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A lot like she was coming out of her skin, she thought, as she was led on a tour through one beautiful room after the next, all apparently a part of her guest quarters. It was a far cry from the inflatable mattress on a floor that had served as the farm’s guest accommodations. All the smug paintings and complacent vases. All the self-aggrandizing rugs, so thick and pristine she very much doubted anyone else had walked across their intricate designs. Even the parade of carefully chosen colors seemed condescending to her. Who would ever choose a mint green? A pale yellow? Then anoint it all with gleaming gold and silver and sanctimonious furnishings?
She longed for the simplicity of her real life. The demands of crops, livestock. The inevitability of the seasons. Rain. Sun. Storms. Drought. Those were the things that mattered, not a castle on a mountain above an island she’d never heard of before. Not all these trappings of a kind of moneyed life she couldn’t even begin to understand.
Maybe she didn’t want to understand.
One thing she could tell she most certainly did not wish to understand was servants.
She’d never had a servant in her life. Clarks did for themselves or they did without.
“I know I’m not a Clark,” she muttered, before she felt compelled to remind herself, and smiled when the servant with her in the bedroom—flinging open curtains and doors and bustling this way and that—looked at her quizzically.
Maybe if she kept saying that, it would start making sense. And maybe if she did it enough, she would believe it.
And maybe you’re happy at the notion of hiding away here, researching and reading and distancing yourself in all yournot rushing, because you don’t want to face the truth, came a voice inside her, tart enough to be her grandmother’s.You want to put off reality as long as possible.
What she wanted, Delaney thought then, was not to collapse on the floor and cry.
Because she was afraid that if she started up again, she might never stop.
Delaney squeezed the bridge of her nose until the heat there dissipated. But then she didn’t know what to do with herself. There appeared to be nothing for hertodo but stand about as the women breezed around her in the overlarge bedchamber, chattering brightly as they unpacked her clothes and set out her few personal things. Her attempt to help was swiftly rebuffed with a laugh, so she...stood there near the gigantic four-poster bed that she worried she’d need a ladder to climb into, feeling awkward.
So awkward that it took her a moment to realize that they were speaking to each other, and sort ofather, in English.
“I thought everyone spoke French here,” she said.
A tad too bluntly, she realized, when all three women—who she was only now realizing were probably about her own age, a fact she probably shouldn’t have found so astonishing—stopped what they were doing and gazed at her.
“French, yes. Also, Italian,” one of the women said. “But the world is big and speaks more than two languages. So, also Spanish. German. And, yes, English.”
“I have a smattering of Japanese,” another woman boasted.
But the third one laughed. “Knowing how to say thank-you in Japanese is not a smattering,” she said. “It’s one word.Arigato.”
Delaney felt as if she ought to apologize for speaking only the one. But didn’t.
“Also,” the first one said as the other two glared at each other, “the warlord insisted that only English-speaking servants wait on you. It caused quite a commotion.”
“I’m not surprised,” Delaney said. “I can’t imagine who would want to wait on a farm girl from Kansas.”
All three women looked confused. They looked at each other, then back at Delaney.
“Everyone wanted to wait on you,” the third girl said, as if she didn’t understand why Delaney had uttered such blasphemy.
“It’s an honor,” agreed the second.
“You are to be the warlord’s bride,” said the first. Rapturously. “What greater honor could there be than to attend you?”
Delaney did not have an answer to that. Her body seemed to respond on its own. She told herself it was shame and horror, that thick current of sensation that coiled low in her belly as the wordsthe warlord’s bridechased around and around in her head. She told herself her body was staging a revolt at the very idea.
But she knew better.
She remembered that kiss too well, and she knew better.
Still, she didn’t have a lot of time alone to sit and brood about it.
Because the three servants moved on from the awkward moment, getting down to business quickly. They unpacked everything from her duffel, and then examined it. Critically. One of them pulled out a tape measure. Another produced a pad and pen and noted down the numbers. And only smiled when Delaney asked why.
After they finished whirlwinding around her, they delivered her to another servant waiting for her outside her guest apartment. He wore a uniform that even Delaney’s untutored eye could identify as fancy. Fancier than the women, certainly.
