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With every breath, she concentrated on inhaling every detail about Princess Ammalia, to carry her essence inside her always. The scent of Ammalia’s hair, as sweet and floral as the flowers in the garden surrounding them. The taste of Ammalia’s kisses, still hot and sweet on Cynthia’s tongue. The feel of her warm soft body. How it had felt pressed against her, beneath her, above her. Its position now, between Cynthia’s legs, with Ammalia’s firm fingers gripping Cynthia’s hips, holding her in place. As if there was anywhere else Cynthia would rather be.
She couldn’t even keep cataloguing the moment. The pleasure was too acute, and release too imminent. She was no longer lying in the grass but floating with the stars above.
As the climax overtook her, the night sky filled with fireworks. Reds, greens, blues, orange. As if each of the delicious contractions were echoed in brilliant color overhead.
Fireworks.
Midnight.
As the booming explosions ceased, she heard the last of a distant clock tower ring the final bell of midnight. The night was over. Hadn’t the Prince wanted to make his betrothal announcement at midnight? And Cynthia was supposed to already be back home at her post. There was no time to waste. If her vindictive stepmother arrived first and discovered the house and its comforts were not waiting for them as promised… There was no telling what retribution would await.
Cynthia scrambled to her feet, her limbs still trembling and weak. Princess Ammalia did the same. Cynthia gathered her into her arms for the briefest, tightest of embraces. She pressed a heartbroken kiss to the princess’s temple, then let her go.
“Forgive me,” she whispered into Ammalia’s hair, then turned and ran as swiftly as she could with one shoe on and one shoe lost, stumbling and scrambling her way back home.
The night—and the princess—had been perfect.
Surviving on the sweetness of the memory would have to be enough.
Chapter Thirteen
The next morning, Cynthia swept ashes into a dustpan before the fireplace. Her stepsisters gasped in unison when Stasia shook out the morning newspaper.
Cynthia turned in time to see them both abandon their hot breakfasts in order to peer in shock and dismay at whatever was written on the front page.
“What has happened?” she asked nervously.
Her stepsisters were too distracted by the upsetting news to remember to shoo Cynthia back to the cinders.
Stasia gaped at her like an awestruck fish. “It says… It says…”
Dorothea snatched the paper out of her sister’s limp hand and shook the headlines at Cynthia. “It says the prince fell in love last night, and will be announcing his future bride today.”
“Maybe it’s one of you,” Cynthia said hopefully. Perhaps she could travel to Italy as Stasia or Dorothea’s handmaiden, and steal snatches of time alone with Princess Ammalia.
“It is not me.” Dorothea stabbed her finger at an illustration sketched further down the page.
Cynthia crept closer to look.
The caricature was recognizably a portrait of the handsome prince… holding a sparkling glass slipper in his large palm.
Cynthia’s missing slipper.
“It cannot be,” she said in horror, clutching the wooden handle of her broom like a defensive weapon as she reflexively backed away from the sketch in the paper. She’d told him she wouldn’t marry him.
Princes apparently did not understand or accept the word no.
Dorothea and Stasia were just as appalled—and they blamed Cynthia.
“We have both our shoes,” said Dorothea. “It’s all your fault.”
“It’s my fault you have your shoes?”
“It’s your fault you left one of yours behind, to stand out from all the other young ladies dropping handkerchiefs in Prince Azzurro’s path.”
“That’s not what I was trying to do,” Cynthia protested. “I wasn’t trying to tempt him or be mysterious. I was trying to disappear.”
“Well, you did so in the most slovenly way possible,” said Lady Tremaine, entering the dining room in time to glimpse the infernal illustration on the front page of the morning newspaper. “I would have locked you in that attic if I’d known you had no intention of fighting fair. To think, you weaseled your way into his sights by behaving like a slattern—”
