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I feel him watching me as brazenly as I felt his touch only moments before.
“Tell me what you’re thinking,” he says. “Please.”
I don’t know what to think. Everything and nothing clashes in my brain. I want to go back to two minutes ago, where I wasn’t thinking at all and letting my body lead the way. But I can’t go back now that the floodgates of reality have crashed open.
“Do you think we should tell him?” I croak.
Beau scoffs. “That’s not my call to make.”
“He’s your brother.”
“He’s supposed to be your husband.” That word rings in the air. “Unless you’ve changed your mind.”
I don’t miss the hopeful lift in his voice. It adds a fresh lashing of guilt across my conscience.
“This… this doesn’t change things. I still—it’s what I’m meant to do.”
Beau shakes his head with each word I say, like he can’t stand to hear it, damning him and us.
But this changes nothing. We’ll forget it ever happened. This whole incredible lapse of judgment. It would send my life into a tailspin. I’d lose everything. I don’t—I don’t know what or who I would be without the charity, the future I’ve been primed for.
This changes nothing.
This changes nothing.
Maybe if I repeat it enough, I’ll start to believe it.
Beau refuses to look at me. His voice is gruff as he finally says, “If that’s what you want.” He adjusts his shirt and unlocks the door. “I’ll go find Faraday.”
Sixteen
My heart is galloping faster than a human’s should be capable of when I wake with a brutal gasp the next morning. The sheets cling to my clammy skin, the material soaked in sweat and shame. They’re tangled around my legs, and I struggle to kick them free before shoving them violently off the bed. Sunlight streams in through a small crack in the curtains, and I wonder how I possibly slept in. Wonder how I didn’t wake up sooner with the bitter taste that coats my tongue.
I scramble out of bed to the bathroom and quickly brush my teeth, avoiding my gaze in the mirror the entire time. Spitting the toothpaste down the drain does nothing to help the taste of bile that rises to the back of my throat as I force myself to look up into my eyes.
A face that doesn’t seem like my own looks back at me. My skin has a slight golden kiss to it from the evening unabashed out in the sun, my lips slightly swollen from kisses that shouldn’t have happened. The ends of my hair are tangled together in a mess, mirroring the feeling of my stomach right now.
Guilty eyes reflect back at me as flashes of yesterday race through my brain.
Beau’s hands on my waist. The goosebumps that rose in every place he touched me. His lips on my neck, my ear, my mouth. The delicate way his fingers deftly slipped inside my panties. The feel of his silky hair against my palms as I held him against me, grinded against his hand.
I hear the shatter before I realize what I’ve done. The small vase of flowers that I keep on the vanity is scattered across the tile, petals meshed with broken glass.
How could I have let that happen? I let someone who is not my boyfriend… fiancé… future betrothed, in my pants. And worse, it was his brother.
But time spent with Beau seems to be time spent in another reality, another world. He’s revealing parts of myself that I didn’t even know I had, and it’s just so easy to forget things like honor and integrity.
But it’s not an excuse.
I tiptoe out of the bathroom and grab a broom from the hall closet to sweep up the mess, then dump the reminder of it in the bin.
I need to talk to someone about this. The urge to spill my guts to someone threatens to boil over, but when I pick up my phone, I go stagnant. The list of people I can actually tell this to is… well… no one.
My friends, even my most trusted and beloved girlfriends, at the end of the day are not in this circle I’ve been thrust into. My access to the royal family will always serve as some sort of barrier, a wall that no matter how badly I wish wasn’t there, just is. There are things that I’ll never be able to share with them because of the secrecy and power imbalance my new future now holds. And as I’ve gotten sucked further into this world this summer, I’ve lost touch with most of them.
I certainly can’t tell Lock, and talking to Beau is out of the question. As a matter of fact, I should email my mother and have her pull me from the rest of the engagements with him.
Oh god, my mother. If she ever found out what happened, I truly and utterly might be melted into a little puddle under her withering stare.
