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‘I’ve been pushing her to come to the Flower Festival,’ Jordan said. ‘That was when I knew I’d be offering her a permanent role. I thought she was being rude when she said she doesn’t like festivals.’
‘I don’t much like them, either,’ he said.
‘Her surname used to be Festa.’
He knew enough from his visits to Di Dio Bellanisiá and other places like it that there wasn’t great thought given to the surnames of the children left there.
Festa.Festival.
What the word meant to her, he didn’t know, but clearly it meant enough that she had changed her name.
‘Was she okay about it?’ He wasn’t completely thoughtless; if it was anyone else he’d have asked too. At least he hoped he would...
‘She seemed to be. Who really knows with Beatrice?’
Not he. He thought of her snapping whenever he’d broached her past, or her English surname, and then he recalled her red swollen eyes after her birthday weekend.
He realised he’d completely misread the situation—for she really had given him a piece of herself when she’d shared something about her long-lost friend. Her so-called twin, yet not a blood relation, and how she’d gone back to find her and then decided things were better left...
Julius had no choice but to leave things.
It didn’t make him feel better, though.
Where Beatrice was concerned, it didn’t feel best left. Even if he knew it would be far more sensible to do so.
CHAPTER TEN
BEATRICECHECKEDHERheart several times throughout the weekend, like a nurse taking a pulse at intervals, but it was beating steadily.
She dealt with casual sex and its fallout for a living, and she certainly wasn’t going to fall apart herself.
She was very grateful to have a week’s reprieve before facing him, though.
Work was quiet. As well as Julius being away, the King was visiting the other islands all week, and it felt like that time between Christmas and New Year, when there was only a skeleton staff and nothing really happened.
It was just quiet.
Incredibly so.
Sometimes painfully so.
While the cats were away, the mice hit the snooze button...
And then suddenly he called.
That day even the lazy peacocks were up by the time Beatrice had disembarked the shuttle bus and was walking along Prince’s Lane. Then her phone rang, and she heard his voice for the first time since that night.
‘Are you in my offices or downstairs?’
‘Downstairs,’ Beatrice lied, and stared at the peacock, daring it to screech.
‘No problem. I’ll find someone else.’
He rang off, and there was a tiny little spike on her temperature chart—a little flash of indignation that he hadn’t so much as said hello or asked if she was okay.
It was solved by a couple of deep breaths, and then a nervous lick of her lips. Because she’d been walking with her phone in her hand when usually it lived in her bag until she arrived at work. Always.
Do not go there, Beatrice warned herself, and threw her phone into her bag.
