She gasps, stumbling slightly.
I press her hand to my chest, over my wildly beating heart. “Listen, listen, Highness, please.” I take a deep breath, trying to sort through all the words, to find the right ones. But there aren’t any.
“I love you,” I gasp. “Highness. Princess. Mirth. Euphrosyne. I fucking love you. I know it’s only been a few weeks. It’s too quick. We’ve only had these stolen moments together. And maybe we’re soul bound, maybe this is fate, and this desire is triggered like that … but I … I know it’s more than that.”
She laughs quietly, wetly. “More than being created for each other by the very universe that sustains us? Sustains the world?”
“Well, when you put it like that?” I shrug, desperately trying to be playful with her. To be her light. Her safe spot. I tug her a little closer, still on my knees and gazing up at her. “I don’t know how this is supposed to work. I’ve been up in my head about it. About where I fit with the others. What I can possibly give to you that any one of them can’t —”
“You aren’t interchangeable parts,” she snaps.
I laugh. “I get it now. I get what I bring you. What I want to bring you.”
She tilts her head. “And what is that?”
“I’m a blank slate. A new start. We don’t have any past together, no baggage. And no expectations. I don’t have responsibilities to an important position or an estate. Or even, sad as it is, familial obligations. I’m yours, Highness. I choose to be yours.”
Mirth’s lips part slightly as she listens to me lay out my epiphany to her, pretty much in real time as I’m experiencing it.
She takes off her sunglasses. Not touching me, she leans over me. I tilt my face up to her, and all her dark hair falls down around us. And I understand. She’s taking us back to that moment. That moment in my bed where she asked me to hide away with her.
“I won’t falter again,” I whisper, aching to kiss her but not closing the space between us.
“At first sight,” she says, her violet eyes burning into my soul, claiming me over and over again. “When I thought I was lost. My soul bruised and raw. When I worried I couldn’t go on without Armin, that I would never heal the wound of losing him. I saw you. I needed a ride.”
“And I gave it to you.”
“I loved you, Rian, at first sight. I just didn’t think I was going to be able to keep you.”
“Keep me, Mirth. Will you let me be yours? Will you let me be part of your bond group?”
“Yes.”
I surge up on my feet, taking her face in my hands and her lips with my mouth. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I pant between kisses. “I won’t falter again.”
She smooths her hands up and down my back, our roles reversed in the moment …
And that’s all a part of it, isn’t it? This give and take in a natural flow.
“The race,” she murmurs against my lips.
“Fuck,” I groan.
She laughs. The vestiges of that suffocating pain in my chest, that emotion clogging my throat and stopping up all my words, disperses. I’m light-headed, high on joy. High on Mirth.
14
MIRTH
“A plane!”Kitty gushes, grabbing Tommy’s arm and jumping in place at the end of the long kitchen counter. “We’re going on a plane!”
“I know,” her brother grumbles around a mouthful of the pancakes Christoph made us all for breakfast. “I’m right here.”
Kitty turns her dark-blue eyes on me where I’m filling the dishwasher. Even highlighted in the light streaming through the side windows of my apartments in London, not even a hint of purple hides in the depths of those eyes this morning. Her hair dances around her neck in perfectly defined curls, courtesy of Sully’s fabricator magic.
“Sully … um, Lord Savoy says we’re going to need snow boots and ski jackets.”
I nod. “The new clothes will be waiting for you at Waterfell Castle. And it’s okay to call us by our names when it’s just the family.”
