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on this beautiful vacation spot.”
He heard Violet’s voice drifting down the corridor, coming from the expansive dining room where his brother often held dinner parties.
It was a massive room with a view that stretched on for miles, a large balcony connecting it and the ballroom and making the most of those views.
Violet was standing right next to the window, her cell phone in her hand. She waved—not at him, but at her screen—then put the phone down at her side. “I was filming a live video. Doing more to tease my location.”
“Of course you were,” he said.
She gave him a bland look. “Just because you don’t understand it doesn’t mean it’s not valid.”
“Oh, I would never think that.”
“Liar. If you don’t understand it, you think it’s beneath you.”
“I didn’t say I didn’t understand it.”
“But you do think it’s beneath you.”
“That was implied in my statement, I think.”
“You’re impossible.”
She walked nearer to him, and he tried to keep his focus on the view outside. But he found himself looking at her. She had most definitely regained her precious makeup. She looked much as she did that first day he had seen her, which he assumed was a signature look for her.
“So you must go to all this trouble,” he said, indicating her makeup, “to talk to people who aren’t even in the room with you.”
She winked. “That’s how you know I like you. If I talk to you in the same room, and I don’t bother to put my eyelashes on.”
“Your eyelashes are fake?”
“A lot of people have fake eyelashes,” she said sagely. “I used to have them individually glued on every week or so, but I prefer the flexibility of the strips so I can just take them off myself at the end of the day.”
“I have to say I vastly don’t care about your eyelashes.”
He looked down at her, at the dramatic sweep of those coal black lashes they were discussing. And he found that he did care, more than he would like. Not about the application, but that he wished he could see them naturally as they had been the other morning. Dark close to her eyes, lighter at the tips. He appreciated now the intimacy of that sight.
And he should not want more.
“You know what I do care about?” she asked. “Outside. I would like to go outside.”
“Well, the garden is fenced in, feel free to wander around. Just don’t dig underneath it.”
“Very cute. Another joke. We could write that in your baby book. However, I would like a tour.”
“A tour of the grounds?”
“Yes.”
“Of the garden, or of the entire grounds? Because I warn you, they are quite wild.”
“I find I’m in the mood for wild.”
She smiled slightly and enigmatically. He could not tell whether she intended for the statement to be a double entendre.
But the moment passed, and he found himself agreeing to take her out of the palace.
One path led to the carefully manicured gardens that had been tamed and kept for generations. A testament to the might of the royal family, he had always thought. And as a result, he had never liked them.
