Page 36 of The Dandelion Princess
I glance up, and his gaze holds mine. I blink and it shifts from my eyes to my lips. It’s a tiny movement, over in a microsecond, but my stomach takes a sudden dip and my reflexes slow to a crawl.
I told myself that Clara was wrong about Marc noticing me because I have never seen a speck of interest from this man I’ve watched with all the passionate absorption of an engineer with his battle robot.
Until this second.
His soft fingers trace down my spine and stop at my waist. My pulse leaps in my throat and I feel like a lost motorist, caught in a fog with no maps or familiar signposts to chart my course, my phone uselessly pinging out a cell signal.How do we get out of here?
He inhales suddenly and his hands lift away. He rubs the back of his neck. “See you next week?” he asks.
But I’m still lost in the fog. What just happened? “Next week?”
“Alix’s party,” he says, looking over me, around me, above me. “The camping thing.”
“Glamping,” I say, taking refuge in a laugh.
When he retrieves his jacket, I shake my hands out in an attempt to get the circulation going. The old, dead crush was firmly one-sided, but this is… I don’t know. I don’t know anything.
He straightens, tipping his chin up with a smile that draws me under a cloak of normalcy, warm and protective. “She says she wants to celebrate Tom’s traditional culture.”
“Finance bro?”
“Pennsylvania Boy Scout. But you know Alix. She can’t resist personally-branded sparkling water chilling in an antique bird bath, so...” He pins me with a look. “Are we good?”
I try for lightness, but my pulse still hasn’t settled. “We’re good. When I see you next time, I promise not to be such a brat.”
He grins, walking backward to the door as he shrugs his jacket on. “Don’t overshoot the runway.”
I don’t sleep. I lay in my bed, wondering if I imagined Marc’s eyes drifting toward my lips. When the night is darkest, I remember that Marc’s first instinct after that infinitesimal lapse in absolute moral rectitude was to ignore it and run like hell.
It’s a brutal reminder that I have to get over him. Someday soon, I’m going to get on one of those apps and keep swiping until I find someone to make out with me. Someone who holds me by the waist and keeps on holding.
I rise the next morning, a squished bean of exhaustion, determined to face the music. I stand, hesitating, on the threshold of the breakfast room, when I hear a voice.
“Looking for Mama?” Alma asks. I emit a tiny squeak, but she breezes past me to the sideboard. “She’s absorbing the news that I am no longer a scarlet woman in the press. I wouldn’t put it past her to launch an investigation into the identity of our leaker.”
Mama has little use for me on the best of days, but if she found out my online identity, a swift murder would be mercy. I place my laptop on the table and return with a cup of coffee, a dish of fruit, and Pankedruss.
“Are you mad?” I ask. Better rip the sticking plaster off at once.
“Yes.” It’s all the more devastating that she says it so plainly. I think I’d rather be screamed at or wrestled with. She reaches for a stack of newspapers, and I see a little nervous hitch in her throat. “Shall we see how bad it is?”
I’ve already seen the digital edition of PAPZ. The online tabloid placed the most lurid photo on the top of their homepage and cheerfully reproduced the entire @trashpandaprincess post from ReadHe. The headline read “SON OF A BEACH!”
Alma pushes each newspaper across the table as she finishes them.The Holy Pelicanreprinted a timeline of events, though it’s sequestered on their social pages where it can’t infect the real news.The Daily Missiveproclaims, “Handsy Hereditary Himmelsteinian Hooks Humanitarian Hottie in Hinterlands”.
The prime minister has weighed in, expressing sympathy on one hand while making a deadly knife thrust with the other. “Though our hearts go out to Her Royal Highness, it makes one uneasy to consider the extent to which the palace successfully hid key details from the public during an important state event. The implications of such control...”
My lip curls. “He’s such an eel—”
Alma bends over her phone, tapping out a message. Texting Jacob. I can tell by the little smile playing around the edges of her mouth.
“Alma,” I prod.
She clears her throat, turns her phone over, then scoots it far out of temptation. “I’m ready.”
“I didn’t expect things to blow up—” I begin.
Her brow lifts. “No. You were angry at the prime minister, you reached for a weapon, and you didn’t care who might be hurt.”
