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“Now, hold on,” said my father in a very stern voice. “She’s certainly never been in heat.”
“Actually, Alonso, I think…” My mother ducked down her head, and now she was blushing.
“You kept it from me?” said my father.
“I asked her to,” I said. “I didn’t think you’d like it, Daddy.”
“Perfectly natural,” said the prince. “But to people who don’t have a designation, it seems extreme. You never have to worry about them again, however.”
I smiled at him, but then I had a stab of fear, because I didn’t think the prince would like the story about me at college, all those men, what I’d done. It was shameful, and he certainly wouldn’t be kissing the back of my hand and reassuring me if he knew. I’d never tell him, I resolved.
Everything about being close to the prince was lovely in a way that I hadn’t known was possible. It was like The Wizard of Oz, like I’d been living in black and white. The prince made the color come into the world, and I’d never really seen it before. I wasn’t willing to let it go. I’d do anything I could to keep it.
The prince’s brow furrowed. “What’s that in your scent, sweetling?”
He could smell my thoughts? Oh, that was awful. I’d have to be careful, I supposed. I tugged my hand out of his, shaking my head. “Nothing. Nothing at all.”
His face fell. “What am I going on about? You must be reeling. Here I am, barreling into your life, demanding you change everything, and expecting you’d go along with it. It’s exactly the kind of alpha stereotype that I could swear was nothing like me.”
“Oh!” I said. “No, you’re wrong. It’s not like that at all.”
“I do have to say,” spoke up my father, “that taking our Eleri away from us—”
“She’s twenty-five, Alonso,” said my mother tersely. “We do want her to live on her own someday, don’t we?”
The prince rubbed his forehead, sitting back in his chair. “It’s only that I didn’t think about what I was doing, at all. And I’ve already ruined your life.”
“You have not ruined it,” I gasped. “I feel as if my life might have started today.”
He gave me a small smile, hope in his eyes. “Me, too.” The smile widened. “Well, that’s encouraging. But I should explain. You’ve been connected to me now, romantically, and the paparazzi will follow you around now for weeks, even if I were somehow to forget about you and try never to see you again, which—I can’t do that. Please, Eleri, don’t tell me that—”
“Of course not.” I was horrified.
He took my hand again. “All right, then.”
I looked into his eyes, and I felt the flood of rightness settle deeply inside me.
“So, then,” he said, “I’d like to move you elsewhere. Somewhere safe, where we can keep the paparazzi at bay. Your parents will be bothered much less with you gone, but I’ll be sure to see to security for them. We may want to look into some sort of relocation for them, a more secure sort of place of residence—”
“Now, wait a second,” said my father. “We’re not moving. We can’t afford to move—”
“We would purchase that, of course,” said the prince. “We have a budget for protection from the press. It’s become necessary as they’ve become more and more bold.”
And with Princess Emily, of course, but none of us said anything. Over a decade ago, the princess had been in an awful accident. She’d been swimming in the ocean in the country of Spesseta, on a holiday. She’d been set on by a large group of paparazzi, who were taking pictures of her from the shore. She’d swum under the water, trying to swim away, got caught under a strong current, dragged down and drowned.
None of the papparazzi had tried to save her, just snapped pictures.
Then she was missing until her body had washed up on shore, hours later, and photos of her corpse had been slapped up luridly across the internet and the front page of a number of tabloids. It was in very poor taste, in my opinion, and since then, the royals and the paparazzi had been quite at odds, with the royals of the opinion that they were fighting for their very lives and the press willing to risk fines and legal consequences because pictures of the royals were so very lucrative.
“You’d buy us a house? We don’t know you. You don’t know us.”
“She’s my omega, sir,” said Prince Devlin. “Perhaps you don’t understand what that means. To people without designations, it’s sometimes a difficult concept to grasp, I think. I could explain, or—”
“It’s all happening very fast,” said my father.
“But it’s a good thing, I think,” said my mother, softening as she looked at the prince and me. “And it seems right to me. I’ve always known there was something about our Eleri.”
“Oh, there definitely is,” said Prince Devlin, squeezing my hand. “Most definitely.”
