“It does seem the only option. Senné can get you there in a few hours.”
“You and Raoul go on without me.” Dorian held up his left hand. “Between the ride and a meal and stringing a bow with nine fingers, I won’t be back until this evening.”
“Too bad, friend.”
Dorian clapped Gregory on the back. “Ah, you know Senné and I always enjoy a long ride. Besides, I’d rather have two days of good hunting than three sitting on my ass in the Egg.”
“I have some feminine entertainment joining us after dinner.”
Dorian doubted Gregory meant women of musical persuasion. “All the more reason to hurry back,” he said.
“I told Melfin to make sure they’re lively.” Gregory tugged at the back of his neck. “I enjoy lively women…enthusiasm…” He muttered to himself as he wandered to his mount.
Dorian waited around the courtyard with a cheerful, aching smile plastered on his face. He called out wishes for a pleasant weather and slow quarry. He waited until Gregory, Raoul and their attendants disappeared over a low hill. He’d never seen fine Desmarais hunting horses move so slowly. If he pushed Senné they could make it back to Trill Castle in under two hours.
“Bring Senné,” he said to the older of the two stable boys. The boy did not dally.
Just over three hours later, in the cave above Redwine Falls, Dorian wrapped his arms around Eleanor’s shoulders. She sat between his bent knees, chattering about this and that, but he scarcely heard her. He grunted answers to her questions. He ground his teeth, all the while cursing himself for the anger that simmered beneath his monotone responses.
Excitement had turned to anxiety as he picked up the bow he’d strung two days ago, left Trill, and backtracked up the cliff to their cave. To his surprise, once he started the ascent towards a seemingly successful rendezvous, tendrils of irritation wrapped sneaky fingers around his mind.
Dorian pulled Eleanor closer, like a selfish toddler hiding a favorite toy in his lap. He buried his face in the flaxen thickness of her hair, and then bit the side of her neck. Another childish gesture. Next he would stand up, stomp his foot and shout mine!
“What’s wrong?” she finally asked.
“Nothing.” He pulled her around to face him and kissed her.
“Maybe we should talk about—”
He kissed her again, and snipped off her words before they could spread through the cave like the roots of a stubborn weed. She returned his kiss, but for the first time he sensed her holding something back.
Her reluctance added to his frustration. His hands chased themselves over her body, trying to wipe the past two weeks away and take them back to that last meeting, before Gregory returned from Point-of-Rocks. His need for her, the need that sat in his groin and in his heart as if his blood had turned to hot Fire-iron, made him reach a hand under her tunic, then thrust it down the front of her leggings.
She did not respond as she had before. There was no gasp of delight, no exhale of hot sweet breath on his neck. She grabbed his hand. “Dorian, please.”
He turned away from the sorrow in her mismatched eyes, like bits of earth and sky trapped in her face. “I’m sorry. You don’t want…you don’t want me to…I understand.”
“No, that’s not it… I just…I’d hoped to avoid this topic.”
“Say it.” He walked to the wall and leaned his forehead against the cool stone.
He closed his eyes as her halting words floated over his shoulder. “Gregory…he’s been very...attentive…” The noise of his teeth scraping together in his own head sent chills down his back. “…and not very patient. I have some…pain.”
Dorian’s lungs seized in his chest. The breath he finally drew in fairly sucked all the air out of the cave. “Motherfucker! Mother—motherfucker—”
Dorian rarely swore, but even the shock on her pale face did not silence him. Senné’s silver horn poke through the cave opening. “Is something wrong?” he asked, with the calmness of a servant asking after an undercooked steak.
“No! Everything is just fucking perfect!”
Eleanor climbed through the hole. Dorian waited a few minutes, and then followed her. She stood between Senné and Teardrop, her face hidden behind the swirling black and white silk curtains of their manes.
Dorian spoke to Senné first. “Peace, old friend. No anger justifies my rudeness. Pray, forgive me.”
“I have never known you to speak so,” said Senné, “and I feel only worry at the pain that would bring forth such words from your mouth. You have my forgiveness.”
Teardrop eyed him with less understanding. He spoke to Eleanor through a protective layer of shiny white hair. “Eleanor, come back. Please, I pray you will also forgive me.”
She stepped out from behind Teardrop. Teardrop snorted her concern but Eleanor silenced her with a few quiet words of reassurance and a squeeze around her arched neck. She wiped her wet face on the mare’s mane. Teardrop muttered to Senné and kicked the rock wall behind her. The sound of her agitation followed Dorian and Eleanor into the chamber.
Eleanor sat on the dirt floor. He sat before her, as if in preparation for an imaginary game of poker. She broke the silence. “I understand your anger.”
“What if we were careful, Eleanor? I’ve never, not in all these years, had one woman lay a claim of a child on me. You know I can control—”
“Is that what this is about?” Her face went from white to fiery red.
“Of course not, but it…you don’t know what it’s like for a man…for me…knowing he can have you whenever—”
He knew as soon as he said it he’d crossed an un-crossable line. Her anger made his seem kitten-like in comparison.
“For a man? For you? You don’t have to bed him! You don’t have to feel him jabbing and scraping away at you—feel your pride and heart and your soul shriveling up like a…a bunch of grapes left out in the sun!”
Teardrop whickered from the other chamber, but both unicorns must have assumed there would be no peace in the cave this afternoon.
“So the fact that you’ve gone ten or twelve or however many years without spawning any bastards with the hundreds of women you’ve bedded is supposed to make me risk my daughter and any poor child we might beget and even your own stupid neck?”
He grabbed her arms. “Eleanor, please—”
“I won’t. I’m leaving—”
“I’m so sorry.” An unfamiliar burning ran from his eyes to his nose. “I’m afraid I might very well kill Gregory with my own two hands for causing you pain. I’m so jealous and angry I don’t know if I can live with it.”
She swallowed with a small chuffing breath. He let her pull him into her lap, as much of him as would fit without squashing her. He rested his head against her chest. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” he whispered.
“Shhh, dearest. Don’t. I love you, Dorian. I forgive you.”
As she stroked his hair some of the anger ran out of him. He could not say all, but it relieved some of the pressure.
“We always knew this would come,” she said.
“I didn’t imagine he would hurt you.”
“Darling, we must speak freely, or every one of our meetings will end like this. We return to Maliana in less that two weeks. It’s unlikely we will be able to meet here again, and we have no safe haven such as this at Eclatant.”
The impending return to the capital city and the shining Fire-iron monolith of Eclatant Palace had loomed in Dorian’s mind for weeks. He spoke from the vicinity of Eleanor’s breast. The weight of his head pulled the collar of her tunic low, and his breath bounced off her skin and back into his face. “If we can find a hideaway we may have an easier time of it. There are so many people about and our duties keep us from much leisure. More excuses to come and go. You have your charity work—”
“—and your Council duties and unicorn training.”
Dorian nodded. “With the Paladins adding Senné to the breeding program we’ll be spending eve
n more time in the stables. Perhaps if I was put out to stud it would ease this ache in my poor neglected personals and I’d not be such a mouthy ass.”
She flicked the end of his nose and kissed his forehead. “In that vein I must address another dragon in this cave. It brings me the same pain you must feel in relation to my…my marital arrangements. You cannot go on leading a seemingly celibate life, darling. You were hardly thus before. It will only raise suspicions.”
Dorian sat up from her lap. “Gregory is full of questions. I said I’ve been bedding a girl from the village, but I don’t know if he believed me. With honesty, in this regard my past history is not serving me well.”
“Please…believe me,” she said as she wrung her hands. “I would not expect you to live like a magician for the rest of your life. If you must take your pleasure elsewhere I won’t begrudge you.”
He started to rebuff her, and then stopped himself. He wanted no one else, yet he could not deny the need to keep his reputation as a wonton womanizer somewhat alive, if only for the sake of their secret. Nor could he ignore the tiny hated voice in his mind, the one that asked a simple question. Never again?
He flinched at the pain in her furrowed brow and downcast eyes, but when he squeezed her hand she squeezed back. He put a finger under her chin made her look at his face. “I love you Eleanor. I’ll never lie to you. If anything I do causes you pain you must tell me, and I will cease and desist. Soldier’s honor.”
She gave him a weak smile. “So it’s come to this, that I would tell the man I love to bed another woman.” Before he could respond she cupped his face in her hands. “Enough, all of it. We’ve spent most of this beautiful afternoon screaming at each other.”
“I must return to the Egg. It will be nigh dark before I get back.”
“Then make me forget, Dorian Finley. Give me something to take from this cave and hold onto in my bed when the sun goes down.”
So he did just that.
Find out what happens next in book 2 of The Cracked Slipper Series
The Dragon Choker
ALSO BY STEPHANIE ALEXANDER
The Cracked Slipper
The Cracked Slipper Series, Book 2: The Dragon Choker
Coming Soon: The Cracked Slipper Series, Book 3: The Glass Rainbow
Coming in 2020: Charleston Green, set in Charleston, South Carolina, the story of a clairvoyant mom of three, who uses her paranormal talents to solve a century-old murder mystery while rebuilding her life after a devastating divorce.
Acknowledgements
The Cracked Slipper Series has been a ten-year labor of love. Since I began the first book in 2009, my life has changed immeasurably. I’ve been through the hardest times in my life, and come out the other side with an outcome that is beautiful beyond anything I thought it could be. Too many people have been a part of this process to name them all, but a few require special recognition. First, to my sister-cousin, Haley Telling, thank you for always cheering me on, and coming up with wonderful ideas for ways to get my work out into the world, and helping me keep my chin up when the process beat me down. This is a hard business, and your eternal optimism helped me remember that the stories are the heart of it.
Thank you to my mother, Dianne Wicklein, who I admire above all other women, and who is a testament to the redemptive power of tenacity and faith. Thank you to my three wonderful children, who have gone from babies to teenagers while I labored on this project and rebuilt my life. They are my reason for pushing myself on good days, and my reason for getting out of bed on bad ones.
Lastly, thank you to my husband, Jeffrey Cluver. I would call you my Prince Charming, but as this book has tried to illustrate, Prince Charming is overrated. Instead, I will call you my best friend, my closest confidante, the rock I cling to when I’m floundering in a sea of writer-ly self doubt. You read my first drafts; you give me feedback I didn’t know I needed; you spark my imagination when it’s feeling about as combustible as a wet match. Thank you for being you.
There are so many others, but I will have to thank them all in person, lest I risk running on for another hundred thousand words. But lastly, thank you to my readers, who fell in love with Eleanor, her journey, and the enchanted universe she inhabits. I hope I’ve done justice to her story, and your imaginations.
—Stephanie
About the Author
Stephanie Alexander grew up in the suburbs of Washington, DC. Drawing, writing stories, and harassing her parents for a pony consumed much of her childhood. After graduating from high school in 1995 she earned a Bachelor of Arts in Communications from the College of Charleston, South Carolina. She returned to Washington, DC, where she followed a long-time fascination with sociopolitical structures and women’s issues to a Master of Arts in Sociology from the American University. She spent several years as a Policy Associate at the International Center for Research on Women (ICRW), a think-tank focused on women’s health and economic advancement.
Stephanie embraced full-time motherhood after the birth of the first of her three children in 2003. Her family put down permanent southern roots in Charleston in 2011. She published her first novel, The Cracked Slipper, in February 2012, and the first printing of the series sold over 40,000 copies. The second book in the series, The Dragon Choker, is currently available, and the series finale, The Glass Rainbow, is forthcoming in early 2020. Stephanie has appeared on local and national media, been a contributor on many writing blogs and in writing magazines, and regularly joins with book clubs for discussions of her work.
In addition to her personal writing, Stephanie returned to the College of Charleston as an Adjunct Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies, and launched her freelance ghostwriting and editing business, Wordarcher, LLC. She has ghostwritten dozens of books, from novels to memoirs to academic theses. Beginning in the Fall of 2015, as a single working mother, she attended law school on a full academic scholarship, earning her juris doctor with honors from the Charleston School of Law in December, 2017.
She currently practices family law in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, the Charleston suburb that is the setting of her latest novel, Charleston Green. Her personal experience rebuilding her life after divorce inspires both her legal work and her fiction.
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