Page 123 of American Royals
Daphne blinked, slowly waking. Through her windows the sky was a leaden gray, streaked with the first dim lights of dawn.
Next to her, his breaths soft and even, lay Ethan Beckett.
She sat up abruptly, hugging her creamy satin sheets to her chest as her room—her mistake—snapped into dizzying focus. Her dress lay in a disheveled mound of tulle on the floor, alongside the shoes she’d kicked off, and scattered pieces of Ethan’s tux: a reproachful trail of evidence, reminding her what they had done. Again.
Ethan stirred next to her, but stayed asleep. For a moment Daphne let her eyes drag over his form: his long torso, his muscled shoulders, the shadow of his lashes on his cheekbones. His hair curled at the nape of his neck. She remembered how, just hours ago, her hands had been tangled in that hair, her head tipped back as she swallowed a moan. Daphne winced at the memory.
If only she could rewind it all like an old-fashioned cassette tape, or better yet, yank the tape out altogether and punch a series of holes through it.
She didn’t understand the current of desire that pulsed between her and Ethan, in spite of what happened last time, or maybe because of it. Maybe what she and Ethan did together had forged some dark bond between them, as if they were heroes—or rather, antiheroes—who’d ventured together to the underworld, and now their fates were forever intertwined.
No. Whatever this was, Daphne had to break it off, now.
Ethan must have felt her eyes on him, because he blinked slowly awake. “Hey,” he murmured, with a yawning smile, and reached to pull Daphne back down toward him. She ducked from under his arm and scooted back.
She hated him for looking so sexy right now, warm and rumpled and creased with sleep.
“Ethan, you need to leave.”
He let out a breath and sat up. “Let’s at least talk about this.”
“There’s nothing to talk about.”
He shook his head defiantly, almost defensively. “Daphne, that’s twice now that you and I have thrown ourselves at each other. I’m not saying I know what it means, but don’t you think we owe it to ourselves to figure it out?”
“As far as I’m concerned, nothing happened. We’re going to put this behind us, just like we did before.”
Except that last time was much, much worse.
Ethan held her gaze steadily. “I can’t keep pretending that nothing has happened between us.”
“Nothing should have happened between us. We can’t do this to Jeff!” Daphne hissed, startled into calling him by his nickname for once.
“We’re not doing anything to Jeff,” Ethan argued. “Look, last time we had plenty reason to feel guilty. But this is completely different—you’re not dating him anymore. I refuse to act like this was some drunken mistake.”
The gray light had crept farther into the room, touching an old music box atop the high-topped vanity where Daphne’s jewelry gleamed. Thrown over the back of her desk chair was a delicate black scarf that Jefferson had given her, after she once mentioned that she wished she had one, for all the cocktail parties they attended in cold weather. That was the kind of boyfriend Jefferson had been. The type who remembered stray comments and acted on them. Or at least, who sent one of his family’s assistants to act on them.
“Jefferson is your best friend, and I dated him for almost three years. This …” Daphne gestured angrily around the room, indicating the rumpled sheets, the pieces of clothing scattered like debris in the aftermath of an explosion. “This has to stop.”
“You’re seriously telling me that last night meant nothing to you?”
He had her trapped. She couldn’t admit that it meant nothing. Not after she’d slept with him twice, when she’d never slept with Jefferson in all their years of dating. But she refused to be bullied into saying anything she might regret. She refused to verbalize feelings that she should never have had in the first place.
The silence stretched to breaking point. Ethan lifted an arm as if he was going to reach for her, then seemed to think better of it.
“You’re lying to yourself,” he told her. “Pretending that this is only physical, that it means nothing, when we both know that’s not true.”
For a split second, Daphne let herself imagine what it would feel like to say yes. To tell Ethan that she chose him. To fall back into the warm circle of his embrace, let him keep looking at her in that charged and magical way.
Their reflections glared at her from the mirror on her wall: Ethan staring at her with those glittering dark eyes, Daphne’s gaze darting back and forth with indecision. Both their figures were cast in a ghostly blue glow. It was coming from her phone, Daphne realized, which was blowing up with messages. She reached over to grab it off her side table.
Her home screen was covered in dozens of tiny bubbles. They were all alerts labeled BREAKING NEWS, their level of panic steadily increasing as the night had progressed.
His Majesty the King has been admitted to the ICU at St. Stephen’s Hospital ….
His Majesty is on life support, having suffered a coronary thrombosis. There is no current update on his condition. His family is with him at this time ….
The king, in the hospital?
