The words were a blow to the gut.
Someone had kidnapped Helene? She would not have thought that possible. Helene d’Tierrza was not a woman who was easily taken.
But then again, Jenna hadn’t been, either.
“Zayn, you can’t really fire her. You were busy. If I’m not mistaken, her contract stipulates that your guard staff is sufficient in such instances—”
Surprised, the king’s natural abruptness escaped in his reply to the duke. “There are more pressing matters at hand. We’re meeting in my office to strategize a plan. Be there as quickly as you can be.”
If it was odd that the playboy duke knew about her contract stipulations and was being invited to a war council on what to do to rescue her partner and best friend, it was nothing compared to the devastation that the king was not inviting her.
With a final sad glance her way, the king did a rare thing and repeated himself. “We looked for you.” And then he turned and left, and it was once again just Jenna and the duke in the not-so-private library alcove.
“Jenna, I—” the duke started. She forestalled him with her own raised palm.
Sebastian, she thought, recalling the name the king had used. The Duke of Redcliff’s first name was Sebastian.
Shaking her head, she said, her voice thick with the knot in her throat from her whole world falling apart, “Helene.”
The name was all she could get past that knot, and even that came out as a croak.
His emerald eyes locking on hers one final time, he nodded, his Adam’s apple moving as he swallowed whatever it was he wanted to say.
She didn’t want to hear it. Whatever it was, it wasn’t as crucial as Helene.
He had asked her to come to the library. The least he could do was help save her friend, whatever strange role there was in that for a Casanova.
And she would go home. There was nowhere else to go. In the dusty old library, she had burned her life to ashes.
Nothing would ever be the same.
Stepping close one last time, he kissed her on the forehead between her eyebrows. The impression of his lips branded her as surely as any scarlet letter. There was no apology in the motion.
Watching him go, the bits of everything she’d built ashes in his wake, she pondered the reality that she—steadfast, trustworthy, dependable, never-make-a-fuss Jenna—had proven every cautious mother of the world right today.
She had torched her reputation, lost her calling and home, and lost both of her best friends—one literally—in one fell swoop.
Nothing in her life would ever be the same, and it wasn’t even five o’clock.