I kept staring at his mouth. His full lips. I ran my own fingers along my lower lip, idly wondering if he was still as good a kisser as he’d been that night long ago. Not that we’d gotten nearly as much time together as I’d wanted.
Or maybe I was just thinking that because I’d already had too much liquor, and any amount of liquor made me want to kiss someone. Seeing Henry in real life still felt like a dream.
“Were you scared?” the princess asked.
“At first. But then I was kind of excited.”
“Hah!” she exclaimed.
“I knew I had to outsmart the bear if I had any chance. So I tossed the rest of my beef jerky out to the side of the cabin, waited for him to go after it, then made a run for my truck. Spent hours downslope waiting for the bear to get the hell out of there.”
Things had started out awkwardly. Henry had seemed like he wasn’t comfortable being at the table, and I had worried it had been one more mistake, in a long series of mistakes, asking him to stay for dinner. Genoveve had given him a clean suit to wear to dinner, and it fit impossibly well for non-tailored clothing.
He looked great, actually. Henry could fill out cheap flannel or expensive qiviut, and either way, he was stunning.
The moment Emma had started asking him about his time living in the mountains, dinner had turned into the Henry Show. He told tales about snowstorms, snakes, and now bears.
“Didn’t you ever get lonely, up there all alone?” Genoveve asked, turning her head to one side.
“No,” Henry said. “Well… yes, but I’m sort of always lonely, in a way. Being up in the mountains on my own didn’t feel any lonelier than boarding school had.”
“Not a single soul was there other than you?” Timothy, the castle’s head of staff, asked, his brow furrowed.
“It wasn’t complete isolation,” Henry said. “There were other people who lived on the mountain. A couple who lived about a mile down from my cabin. Another man, Gareth, who was a few years older than me. Gareth taught me a lot about foraging nearby, and also taught me that I couldn’t rely only on foraging, and that I was going to have to get used to doctoring up a can of beans every now and then.”
“Sounds like a good friend,” the princess said.
“I considered him even more than a friend, for a while,” Henry said.
“A best friend,” Timothy said.
“Well, we kept each other happy, and warm in bed, sometimes,” he said. “He left to go back to city life after a year of my living out there. Haven’t spoken to him since.”
My chest was suddenly tight. I clutched my drink glass, bringing it to my lips and sipping. Timothy raised an eyebrow, but ultimately shrugged.
I had no reason to be possessive of Henry, certainly not when it came to men he may or may not have been with, years ago. I had even slept with a couple of women who had visited the castle, because they had smelled lovely and it had been yet another secret to keep, a secret that made me feel alive when I had felt dead.
But my heart had never been in it. Not even for a moment.
Jealousy curled through me hot and slow like the scotch I’d been putting away all night. I hated thinking of another man sleeping next to Henry in bed.
When I looked up, Henry’s eyes were on mine.
“Enough about me, though,” Henry said, taking a deep breath and leaning back. “I’ve been running my mouth all night. Sebastian, I want to hear about what you’ve been doing all of this time.”
“You two were friends as children, yes?” Princess Emma asked.
I nodded. “Best friends. Neighbors.”
“We saw each other every day. Then I didn’t see him for eleven years,” Henry said.
“How sad,” Emma said.
“I’ve been learning how to be a prince,” I said, trying to sit up straighter in my chair but finding that all of my bones felt heavy. I ran my fingers through my hair, pulling in a sharp breath of air through my nostrils. “The Prince of Frostmonte is a title that used to imply power, lawmaking. It held meaning. Now it primarily means that I’m the face of Frostmonte, a representative of not only this mountain but the villages below, a symbol across the world for the people that live here.”
“Which means…?” Henry asked.
He was calling me on my bullshit. I didn’t know if I’d rather punch him or put my mouth on him.
“Which means,” I said, “that I show up, I look good, and I eat very fancy food.”
Genoveve giggled. “Prince Sebastian is shy about his accomplishments. He has met with countless international dignitaries. He’s demanded environmental stringency for all of the villages nearby when meeting with local politicians. He’s helped bridge diplomacy between two small countries that had hated each other for years.”
“Well, that all sounds very impressive,” Henry said.
“Not as impressive as defeating a bear in the wilderness,” I said.
“Sebastian used to be deathly afraid of bears,” Henry said, picking up his own drink glass and taking a big swig. “One weekend morning, he came running over to my house to tell me he’d had a nightmare about one terrorizing his aunt’s backyard.”
A pang of sweet nostalgia hit me. “I’d forgotten all about that.”
That morning had been close to my heart. It was one of the rare times that my aunt had allowed me to walk down to the Berrydale Diner with Henry to get breakfast, because she’d seen how freaked out I was by the dream. I’d ordered a stack of pancakes and doused it in far more syrup than I should have, just because I could. Henry and I had shared a big plate of hash browns with ketchup. Once we were stuffed we walked back to our street slowly, stopping every few minutes to kick rocks or rescue worms from the sidewalk.
Henry had plucked a dandelion from a lawn and stuck it behind his ear that morning. I could still remember how it brought out the flecks of gold in his eyes.
I had loved him more than I was even aware.
“Was Sebastian a fearful child?” the Princess asked.
“No,” Henry said. “He was actually very brave.”
“Lies,” I said, shaking my head slowly.
“Not lies,” Henry told me. “He thought he was fearful, but he would have done anything to protect the people he loved.”
I wanted to slide right out of my skin. My cheeks burned hot with embarrassment at the compliment.
I knew I had been an anxious wreck as a child, and Henry’s compliments were at once agonizing and impossibly kind.
How could Henry still be this way? How could he still say these things about me when he was completely right about the last eleven years? I could have contacted him. I could have found some way, another secretive mission, to talk to him.
But I’d been too dead-set on being the prince I was meant to be. I had my little collection of small secrets but anything involving Henry—even thinking of him—had made me disintegrate inside.
And yet now he was still here. Still complimenting me.
There were far too many emotions welling inside me, especially after the amount of alcohol I had consumed.
I needed to send him home at once.
“Henry,” I said, glancing up at him as I stood. “It’s all right, Genoveve, stay. I need to speak to Henry briefly in the war room.”