Page 47 of First Light

“Selfish?” She laughed. “You’re trying not to be selfish? Now I know you’re joking.” She stood and started pacing near the fire. “Trying not to be selfish. That isrich.”

“How?” He scowled. “I never lied to you. I told you I’d lost my wife. I told you about Seren.”

“You didn’t tell me that your wife had my face!” She stopped and pointed to it. “Do you understand how weird that is, Lachlan? She was mytwin.”

“I have a twin too, and we’re completely different people.”

“Okay, you didn’t tell me that you came from a secret, magical world. How is that not a lie?”

Lachlan stared at her. “Really, Carys? Be honest—you would have thought I was a lunatic.”

“Maybe so, but at least I wouldn’t have fallen in love with someone who disappeared into thin air.” She resumed pacing around the room. “You had toknow.” She blinked back tears. “You’re aprince. You had to know that your father wouldn’t just let you go.”

Guilt passed over his face, but he didn’t look away. “I didn’t know they could find me. I didn’t realize there was a gate so close to your house.”

“What happened?” She crossed her arms over her chest. “It like… sucked you in or something?”

“No! Getting too close to the gate tripped some kind of… alarm, I suppose. They’d put a spell out to find me, and when I got too close to a gate, they knew where I was. And once my father knew where I was?—”

“Are you telling me your dad sent a… a fairy strike force to California to kidnap you?”

He muttered, “Fairy strike force may be the wrong mental picture, but there were around a dozen of them, yes.”

“Did they forbid you from leaving me anote? Did they forbid you from calling me once you got back to Edinburgh?” She frowned. “You brought your phone through a fae gate? I thought you couldn’t do that.”

“Theytookit, Carys. Then they smashed it.” He took a deep breath. “There’s no rule that says technology can’t go through gates if fae carry them. They run the portals, not us.”

“Thanks for clearing that up. I’ll make a note.”

“I know you’re still angry.”

“There had to have been a way to tell me. Something. Anything.”

Lachlan stood and walked to her. “There wasn’t time. They tracked me. They hunted me. And before I knew what was happening, theytook me. They wanted to search your house, but I didn’t want them to…” He blinked and clammed up.

She narrowed her eyes. “Didn’t want them to what?”

“I didn’t want them to know about you. I was worried they might hurt you. The fae who took me, they don’t care about humans at all, especially mundane ones.”

“Ohright.” She knew what he was saying, but using the wordmundanestill stung. “I’m not special enough for them to care about.”

Of course she wasn’t. She wasn’t a princess. She wasn’t Seren. If she didn’t want to see her father’s twin so much, she would have agreed with him and just gone home.

“I never said that, and I never would.” He huffed out a breath. “Misunderstandings like this are the reason it would be better for you to go.”

“I’m not going anywhere. I’m staying until I see Seren’s father.”

Lachlan blinked. “That’s why you want to stay?”

He tried to grab for her arm, but she shoved him to the side and walked out the door, storming down the corridor as she looked for the stairwell she’d walked up the night before.

“Carys, I know you miss your parents, but he’s not the same man.”

She held up a hand as she walked down the hall, flipping him off before she stomped down the stairs.

“That’s very mature. Dafydd is not your father, Carys.”

She didn’t care about being mature, and she knew he wasn’t her father.

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