“No! I was only teasing. It’s beautiful. You’re ... it’s beautiful.”
Feeling a bit uncomfortable, I started babbling about the dress. “The stitching is not as elaborate as some others I’ve had. Like ...” I tried to think of one with more stitching, but my mind had gone blank because he’d moved closer.
“My wedding dress!” I practically shouted the words because the blood rushing in my ears made it hard to hear myself. “That one was very, very intricate.”
That dress had also made me initially disbelieve his story that he hadn’t known who I was from the beginning. It had been blue and gold—my family’s colors. There was no way he could have had a dress created with that much embroidery unless he had known for weeks that—
“Did you like the dress you wore when we were wed?”
I loved it. It had been the one good thing that had happened to me that day. “It’s still one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever worn.”
“I’m glad. The dress was my mother’s.”
It was as if he had stepped back and let an arrow fly directly to my heart. I couldn’t catch my breath—I was shocked and then delighted and confused and wanted to swoon and ...
He had let me wear his mother’s dress.
Xander had hated me, been so furious with me, but he’d let me wear his mother’s dress.
I knew what she had meant to him, so I understood what kind of gesture that had been. “But it was in Locris’s colors.”
“My mother’s nation has the same colors. That was one of the reasons why I thought you might like ...” He trailed off, leaving so much unspoken.
By the goddess I was going to kiss this man until we both forgot how to breathe.
As if he could read my desire for him, he foolishly came closer and reached for my hand. I sighed when his warm fingers enveloped mine. “I misspoke earlier. About your dress.”
“So you don’t think it’s beautiful?”
“This may not be the wisest choice, but what I meant to say, what I should have said, is thatyou’rebeautiful.”
It probably would have been better for our situation for him to have kept that information to himself, but I was so glad he’d said it.
Especially because the only other time he had called me beautiful had been when he was drugged. “You haven’t been drinking any honeyed wine, have you?”
Merriment made his eyes glow even more. “No, I stay away from all wine now. I’m giving you my true thoughts.”
Oh.
“But the morning after ...” I didn’t have to clarify which one I meant—I could see from his expression that he knew. “You said youdidn’t mean anything you said to me on your birthday. That it had all been due to the wine.”
He looked down at our joined hands and then rubbed his thumb along the delicate skin of my wrist. My pulse leapt up to meet him there, keeping an unsustainable rhythm.
“I have a lot of regrets, Lia. And the lies that I told you that morning outside the council chambers, in an attempt to protect myself, are among them.”
Part of me exulted in the fact that I had been right—I’d known he was lying—while the rest of me panicked at the desires I was having. How they urged me to go lock our door and let him slowly take this beautiful dress off me.
“When you said that, it made me feel like ... you didn’t want me.” I knew I was playing with fire. Pleading to be burned. No, not just burned. Incinerated. Completely consumed.
His eyes dropped to my lips and they tingled in response. “I’ve already told you—then, now, I always want you.”
The confidence, the honesty, the raw desire in his deep voice threatened to overwhelm me. My vision blurred, my limbs quivered, and molten fire erupted in my gut.
Io called to us from her room, saying that we should head down to the party. Her voice startled me and I realized that I’d been swaying toward him, ready for his kiss. I shakily pulled my hand away from him. She would have been upset if she had just seen how we were looking at each other, heard the things we were saying.
What I had considered begging him to do to me.
“We should go,” I said, averting my gaze. I walked out into the hallway and greeted my adelphia, ignoring my racing heartbeat. We all gushed over each other’s dresses, but in my mind, I was still back in my bedroom with Xander, where he was leading me over to our mirror to have a redo of his birthday.
