Iris couldn’t imagine quiet, polite, perfect Keith ever being a bother. And it wasn’t his fault that she was terrified to let him know who she really was.
“I don’t mind at all, and you couldn’t be a bother if you tried.” He still looked a little endearingly nervous about it, with a cute indentation between his eyebrows, so she tried to reassure him. “In fact, you’ll be a big help. I have to clean the fish tanks this week, and it’s always a lot of work. It’ll be nice to have an extra set of hands.”
In a flash, Keith’s adorable frown changed into a devastating smile.
“You have pet fish?”
“I do,” Iris said. “Two tanks of them, one saltwater and one freshwater.”
It was a shockingly coherent answer, considering how hard it was for her to think with him smiling at her like that.
It was the first time since the accident that a smile hadn’t given her a regretful pang—not even a distant, tiny one. There was no sense of what she’d lost, just awe at what she was getting now. He was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen.
She didn’t want to hurt him.
What if she covered up the truth about herself well enough to scrape by for a week, but then it came out after they were married? What if she wound up trapping him in a life that would only make him miserable?
She couldn’t do that to him. She had to find some way to be sure he knew what he was getting into, even if that meant he would reject her. It would be hard to strike a balance between being her new self and being honest, but she had to try.
“Come on,” she said. “I’ll introduce you to the fish.”
5
Iris lived in a small, whitewashed cottage with a wave of morning glories and pale pink climbing roses cresting over the door—which, to Keith’s surprise, was apparently left completely unlocked.
“What?” she said when she saw his surprised look at the doorknob.
“Nothing.” He shook his head, mentally scolding himself for having forgotten such a major truism of unicorn life. “I’ve lived in the city too long. Out in the human world—most of it, anyway—it’s usually a bad idea to leave your doors unlocked.”
“I’ve heard that. Here, it just makes people think you have something to hide.”
And right when he’d been thinking there were some advantages to villages like theirs, her words reminded him that this particular upside had a sting in its tail. Sure, it was nice to trust your neighbors’ integrity so completely that you didn’t feel the need to lock your doors—and nice to come home, day after day, to find you were right. But it was a lot less nice to have those same trustworthy neighbors decide that it was suspicious for you to want a little more privacy.
From the resigned tone of Iris’s voice, it sounded like she knew all too well what it was like to be on the other side of public opinion.
But that didn’t make sense. Everything he’d seen so far suggested that the Silver Council was extremely pro-Iris, and it didn’t extend its approval lightly. He knew that better than anyone.
