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And happy looked so good on her.
She’d done her hair in a single, long braid down her back, and it was making him a little crazy. It was the in-between-ness of it. It wasn’t her familiar, formal work coiffure, but it also wasn’t the messy, free-flowing hair he’d seen last night. It was something else, something casual that feltmoreintimate, somehow, than the postcoital hair had. As if this was how she’d do her hair for a day of leisure with someone she knew well, someone she wasn’t trying to impress. Someone she trusted.
Oh, how he yearned to be that person.
And, oh, how alarming that yearning was if he thought about it too much.
So he didn’t think about it. He got out the picnic basket and laid out a waterproof mat before coming back to offer Cara a hand—without the block they used to mount the sleigh at thepalace, it was a long way down. He ended up sort of swinging her down, and it was all he could do not tokeepswinging her, to twirl her around as if they were in a movie.
She made appreciative noises as he unpacked the lunch he’d ordered from the palace kitchen. It was merely an array of finger foods—cheeses and cold meats, nuts and dried fruits, tarts for dessert—but she seemed to find it all delightful.
“Before you eat,” he said as she filled her plate, “I thought we should toast your promotion.” He produced a half bottle of Champagne and raised his eyebrows inquiringly. “I know you’re not much of a drinker. I also have sparkling mineral water, if you’d prefer.”
“You think of everything, don’t you?”
“It’s my job.”
It was the wrong thing to say, judging by the way her face shuttered, though he wasn’t sure why. In the past, she’d complimented him on his thoroughness.
“What an incredible view,” she said after a few moments of silence. They were at a lookout about halfway down the hill the palace was situated on. It had been cleared of trees, and there was a view across to the next peak. “What is that?”
“That’s a small ski run. Most of the skiing in Eldovia is on the other side of the mountain, but there’s a nice little hill over there.”
“That doesn’t look like a hill to me,” she said with what struck him as artificial cheer. “It looks like a near vertical chunk of mountain.”
“Ah, yes, you’re not a skier. Have you ever tried?”
She didn’t answer. She was back to looking shuttered. That was the only word he could think of to describe it. It wasn’t theanger or annoyance he’d seen in her earlier in her time here, but something was wrong. “Will you tell me what is troubling you?”
“I went to an elite private high school in New York.”
“All right.”
“I got a scholarship.”
“That’s... good.” It was, yes?
“It paid for my tuition, but my parents killed themselves paying for everything else—uniforms, books. It was the kind of school where the drama teacher didn’t think twice about asking everyone to come up with their own costumes, for example. I don’t think my parents realized how expensive that school was going to be, even with a full scholarship. They usually made it work when stuff like that came up. They never wanted me to know how tight things were, but I knew.”
“Children usually do.” He knew that from both his own teen years, when his parents’ marriage had been falling apart, and from his current work with families in need.
“Anyway, the senior class went on a trip every year in February. It was usually somewhere drivable, which was the only reason I was entertaining going. We had a bus fee, but that was manageable. But my year voted on a ski trip upstate, at a resort in Lake Placid.”
Ah. He saw immediately what the issue with skiing was.
“I’d budgeted for the bus and the accommodations, but they wanted another two hundred bucks to rent skis and for lessons and for the... whatever you call it, the slope pass thing. That was not going to happen.”
“Of course not.”
“The stupid thing was, it never occurred to anyone—the kids, their parents, any teachers—that that might be inaccessible for someone like me. Two hundred dollars was pocket change for these people. Probably they would have ‘fundraised’ for me if I’d pointed out how inaccessible the trip was. They did that once, when a debate team I was on went to a national competition in California. It was mortifying. No way I was letting that happen again. Alternatively, my parents probably would have come up with the money. They sometimes took cash out against their credit cards to pay for stuff, or went to one of those payday loan places where they advance you money but you have to pay it back with usurious interest rates. That wasn’t happening, either.”
“Of course not.” He would have felt exactly the same in her place. “So you didn’t go?”
“I had enough money saved for the bus and the room, so I did go, but...” She rolled her eyes. “I pretended to sprain my ankle a few days before. I’d found a pair of crutches at Goodwill. So I went on the trip but I had an excuse not to ski.”
“I’d say that’s rather ingenious.”
“I’d say it’s rather pathetic. I should have told them to take their trip and shove it.”
