky sky dazzled with a million stars, a heavenly picture painted in my eyes, but nothing that couldn’t have been enjoyed from the terrace. “Okay, what are we doing here?”
“Finishing our dance.” His arms looped around my waist, his eyes glinting into mine as he started moving to the slow beat of the string music filtering through the trees. His v
oice grew husk, honey melting over hot gravel, “The way it was destined to end from the moment I took you into my arms…” and you let me.
He didn’t have to say it. I hadn’t resisted. I hadn’t been pretending. His arms tightened, wiping out another inch of air between us and I had to tilt my head back to hold his hungry gaze. The air thickened, charged like the coming of a tempest storm. His mouth lowered a fraction and my skin tingled with awareness. I brought a hand up to his chest, my palm pressed to the rippled muscle there and a breath fluttered away from me, took with it any whispers that might have denied him.
His mouth came down in a commanding, possessive kiss that shaped my lips to his and hollowed my stomach with desire. My lips parted for him to deepen the kiss. I wanted this. I ached for more of him, craved his taste and touch like a drug. Our tongues stroked and claimed and there was no loss, no doubt, no sorrow, no missing parts of me.
My fingers curled into the cloth of his shirt and his hand slid lower, over the curve of my backside, pressing my core to his hardness with an intimacy that lit fire to my desire and weakened my knees.
His kiss slanted off my lips, his breaths ragged on the corner of my mouth.
“Nate,” I groaned, “don’t…” stop.
Nate... That’s what finally did it, brought me to my senses. The affection once linked to that nickname was now a stigma that bore betrayal and shame. The desire that had swept me away unravelled into a hot mess.
“Don’t.” My fist uncurled and I slammed my palm against his chest, pushed. “Stop.”
He released me, his breaths still ragged, his hooded gaze stormy with want. “What is it?”
The air in my lungs pinched. “I can’t do this.”
“Yes, you can.” He reached for me, not understanding. “What that was, you and me, that can’t be faked.”
“That’s the problem.” I pulled away, folding my arms stiffly to form a barrier, sickened by what had just happened. Not the dancing. Not even the kiss. I’d made some kind of peace with this marriage and what my life would be. But the desire, the ache to lose myself to him completely, how could I be so…so soulless? “You killed my father! How can I want you? How can I feel anything for you? What does that make me?”
The raw hunger faded from his eyes as he looked at me. “Human.”
“I’ve never claimed, or tried, to be perfect, but there was one thing I did perfectly well.” Being my father’s daughter. “Now I can’t even do that right. Every new day seems to bring a new way for me to betray my father’s memory.”
“Rose—“ He cut himself off, scrubbed his jaw while his gaze narrowed on me, searching for answers.
“It’s wrong,” I said, feeling as if parts of me were tearing at the seams. How did I even explain? “Everything’s wrong.”
“The evolution of man is hinged on flaws, Rose. It’s why we shed our furry skin, walked taller, developed different parts of our brains.” He shoved a hand through his hair, held it back from his face. “Those flaws weren’t a weakness, they triggered our genetics to change, to adapt to our environment so we could survive and thrive.”
“I also had a royal education.” Until the age of eleven, anyway. “But I don’t see the relevance here, I really don’t.”
“Our human flaws make us stronger, enable us to do what must be done,” he said, and he wasn’t philosophising. He sounded like a man who spoke from experience. “It’s the flaws in our nature that allow us to unwrap ourselves from the past, from the rigid ideals of right and wrong, and start over as our own person. And maybe we make the same mistakes, but maybe we do better.”
…unwrap ourselves from the past. The relevance of his lecture on evolution hit me like a slap of cold water. But the flaw Nathanial was talking about wasn’t my traitorous desire, it was my inability to forgive and forget he was my father’s murderer. That pesky little detail was a hindrance to this marriage, might even one day threaten his survival.
Suddenly, I saw so much more clearly. He didn’t consider anything he’d ever done as a flaw, a weakness. All those things that had shattered my life, those were his strengths. He had nothing to atone for, no sins to make right, not in his mind.
“This is what you’ve been doing all along, weakening me until I break.” The shifting. The loosening. And tonight I had, I had broken, and that was on me. But the man I’d softened toward was an illusion. No, not even an illusion. He was a meticulously executed plan. “You weren’t willing to let me carve your face because you think you deserve it. You’re not granting Markus the barony as a start to making things right. All those grand gestures were just a strategy to whittle away at my defences.”
His jaw clenched, his mouth flattened. He stood there, looking at me in grim silence.
“Tell me it isn’t so.” I stepped closer so I could search his eyes in the moonlight, hated myself for looking so hard, but there it was. I wanted to find something inside Nathanial that could still be salvaged. “Look me in the eye, Nathanial, and deny it. Tell me it wasn’t all just to break me.”
He looked me straight in the eye, not blinking, not flinching, and he couldn’t deny any of it.
“My God….” I turned from him. “I am such a fool.”
“Rose, wait,” he growled.
“No!” I spun back to him, put a hand out to stop him. Stop him coming closer. Stop his lies before they left his mouth. To just stop him. “Leave me alone. Just let me be.”
I waited a beat to make sure he’d stay, and then I turned from him, stumbling over my own feet in my haste to get away. I didn’t go down the stepping stone path. That ended in the terrace and laughter and dancing and people. I fled into the thick of trees and bush, hadn’t gone far when a heel sank into the mushy undergrowth and turned my ankle. I floundered, reached out with nothing to grab onto and tumbled against a stubby bush.
Dammit all.
Dammit it all to hell.
I fought the prickly branches, heard and felt the skirt of my dress rip as I wrenched free but what did it matter? I wasn’t going back to the ball. I couldn’t hide forever, but I needed the rest of this night to sort through the knots in my head. I didn’t even know if I was angry with Nathanial, disappointed, or just plain weary at myself. I should never have called him out on his duplicity. I should have absorbed it quietly, armed myself with it, and let the truce between us ride. Who cared why he did anything? It wasn’t as if I had high expectations of the man.
I unstrapped my sandals and pushed on, shoes dangling from one hand, skirt dragging on the forest floor. The sound of movement brushing the forest came from behind. I hastened my pace, pricking my ears for signs of Nathanial following, but heard only a breeze stirring the tops of trees. Light filtered through the dense foliage to my left and I veered in that direction, hoping to wing my way around to the front of the house and find a footman to call for the carriage.
Male voices reached me, a timbered chuckle I thought I recognized. I battered aside a spray of leaves and emerged onto a cobbled path along the side of the house, lit by electric lanterns fastened to the walls. A little farther down, the small group of men gathered in a pool of light made an unlikely—if welcome—sight. Markus and David, drinking tankards of ale and rolling dice with the three men of the King’s Guard.
Markus glanced up as I drew nearer. “Rose?”
“I’m ready to go home,” I called out.
He pressed his tankard into David’s hand with the order, “Tell the driver to bring the carriage. And fetch our horses. We’ll meet you in the courtyard.”
David darted a look at me, then took off at quick march. The King’s Guard stepped aside for me to pass. “Your grace?” one of them asked, a young man with worry on his brow. “Are you alright?”
“Everything is fine,” I said, all at once conscious of my torn dress and bared feet. “I’ll send the carriage back for the King.”
“The King is not returning with you?” another said, his attention sharpening.
“He is not,
” I said flatly.
Markus fell in line with me as I walked on, held onto his silence for all of two breaths before he bit out, “What did Nathanial do to you?”
The anger in his voice ground me to a halt. “He didn’t do anything to me.” I grabbed his arm to turn him to him. “Markus, look at me.”
His gaze travelled over me, his expression cast in iron. “I am looking at you, and you know what I see?”
I ran my hands down my dishevelled dress. “I did this to myself.”
“You have scratches on your face.”
I did? “I fell into a bush.”
“And why were you so desperate to get away from Nathanial that you ran into a bush?”
“What makes you think I was trying to get away from Nathanial?”
“Weren’t you?”
My throat clogged with the lies I couldn’t tell. Not to Markus.
“I just needed to be alone,” I admitted. “Nathanial didn’t hurt me. He wouldn’t.”
“Maybe not physically” he grunted.
“I can handle Nathanial.”
“So you keep—”
“Rose, wait!” Nathanial emerged from the clustered trees beyond the guards, near the same spot I’d come through. He strode toward us. “At least let me escort you home.”
“You bastard!” Markus cut away from me, charging for Nathanial and—Oh God, no! He unsheathed his damn sword.
“Markus, don’t!” I shouted. Pulse thundering in my veins, I tossed aside the stupid sandals and went after him. “Markus!”
It was an order, an imperial command, and totally ignored.
Markus didn’t even glance back over his shoulder. He kept going, sword raised, fury coating his tongue as he barked at Nathanial, “One way or another, this ends now.”
In the time it took my gaze to flash from Markus to Nathanial, the scene had spiralled out of control. Nathanial had a sword in his hands, no doubt taken from one of his Guard—they’d formed a shield between us and their King, but Nathanial parted them to meet Markus’s challenge.
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