“Oh no, dear. They’re right over here. I cut them and wrapped them in plastic wrap for you. Just as fresh as they were out of the oven.” She smiled but it didn’t quite reach her eyes.
Madeline silently collected shavings from a bar of dark chocolate in a plastic bowl. No snarky comments about my nonexistent love life or fairy tale endings. What was going on?
Three men with broad shoulders and arms the size of tree trunks carried a round table from the storeroom in back of the kitchen. They stopped just before the door, one of them turning to Mrs. Fletcher.
“Where does the prince want this again?” he questioned, his bicep bulging as he perched one side of the table on a broad shoulder.
“In his antechamber. Next to the grand piano.” She glanced straight from him to me, a world of understanding in her eyes.
I grabbed a handful of plastic wrap covered brownies and turned to the staff. “Why does everyone keep looking at me like that? What is going on?”
Madeline finally looked up from shaving her chocolate. “You mean you don’t know?”
“Know what?”
She set the shaver down on the countertop next to the bowl full of strips of curled chocolate. “Prince Sutton requested an intimate dinner in his private chambers.” Her face twisted. “With Julianna Bellarosa.”
My stomach fell.
My heart felt as though it were beating outside of my body, a thundering drum for the entire room to hear.
The temperature in the room fell to rigid at best.
Intimate dinner. Next to the grand piano.
The words tore through me like a gust of wind through a pile of leaves.
The girl from the other day who peeled potatoes gave me a shy smile. “If it means anything, we were all really rooting for you.”
Rooting for me?
“He was different with you,” she continued. “It would’ve been nice to have a friendly face on the throne.”
There were so many things wrong with that statement. For starters, it meant they didn’t hate me, which was the complete opposite of what I spent way too many sleepless nights worrying about. Second, Mama loved the queen, which meant she had to be decent. Right? And yes, Sutton gave me butterflies, except you know, in my vagina. But queen? That was a stretch. Even if he didn’t have a date. An intimate date. In his private chambers. The same chambers where he took possession of my body… and my soul.
A pot of tea whistled, and I flinched. My eyes moved from the potato girl to Madeline to Mrs. Fletcher. “Thank you for wrapping these. I really need to go. I’m going to be late for a meeting.”
When I was little, Dad used to take me to the pier. The first time we rode the Ferris wheel, we got stuck at the top. I later learned that all the cars got stuck at the top. How else would they let other riders on at the bottom? I remember clenching Dad’s hand in mine and tucking my head against his side while he promised me it would be okay. I hated being stuck at the top. After that, I never rode the Ferris wheel again.
This felt a lot like that. I never had a real boyfriend. I kept Keaton at arm’s length. I used fate as a reason to run from Sutton. I realized now that it wasn’t the Ferris wheel that I was afraid of.
It was the fall.
Twenty-Three
Just as he promised, Keaton waited outside the east gate. His typical confident smile greeted me as I walked up to him and handed him a brownie. He eyed my bright blue, knee-length sundress, and his smile widened.
“You know what they say about chocolate,” he said with a wink.
Chocolate is an aphrodisiac.
And Madeline filled a bowl full of it this morning… for Sutton’s intimate dinner. Something sharp curled in my chest, and I tried to put a label on it, on this biting, tearing ache. Thorns. It felt like thorns wrapped around my lungs and ripping me open from the inside out.
Last night, I kept waiting for Sutton to show up at my door with his penetrating gaze and crude words. He never did. And that hurt more than I wanted to admit. Deep down, I knew I probably wouldn’t see him today either. I’d gotten used to his inconvenient interruptions, his broody eyes, and smooth voice. I missed him.
He’s not yours to miss.
Keaton took the brownie, unwrapping it from the plastic wrap and popping half of it into his mouth with one bite. He moaned around the chocolate as he chewed.
“So good, Katie. Always so fucking good.” Words that used to make me feel warm inside now made me feel empty. Because they came from the wrong lips. “Shall we?” he asked, holding out an arm.
I started to answer, but my words got stuck in my throat. So, I silently hooked my arm around his, and we headed for the train.
When we got to the farm, I stopped as we reached the beginning of the long gravel road that led to the house. I’d gone to the farm a few times since I moved to the castle but always as a spectator, never as a visitor. I always stood at the train stop and stared out over the green fields in silence. I never found the courage to cross the road.
“You ready?” Keaton asked.
I sucked in a breath and stared at the dirt road path to the two-story brick home—the only home I’d known since birth.
“Ready.”
The light, spring breeze swept over the fields of green and red, making the crops look as though they were waving at us as we walked by. The sun was already hot enough to warm my skin, and it was barely past breakfast. Every second felt like an eternity and each step seemed like a mile. We never even removed the furniture. All we took was our clothes and personal belongings. Would it still look the same? When we went inside, would it still feel like all those times I flew through the front door after being at Chelsea’s for a weekend?
I looked beyond the crops to the top of a rolling hill where the barn used to sit, and my heart lurched to my throat. I saw the house in the distance standing tall and proud, and none of it felt familiar at all. It only felt like a shrine.
“Can I ask you something?” I asked as we walked.
Keaton chuckled. The sound was easy and light, and it immediately put me at ease. “If you’re going to beg for me to take you back, you should know the answer is yes.”
I laughed, thankful for the interruption in my regularly scheduled program of self-pity. Then I bumped my shoulder against his arm. “I was going to ask if all the guys in the barracks walked around like they just got laid. Or if I just caught them on a good day.”
“Depends on if you call seeing a four-inch dick in a pair of cotton briefs a good day…”
“I don’t even want to know how you know that.”
He laughed again as we rounded the final curve, finally coming face-to-face with my childhood home. The small rose garden in the front that Mama had planted and loved welcomed us with full blooms. It was a house, like any other house. There were rooms and walls and chairs and tables, except this house held my memories, my childhood, my heart. This one was the glue of my very existence. Maybe that was why ever since we left, it felt like I was falling apart. My pulse throbbed, and I struggled to find my breath.
“I don’t think I can do this.”
Keaton’s eyes met mine. His fingers gripped my biceps as he held my gaze. “You can do this.” He moved to stroke my cheek with the back of his fingers. “I got you.”