So while I’m here, for whatever short time I have left, I’m going to figure out how to make Prince Forsythe Ashbourne, Duke of Fairhaven, laugh. And smile. To not feel the pressure of maintaining a facade, even if it's only for a moment, a breath.
Almost as if he can feel me watching him, his amber eyes move off of Isadora, and to me. Catching and holding. Heat rushes across my chest, up to my cheeks at being caught staring. But I don’t look away, instead arching a brow.
His own brow wrinkles, like he’s trying to figure me out. Isadora glances over her shoulder checking what—or who—has his attention, and scowls when she sees it’s me.
She touches his arm. He blinks and the tension breaks.
The moment is gone.
Even more so when he looks back at the omega at his side.
And I feel… unaccountably left adrift, as if I… needed his gaze to stay tethered, to believe that I’m still here, still technically in the running, even if nothing will come of it.
It's a relief when production announces we’ve done enough mingling, enough gossiping about the elimination ceremony. As soon as they tell us we’re free to return to our rooms, I’m handing off my empty glass to a server, kicking off my heels, and carrying with me as I scamper off to my cabana, more than ready to be done with the emotions of the day.
If I feel eyes following my every move—the burn of alpha attention pressed between my shoulder blades as I make my escape—I pretend I don’t.
Episode 10: A Spell is Cast
I straighten when Florence enters the pool deck area wearing a pair of periwinkle yoga pants and a strappy sports bra that matches. Her hair is braided back from her face. Where many of the girls have gone for full faces of makeup, complete with fake eyelashes, she looks fresh and bare faced, like she put on SPF and nothing else.
It makes my heart clench painfully.
Especially when she pauses as soon as her toes touch the tiles, wet from splashing omegas, and looks around uncertainly. Like she still can’t believe she’s here. Like she can’t believe Forsythe didn’t send her home last night.
I’m so grateful that my pack chose to keep her.
She’s just about the only thing so far that has made this bearable.
I watch as she looks toward where my pack is lounging out of the sun, surrounded by omegas who haven’t so much as glanced in my direction. Almost as if they don’t think I’m worth their time.
And why would that be, hmm?An insidious little voice whispers inside my head.Perhaps because your pack has led them to believe that.
I push that thought away. I knew what I was getting into with the Ashbourne pack. I’d like to say my bonding was one of passion, where one of my alpha’s was feral with the need to have me that he bit me and bonded me, but the truth is before we got anywhere close to that, Forsythe sat me down with the others huddled around him and told me how it would be. How it would have to be.
That privately I would be a pack member. Privately they would be able to treat me as their beta. But publicly, we’d have to pretend to only have a working relationship, granted a very close working relationship. So close that at least half the country knows I’m part of the pack, and the other half suspects it.
But as long as it's not confirmed by us, that’s okay.
His grandmother, the queen, disapproves of having a beta in the pack. She’s of the more traditional belief that a pack should be full of strong alphas, and a well-bred, quiet, demure omega. And betas should keep to themselves.
Honestly, that poll that showed that seventy-two percent of Bravonnians under the age of forty think the monarchy is out of touch, was one hundred percent correct. The queen is old fashioned—beyond old fashioned—and it's holding our country back.
It's holding my pack back too.
Her trying to prove she’s ‘hip’ or whatever is even worse.
That’s why we’re here, courting omegas on international television, letting the world get a good look at the Spare Heir’s royal pack. Showing the world that the royal family can change with the times.
Afterall, it used to be tradition to have all eligible noble bred omegas travel to Ashbourne Reach, the Ashbourne country estate, for a week or two so the pack could get to know them and then choose a suitable mate from the lot.
This is essentially the same thing, with the addition of cameras and viewership.
I watch as Florence takes one timid step toward my pack, then shakes her head and turns in the opposite direction, ignoring the glares the production staff is throwing her way and the way every member of my pack tracks her progress to the small gym area set up in a grassy spot on the opposite side of the pool from the pack she’s supposed to be getting to know.
My feet are moving before I know it, carrying me along the outer edge of the pool deck and to the gym area. I feel my pack’s eyes on my back, but not one of them asks where I’m going, what I’m doing.
She smiles when she sees me approaching, wide and beaming and bright.Like sunshine.It hits me right in the chest and behind my ribs warms. “Hi, Piers!”
