I get a small, crooked smile as she shifts, treating me to the best angle ever. I prop my phone up against the wall behind the desk I’m sitting at, flip to a new page, and start sketching.
“Stop drawing me.”
“Never. I see your face when I close my eyes, and whenever that happens with something, I have to draw it. I drew you this morning when you were still sound asleep in my bed.”
“Your Highness?—”
“Rowan,” I correct as my hand continues to move, my eyes bouncing back and forth between the paper and the screen.
A huff. “Prince, what you’re doing with me isn’t smart. This has to stop.”
“So you like to say, and yet here we are.”
“I’m hanging up now.”
“Please don’t. I want to look at you for a bit longer. Talk to you. Pretend. Maybe even imagine.”
“Imagine what?”
“That the world isn’t as complex as it seems. That you’re simply a woman I met and I’m just a guy and this isn’t as impossible as it feels. I don’t want it to be impossible. I want what I feel when I look at you to never stop.”
Her eyes glass over, and she shifts again, pressing her head deeper into her pillow to hide it. “And what’s that?”
“Hope. Excitement. Lust. Derangement.” Love. I won’t say it, and I barely allow myself to think it because it seems too soon and too insane, but it creeps into those dark, unruly recesses all the same. It’s impossible for it to be that. I don’t know her. There are all these things that make her everything I need to stay away from. But the thought is there. A truth that resonates through me and doesn’t care about all the other bullshit.
I can’t leave her alone. I think about her night and day. My moments are consumed with her.
She giggles, the sound like music. “You are definitely that last one, Your Highness.”
“Don’t pretend you don’t like me too.”
She rolls her eyes. “Good night.”
“Will you sing for me?” I don’t want her to hang up. Searching for Marie fucks with me. The diamond I foundisfucking with me. I feel like I’m chasing ghosts, and when I get to the end of this—if I ever get there—I’m positive it will be with heartbreak.
I don’t like to think about the curse because it’s entirely out of my control. My nieces and nephew are my life. My brother is the only true family I have—other than Althea, but she’s not of our royal bloodline—because our mother has little if anything to do with us. Bellamy is pregnant with twins, and the fear—the chronic fucking fear—keeps me up. I want to fix everything, and I don’t know how, so looking at Marcella and drawing her and listening to her is a tonic to my ravaged soul.
She might prove to be the biggest curse of all, and maybe this is all part of it. The beautiful angel of death coming to claim its next victim—me. But I’d rather be destroyed by her than continue in the gray nothingness.
“Sing?” Her brows pinch in confusion as if I spoke to her in ancient Greek.
“Yes, my enchanting siren. I want you to sing something for me.”
“And jump to your death?”
I laugh, my hand continuing to move across the thick sketch paper. It’s as if she were reading my mind. “If that’s how it goes, there are worse ways for a man to die than at your hands.”
Her face pinches up for a flicker of a second before she evens it out and asks, “Sing what?”
“Anything. Your favorite song that you like to sing.”
“I don’t know a lot of songs. I only know what I grew up hearing.”
I already figured that out, which is why she’ll fight me on some of the things I’m sending her.
“I don’t care. Pick something. Make it up if you have to.”
Again to my surprise, she opens those full lips, and her voice is set free. It’s incredible and sends chills racing up my spine. I don’t know the song. It’s some Italian thing, but she could be singing me the history of Messalina straight from one of the old tomes in my study, and I wouldn’t mind.
