Page 3 of How To Please A Princely Fae

I watch the plant for a moment, so sure I felt a whisper of magic from it, or perhaps from me, after all, but my hopes aredashed as the bud stays tightly closed, the leaves as yellow-green and sad as ever.

“Goodnight, little plant,” I murmur, headed for bed.

I have all the plant and potion magic knowledge I can stuff inside my brain, and still I know there’s no better remedy for a hurt of the heart like a good night’s sleep.

Chapter 2

KIERAN

Istorm into the apothecary, ready to tear the store apart and make that absolute minx of a little witch listen to reason. How dare she offer to take some washed-up ancient god’s hand in marriage? How dare she be so careless with herself?

Doesn’t she know she iseverything?

My fangs pierce my bottom lip as I grind my teeth. My nostrils flare, and my heart pounds so hard it fairly tries to escape the cage of my ribs.

How dare Willow even think about endangering herself? Of giving up everything it’s so clear she loves in order to meet the extremely cliché demands of some ancient magic being?

Absolutelynot.

I am a prince of the Unseelie Underhill, and I will not allow it.

My nose scrunches and my grimace deepens because that title is a double-edged sword, primed to cut both ways.

I am a prince of the Unseelie Underhill, and Willow deserves so much more than I can give her. I am a creature of darkness,spawn of an Unseelie queen who would kill me if I so much as deigned to breathe the air of the Underhill again.

Willow does not deserve to be yoked to me.

I should have walked away from this job and her the moment I realized what a treasure of a witch she was, but all the reasons that keep me away from her are the same reasons that I haven’t left.

I am selfish and callous, through and through.

Somewhere in the dark, a cricket chirps, singing a song to itself and jolting me from my thoughts. I see well in the dark, as do all things raised in the Underhill, and it takes me no time at all to deduce the cricket and I are alone.

“Willow?” I call out, just in case.

She’s not here, not in the store itself, though I hardly expected her to be here. The floorboards creak under my feet as I walk through the winding shelves and displays that I now know by heart.

There is the feverfew potion she brewed only yesterday, bottled in tiny glass jars and sealed with magic and tied with a velvet ribbon. A hand-lettered tag swings gently as I walk by.

For fevers and headaches,it reads.

It won’t work on the headache I have.

My hands ball into fists, feckless and incapable as always, because those… beings that appeared tonight won’t be beaten by measly physical violence.

Though I would do my best if I had the chance to try.

Ga’Rek would laugh at the thought, were he here to hear it. The huge orc’s spent most of my life trying and failing to teach me to fight, to stand up for myself.

Of course, the one time I took a lesson of self-defense and applied it, I was banished from the Underhill along with my two companions. My only two friends, though I’m not sure they feelthe same about me or if I’m just some unfortunate responsibility they’ve been saddled with since I was born.

I know everyone else feels that way about me. My mother, the Dark Queen, certainly did. I’m sure she was thrilled to wash her elegant hands of me the moment I protected myself and gave her an excuse to. I was never the heir. I wasn’t even the spare.

No one’s ever wanted me.

My mood is positively foul as I round the corner into what Willow calls her laboratory. The room reeks of magic, so many powerful incantations and charms worked here over the years that their imprint might never be truly washed away.

It smells of Willow, too.

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