“Oh,” she said. “They’re beautiful.”
She’d never been so close to total despair as she was a few moments ago, and now it felt like everything was…okay. Almost.
She was going to have to make it into the ballroom and connect with the king as quickly as possible. “We have to get you to the ball,” Adam said.
Suspicion stirred in her chest. He’d always been kind, but this was so above and beyond, it was potentially risking his job if they were caught sneaking her in. “Why are you doing this?”
“I would do anything for Elizabeth,” he said.
Birdie wrapped her arms around his neck, hugging him. “She would do anything for you,” she whispered, just so he could hear. “I’m certain of it. However you feel, you need to tell her.”
He didn’t say anything, but as she was whisked down the stairs and into a beautiful, classic town car, she felt like this was a night when anything was possible.
All of her wishes had been answered.
Everything would be okay.
Chapter Five
Far too quickly, the masked ball was upon them. He both wanted it to happen, and didn’t. He disliked parties generally. And would never have agreed to do this if he didn’t think it was the absolute best option to find the woman.
She haunted him.
He’d never in his life had sex like that.
Maybe it was an illusion. Maybe it was all intensity brought on by the moment. By the loss.
It was such a difficult, conflicting thing to miss Circe the way that he did. He hadn’t loved her. Their marriage had been difficult. But she’d been a presence in his life. A woman who’d had fire and strength. And who certainly had deserved to live. To go on with her life, to be a mother, to have the things that she wanted.
He felt… That he hadn’t been able to make her happy was something that ate at him more and more as time went on. That her life, the past few years of it were spent in a state of dissatisfaction. Should he have set her free, let her go off and find someone else that she could love? They’d both been so wedded to their duty. Far more than they were wedded to each other.
And yet the end result had been the same. She had been a captive in her own life, and that was how it had been until the end.
He was looking into bringing another woman into this. Intohim.
But at least there was spark. He clung to that. He’d been so convinced that he and Circe would be able to create a spark out of a shared belief in what needed to happen for the kingdom.
But they hadn’t.
And if they had at least been able to be companionable then perhaps it would’ve been acceptable, but they hadn’t even been friends.
They’d been two strangers, bristling with resentment and loneliness.
And he missed her. Because he didn’t know how to live without that. Didn’t know how to be by himself, even when the togetherness had been difficult.
To believe that he might be on the cusp of something else was…impossible.
“Are you all right?”
He looked at his sister, who was staring at him with large, concerned eyes, her son on her hip, his pudgy hand clasping the neckline of her green ball gown. She was going to leave him in the nursery before everything got started, he assumed. Knowing Emerald, she might decide to bring the baby for a while. Being able to have a family, a happy, intact family, was such a great joy for her that she often brought her child when no other princess would ever consider such a thing.
He didn’t blame her. He was such a joy for the three of them, who had experienced so much loss.
Circe had loved him too.
“Fine,” he said.
His sister knew why he was having the ball. That was another issue with having your best friend be married to your sister. Andrei was going to report back. Even if Onyx didn’t particularly want Emerald to know the details of his intimate life.
