Page 82 of The Princess and the Fraud

With him holding my hand to his chest, and my other pressed to his face, I realized all at once at how intimate it must look if anyone were to walk past. As I stared into Aaron’s dark eyes, seeing the slivers of a lighter brown in them, I felt it. It was, I imagined, how it’d feel like to draw a bow across cello strings again. Something raw and unsteady unlocked inside me, eliciting a shaking, lowhumthat spread to every inch of my body.

It might’ve looked intimate, but itfeltintimate. Forbidden, but not wrong. I wanted to close my eyes, both afraid of this moment and… eager for it.

“Why did you take it back?” Aaron asked, and his voice was much quieter than it’d been a moment ago, as if our physical connection made it so he had to nearly whisper. “Telling me to marry you. Why did you take it back?”

I swayed a little, more of my weight pressing into the palm against his chest. My heart thundered, a rapid stampede that caused my head to swim. “You said… it was an easy choice. Me or Fiona.”

“It was easy.” Now his voicediddrop to a whisper, and he reached up to hold my wrist of the hand that pressed to his cheek. “So why did you take it back?”

Tomorrow, I’d blame it all on the green tea shot. My thoughts, my feelings, the craziness that was this snapshot in time. In this moment, I couldn’t stop thinking about how his cold skin siphoned my warmth—how I wanted him to take it all. “Because I care about you.” I searched his face, but my vision was too blurry to see any trace of expression. “And that… scares me.”

Aaron looked at me then, straight on, stealing the breath from my lungs. “If I proposed to you, would you say yes?” His fingers tightened around my wrist, slightly, like he wasn’t sure if he wanted to hold on or let go. “If I made the crazy, reckless, catastrophic choice of proposing to you, what would you say?”

I swallowed hard, but it was like the saliva in my mouth wouldn’t go down. “Marrying me iscatastrophic?”

Even when I’d touched Aaron’s skin and found it cold, I hadn’t felt warm myself. But now? Now I was burning. The back of my neck prickled with sweat, my tangled hair sticking to damp skin. Heat curled under my ribs, spread to my fingertips, and the frantic drum of my heartbeat only tightened the pressure in my chest.

“Not marrying you,” he murmured. His voice hooked into me, pulling something loose, something I wasn’t ready to name.

Just as the taste of green tea shots crept up my throat, the whiskey and peach suddenly too bitter, he said it—words that barely reached me before the ground tilted beneath my feet.

“Falling for you.”

And then I threw up all over the hotel hallway floor.

CHAPTERNINETEEN

Iawoke to “The Swan” by Saint-Saëns.

Despite the slow-fading haze of sleep, the gentle sweep of cello paired with the steady chords of piano was unmistakable, and for one blissful moment, the world was nothing but the execution of the piece. A lot of people associated this composition with mourning, saying it was bitter but beautiful, but I’d always thought it was what falling in love sounded like. Quiet. Serene. Reaching down deep inside you and plucking a chord only someone with an intimate touch could.

The piece ended with a dreamlike piano progression, followed by one final strum of a cello string. For some reason, a chord of familiarity hummed within me, too, something triggering déjà vu. The world was silent for a beat, and then two, before “The Swan” began again from the top, piano leading it in before the cello came to life.

In those quiet moments, I realized I was clutching something soft to my chest.

And that I felt like hot garbage.

My head throbbed as if someone used it in place of a baseball. I couldn’t hold still, despite the stillness being what I craved; on its own accord, every inch of me trembled, almost as if my body were the cello and someone was dragging their bow across my raw skin.

I furrowed my brow, wincing at the pain and the taste in my mouth. It wasn’t’ as bad as I thought it would’ve after a night of drinking, but the film that coated my dry tongue and teeth definitely wasn’t enjoyable. Water. I needed water. I felt like I’d die without it.

I pried my eyelids apart, finding a ceiling that wasn’t the water-stained one of my apartment. Things came back to me in flashes. The Uber ride with Paige. Me fumbling for the lamp on the nightstand. Paige’s note.I didn’t know where else to leave you.

Sitting up—and nearly falling back down due to the roar in my head—I remembered that I was at Alderton-Du Ponte the exact same moment I noticed the teddy bear in my arms. I peered at it, smoothing my fingers down its matted fur, wondering why it looked familiar.

And then I remembered Aaron Astor the exact second I swung my legs over the side of the bed, feet landing on something solid, eliciting a very human-like yell.

Or, well, a human-likecurse. It punctuated “The Swan” like a squawk from the bird itself.

I jerked my legs back, peering over the bed to find Aaron curled up on the floor, gripping his stomach. He had no blanket to cover him, and instead used what looked like one of his jackets. “Good morning to you, too,” he groaned out.

“What—what are you doing on my hotel room floor?” I demanded, wrenching the teddy bear to my chest, as if there was something scandalizing about my oversized sweatshirt.

“You mean what am I doing onmyhotel room floor?” He leveraged himself up onto an elbow. “I’m asking myself the same question, Lovisa.”

Oh.Oh. This washisroom. I looked down at the teddy bear—hisbear. I’d come to his room in the middle of the night—oh my gosh. I clutched my head with a gasp, equally from the pain and from the humiliation.

Aaron pushed up from the floor to his knees, where he turned toward the nightstand, reaching. The music abruptly went silent, right before the swell point of the piece, and I looked over to see that he’d been playing it from his phone. “You play music when you sleep?” I asked him, setting the teddy bear onto my lap.

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