I pull Bram closer to me, gripping the width of his shoulders. The kiss grows more urgent, and he slips his tongue behind my teeth.
He’s kissing me like he means it. My veins thrum with the knowledge of his want. Bram may be a prince, he may not even be human, but I have all the power here.
I pull back and look at him. We’re both panting, and he’s nearly unbearably pretty in the moonlight. I reach up and trace the line of his perfect eyebrows, his sharp jaw, the hollows of his cheekbones. I tuck a lock of hair behind his ear to get a look up close at the slightly pointed tip.
“That’s a start,” I say.
He smiles, and I can’t help but poke his dimple. He presses his face into my hand. “Good. Because I do not intend for it to be the end.”
“Where is Emmett? I didn’t see him tonight,” I ask Lottie later as she takes down my hair.
Her fingers hesitate. “He’s left. Gone on a hunting trip or something.”
He said he never had the stomach for hunting.Gone.Why didn’t he say goodbye?
“When will he be back?”
“Not for a while, I presume. He took enough clothes for a month or two. His valet was complaining about it all afternoon.”
“When his brother is about to get engaged? That seems odd.”
Lottie just shrugs. “Classic Emmett. Never found an important event he couldn’t weasel his way out of. I’m surprised he didn’t tell you,” Lottie says. “He wrote a note to Faith. I delivered it this morning. Perhaps she has more details.”
I frown at myself in the mirror. “Perhaps.”
“Oh!” Lottie exclaims. “Speaking of De Veres.” She pulls my note, the one addressed to Emmett’s father, out from the front pocket of her apron.
“Prince Consort Edgar is also away, has been for weeks apparently.”
“Why?”
Lottie’s brows furrow. “You know, it’s the strangest thing, absolutely no one knows. No word has come from him at all.”
A cool breeze comes from the cracked window, but that’s not why I feel suddenly cold. I’m hit with the realization that the season is nearly over and I have been left completely on my own.
Faith Fairchild
The first time I realized my mother was lying to me, I was four years old. She tucked me into bed, kissed my forehead, and whispered to me what she always whispered.
“Good night, my sweet girl. Say your prayers, and may your papa in heaven watch over you.”
I had been aware for some time that my family was different from other children’s families. My mother and I lived on the top floor of a boardinghouse, just the two of us. Other children had siblings and fathers and big green lawns to run around on, but I had only my mother and the little world we created.
But that day was different. The first thing I noticed was that there was a man in our flat. I don’t think a man had ever been there before. There were always boarders in the house. They taught me to play chess in the shared parlor downstairs or let me help them hang their laundry in the garden outside, but inside our attic, it was always just my mother and me.
The man was tall and broad, with a sneering sort of face and big, blocky eyebrows.
The second thing I noticed was that the man was making my mother cry.
The memory is fuzzy now, fourteen years later. I think I must have just woken up from a nap. But I do remember what the man said when I climbed onto my mother’s lap to wipe away her tears. “I just wanted to see my daughter.”
“You can see her whenever you like,” my mother replied.
He paced the room, too large for it. I worried that he was going to knock over the wooden cradle where my doll slept. “You know that’s not true,” he said.
I realized at once that this strange man was my father—that my mother had been lying to me my whole life. She had told me my father was a sailor who died at sea. Every night I prayed for him, but my father was right here in front of me.
I learned a valuable lesson that day: no one is to be trusted, anyone could be lying at any time, even the people you love most.
