“It’s not green—it’s cream, with a sage greenbustleand gorgeous emeraldembroidery. And it’s going to be perfect on you. We’ll need to put your hair up—even though guys generally like hair down. With that kind of neckline, you’re totally going to want to keep your hair off your shoulders. Try it on.”
Fran shrugged, and Nicki moved to her side to help her undo the fastenings of the gown. “I thought this wasn’t supposed to be a meat market.”
“Everything’s a meat market,” Lauren said, refocusing on the racks. “And that gown costs four thousand dollars retail. Someone ought to wear it, and it might as well be you.” She frowned over her shoulder at Nicki. “Nicki, stop fussing, you’ve got to try this gown on.”
“My meat’s totally off the market now,” Nicki objected, but Lauren shook out a new dress, markedly different than the belle-of-the-ball gowns she had been pawing through before. “I hate these kinds of events anyway.”
“All the more reason for you to wear this. Stefan’s entire face is going to melt. He’ll hustle you out of that ballroom so quickly your head’s going to spin.”
“Ohhhh,” Nicki said. She pulled the gown from Lauren’s grasp and held it up to the mirror as Fran worked her head through the neckline of her gown with Emmaline’s help. Nicki grinned and Emmaline laughed, giving Nicki an enthusiastic thumb’s up.
“I have to be in the room when he sees you in that,” Lauren said triumphantly. “Dimitri will have his hands full keeping all the marriage-minded misses from tripping over Ari, so I need something to bring me joy.”
“That dress will definitely do it,” Fran agreed.
Nicki grinned, kicking out a leg to follow the line of an impossibly high slit in the deep black gown. At the last ball Nicki had worn a toga dress, which as Fran recalled Stefan had taken slight exception to as well. But this gown put that one to shame. Flowing, sleek, and perfectly proportioned for Nicki’s compact but lithe figure, the material practically shimmered as Nicki swung around to face them all again.
Then she stared.
“Oh my God, Fran,” she breathed.
“What?” Fran’s hands went instantly to her hair, knocked askew by her efforts to get into the dress. “What’s wrong?”
A knock at Emmaline’s door immediately distracted them, and Lauren pivoted sharply as a voice called from the corridor. “Girls? It’s Catherine. May I come in?”
“Of course!” Emmaline called out before Fran could ward her off. She was too far away from the mirror to see what had startled Nicki so, but a moment later the queen burst into the suite and took them all in with a sweeping glance.
She froze when she saw Fran, her face arrested.
“What?” Fran cried, looking down her the length of the dress. “What’s wrong with me?”
“Nothing at all, my dear,” the queen said, walking around her. Her eyes were lit with speculation as she surveyed Fran from top to toe. “Nothing at all. This will doverynicely.”
She slanted a glance toward Lauren. “You picked this out, didn’t you?” she charged, and Lauren laid a modest hand on her chest as Fran lifted her skirts and finally positioned herself in front of the mirror.
“Oh,” she managed, blinking fast.
She of all people knew the truth in the statement “the clothes make the man.” She’d gone through several identities, and her outward appearance had as much if not more to do with her success than the paper trail she’d created both before she arrived and after she left.
But nothing could have prepared her for this gown.
It wasn’t like Emmaline’s fairytale pink confection from the ball a few weeks ago. That gown had done everything to showcase Emmaline’s ethereal beauty and incandescent joy. This dress was every bit as big but it was…elegant. Sophisticated. It slid along Fran’s body as if it had been tailored specifically to her, but somehow made her seem taller, almost regal.
It wasn’t a gown for a princess. It was a gown for a queen.
And it was a queen who walked up next to Fran now, the two of them standing shoulder to shoulder in the mirror’s reflection. “You are absolutely stunning, Francesca,” Catherine said, her arm snaking around Fran to give her a hug. “In that dress, I do believe you could do anything.”
Ari stomped down the hallway,his head buzzing with too many meetings, too many file folders, too many screens of information. His memory was dropping in new facts and realizations by the hour, and what it wasn’t willing to provide, Cyril was ready as backup.
But none of it was providing him the information he most sorely needed.
Something had happened in the run-up to his flight from the municipal airport. According to Dimitri, Ari had been toying with new gadgets for days, talking about taking a flight to test his new instrument panels. So he hadn’t been fleeing headlong into the skies that night—not that that would have made any sense anyway. Dimitri hadn’t even known he was going to attempt a flight.
According to Cyril, there were no threats to the royal family recorded in the days prior to or immediately after his disappearance—no activity at all, in fact, other than a building excitement about the prince’s planned Accession activities. The night of his flight, he’d attended a state function with his parents—not at the palace, and had rubbed elbows with all the usual government officials, captains of industry, and members of Garronia’s noble families.
Though the Andris line had sat atop the throne for centuries, Garronia had started as a collection of tiny city-states, each of them boasting a landowner with the title of “count.” With the consolidation of power under a central king, the original monarch had seen the value in allowing the tiny fiefdoms to retain their noble titles, regardless if their estates were governed by the larger whole. The result made for a country full of noblemen and women, each with varying degrees of royal blood in their veins.
Ari’s allotment of royal blood was about to boil over, however, if he didn’t figure out soon who he’d been—
