Total pages in book: 76
Estimated words: 72897 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 364(@200wpm)___ 292(@250wpm)___ 243(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 72897 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 364(@200wpm)___ 292(@250wpm)___ 243(@300wpm)
It almost felt like a dinner party.
“So I see the bear, clear as day,” Henry was saying. “Right outside my cabin window. And I’m telling you, my cabin windows were not very sturdy.”
Princess Emma was rapt, smiling, sitting back after eating a delicious meal, eyes trained on Henry. He had always been a good storyteller, but he had the entire table wrapped tightly around his finger now. Even Genoveve was focused exclusively on Henry.
Henry was glowing, his cheekbones so defined in the amber light. I wanted to run my fingertips along his face, to feel the relative roughness of his skin against mine.
I kept staring at his mouth. His full lips. I ran my own fingers along my lower lip, idly wondering if he was still as good a kisser as he’d been that night long ago. Not that we’d gotten nearly as much time together as I’d wanted.
Or maybe I was just thinking that because I’d already had too much liquor, and any amount of liquor made me want to kiss someone. Seeing Henry in real life still felt like a dream.
“Were you scared?” the princess asked.
“At first. But then I was kind of excited.”
“Hah!” she exclaimed.
“I knew I had to outsmart the bear if I had any chance. So I tossed the rest of my beef jerky out to the side of the cabin, waited for him to go after it, then made a run for my truck. Spent hours downslope waiting for the bear to get the hell out of there.”
Things had started out awkwardly. Henry had seemed like he wasn’t comfortable being at the table, and I had worried it had been one more mistake, in a long series of mistakes, asking him to stay for dinner. Genoveve had given him a clean suit to wear to dinner, and it fit impossibly well for non-tailored clothing.
He looked great, actually. Henry could fill out cheap flannel or expensive qiviut, and either way, he was stunning.
The moment Emma had started asking him about his time living in the mountains, dinner had turned into the Henry Show. He told tales about snowstorms, snakes, and now bears.
“Didn’t you ever get lonely, up there all alone?” Genoveve asked, turning her head to one side.
“No,” Henry said. “Well… yes, but I’m sort of always lonely, in a way. Being up in the mountains on my own didn’t feel any lonelier than boarding school had.”
“Not a single soul was there other than you?” Timothy, the castle’s head of staff, asked, his brow furrowed.
“It wasn’t complete isolation,” Henry said. “There were other people who lived on the mountain. A couple who lived about a mile down from my cabin. Another man, Gareth, who was a few years older than me. Gareth taught me a lot about foraging nearby, and also taught me that I couldn’t rely only on foraging, and that I was going to have to get used to doctoring up a can of beans every now and then.”
“Sounds like a good friend,” the princess said.
“I considered him even more than a friend, for a while,” Henry said.
“A best friend,” Timothy said.
“Well, we kept each other happy, and warm in bed, sometimes,” he said. “He left to go back to city life after a year of my living out there. Haven’t spoken to him since.”
My chest was suddenly tight. I clutched my drink glass, bringing it to my lips and sipping. Timothy raised an eyebrow, but ultimately shrugged.
I had no reason to be possessive of Henry, certainly not when it came to men he may or may not have been with, years ago. I had even slept with a couple of women who had visited the castle, because they had smelled lovely and it had been yet another secret to keep, a secret that made me feel alive when I had felt dead.
But my heart had never been in it. Not even for a moment.
Jealousy curled through me hot and slow like the scotch I’d been putting away all night. I hated thinking of another man sleeping next to Henry in bed.
When I looked up, Henry’s eyes were on mine.
“Enough about me, though,” Henry said, taking a deep breath and leaning back. “I’ve been running my mouth all night. Sebastian, I want to hear about what you’ve been doing all of this time.”
“You two were friends as children, yes?” Princess Emma asked.
I nodded. “Best friends. Neighbors.”
“We saw each other every day. Then I didn’t see him for eleven years,” Henry said.
“How sad,” Emma said.
“I’ve been learning how to be a prince,” I said, trying to sit up straighter in my chair but finding that all of my bones felt heavy. I ran my fingers through my hair, pulling in a sharp breath of air through my nostrils. “The Prince of Frostmonte is a title that used to imply power, lawmaking. It held meaning. Now it primarily means that I’m the face of Frostmonte, a representative of not only this mountain but the villages below, a symbol across the world for the people that live here.”