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Not that it was her home anyway, really, since she wasn’t a Clark after all.
She’d spent the whole of the flight hiding away in her room, giving herself a crash course in all things Ile d’Montagne. She’d done some research in the days since Cayetano had appeared in the yard, but then, she’d mostly been looking for things to refute Cayetano’s claims. Orhim, if that was even possible. Instead she’d seen pictures of a princess who looked...not unlike her, once she looked beyond the fancy dresses and actual tiaras. It had been too much for her, fast. She’d found she had a deep and instant aversion to looking any further into the actual human woman who she’d beenswapped within a Milwaukee hospital.
Because Princess Amalia hadn’t chosen this, either.
It was like someone walking on her grave. It had made Delaney shiver.
But she’d sucked it up on the flight today. She’d repressed that shiver. And she’d done a deep dive into the road not taken these last few hours.
She’d looked at pictures of the Princess she wasn’t. She’d studied the other woman’s face, and she didn’t think she was kidding herself when she saw the Clark chin. Right there for all the world to see.
The one that wasn’t onherface and never had been.
It had made her feel a little dizzy.
It made her curl up in a ball and fight to breathe evenly again.
And for a while there, she hadn’t been sure she could. She felt as if she was cracking wide-open, falling to pieces, there on an ostentatious plane flying her off into a future she couldn’t begin to imagine.
Delaney hadn’t had to imagine her future, ever. She’d always known what it would hold. The seasons would change. There would be good years and bad. Drought and blight. There were a thousand things that could disrupt the yield, including bankers. But she knew where she’d be.
Her vegetables would grow without her now, and for some reason that was the part that made her throat tight and her eyes burn. She’d stayed where she was, curled up in a ball fighting hard to keep the tears inside, for longer than she thought she should have.
When she got herself back under control, she’d stopped thinking about her garden and had returned to piecing together the life Cayetano seemed to think she’d be stepping into. She hadn’t come that close to crying again, but she had found herself...panicky at the notion thatshemight be expected to do the things a princess did. That Cayetano might expect her to do those things.
And more panicky still when she imagined how she would go about telling him she would be doing none of them. That she was here for the adventure, nothing more.
But that wasn’t why her heart skipped a beat or two in her chest now. It was because, down below her, she could see the sea.
An actualsea.
The first she’d ever seen outside of a television screen.
Delaney could see the waves, topped with the occasional bit of white here and there. She knew it was a part of the greater Mediterranean, and even their likely location on a map. But what caught at her was the color. She’d always known that oceans were meant to be blue, but she’d had no idea what that meant. Not really.
Nothing she’d read had prepared her for all the layers of that blue. Aquamarines and blues and deeper navies, rivaling the sky above.
Needless to say, there was no sea of any kind in Kansas.
She wasn’t sure there was even any blue, comparatively speaking. Not on this scale.
And then the plane was flying in over an island that looked like make-believe to Delaney. It was too perfect. Too pretty. She saw those white sand beaches that looked too pristine to touch and then built up into the hillsides, gleaming small communities in whites and more blues and deep terra-cottas. But the plane kept going, circling around until it began a breathtaking descent into a high, green valley. She saw fields, though none of them like the ones she’d left behind. Still, the presence of crops—even if it wasn’t corn—made her feel less...adrift, maybe.
Though she suspected she wasn’t going to feel like herself for some time.
Because she quite literallywasn’therself, and she didn’t have the slightest idea how she was meant to deal with that truth.
Her breath seemed to tangle in her throat then, but she swallowed hard. And maybe concentrated that much more fiercely on the fields and villages below her.
She refused to cry again. She was filled with horror at the very idea ofshowingsomeone else—especially burnt gold and ferocious Cayetano—her emotions. And she couldn’t help feeling something more than the mess of loss and uncertainty. It was another hint of that same excitement, and it made her feel worse.
Surely she shouldn’t like a single moment of this charade.
Delaney hated herself that she did.
She forced herself to concentrate as the plane descended even further.
And she didn’t need to ask. She understood without being told that the fortress she could see on one end of the valley, built into the side of the mountains, was where Cayetano was taking her. The castle he’d mentioned.
