Page 21 of Will You (Not) Marry Me

She was starting to shut herself off again, and desperate to keep the conversation going, Finn mentally dug his heels in.

“And New York?”

The tiny spark of a smile flickered back to life as he mentioned the city, and Eva reached out to her laptop and selected another photo to start editing while they talked, fingers flying over the keys.

“Did you like it, then? New York. I’ve never been.”

“I loved it,” she said tenderly.

“Tell me about it.”

She looked at him properly this time, away from her computer and her bitten-down fingernails. She looked up at him like she was trying to figure out if he was making fun of her or not. Which was odd considering how she’d treated him ever since they’d met.

But this whole situation was odd. It was like she was hiding something deep down, and if this was the first step of her coming out of hiding, then Finn was willing to let go of any possible grudges and continue to be kind. So he stayed silent and held her gaze as gently as he could while she decided whether or not to trust him.

“It gets just as cold there,” she said haltingly as if still waiting for him to laugh in her face. But he didn’t; he silently vowed not to, ever. And maybe Eva sensed that because she took a deep breath and continued talking. “But it’s a different sort of cold. It’s all dirt and smog and garbage. There are people everywhere and noise all the time. It’s absolute chaos twenty-four-seven. There are rude people and creepy men and insane people, and you get used to all of it to the point where you don’t even notice it anymore. And I love it. All the craziness. It’s like living in one of those white noise machines. Strangely comforting.”

She drifted off again, turning her attention to her photographs. Finn watched as she adjusted more settings, bringing the image to life on the screen.

“It must be maddeningly quiet here for you, then,” he said, starting to maybe understand why she fidgeted so much.

She shrugged. “It’s not so bad, the quiet. It’s nice to have a break. But long term… yeah, I think I was happier in such a busy place.”

Questions started to poke about in Finn’s brain. If she was so much happier in New York, then why come back to Europe? The questions itched at him, but he shoved them away, for now at least. She was having a conversation with him. A real conversation, and he was desperate not to screw it up.

“When did you start liking photography, then?” he asked.

“When I was twelve,” she said with her widest smile yet. A beautiful smile. “My uncle gave me a camera as a gift, and I fell in love with it. I practiced whenever I could until I went to New York to study…”

Once again, her sentence trailed off into nothing, sounding sad. Before Finn could ask anything else, she snapped her laptop shut with a definitive click, scraping her chair back.

“I need to plug this in to charge,” she said, giving him a tight smile before wandering off to her room.

Finn sat back in his chair with a huff.

Well. That was unexpected. It was like she’d transformed into a different person. Maybe she was secretly a twin and they’d switched places or something. At this point he wouldn’t be surprised. Otherwise, why the split personality? Didn’t most people pretend to be good and kind when they actually weren’t, and not the other way around?

The most unexpected part of it all was that Finn found himselflikingthis new version of Eva. This intelligent, creative, talented woman she’d been hiding beneath that irritating, unapproachable mask.

He sighed, fiddling with a pen he’d left on the table. Now he was even more confused than before. Because if the version of Eva he’d just met was what she was really like deep down, then maybe she wasn’t so bad after all.

CHAPTER10

EVA

Eva barely slept that night, unable to get comfortable as her brain whirred through thought after thought. It had been a mistake to show Finn her photos, to have that conversation with him. Not that it had been a bad conversation—it had been lovely, and Finn had seemed so kind and curious, not hiding behind that stuffy royal persona he had up the rest of the time. But that was exactly why it had been a mistake. Because her plan to chase him away by being a terror of a human had gone off the rails.

Why was she being nice to him? And why was he being nice to her? They couldn’t just startbonding. Bonding wasn’t part of the plan. Bonding was precisely the opposite of the plan. Not that the plan was going all that well anyways. She had to admit that. In the last couple of days, Finn had seemed to cotton on that she was up tosomething. Even if he didn’t know what that something was. He’d been entirely, annoyingly unflappable.

Eva sighed and scrubbed her hands over her face. He was just so…pleasant. That was the other problem that had reared up unexpectedly. How good of a person he was.

She was unable to just keep staring up at the ceiling and her mouth was dry as sand, the sort of dry you only get during a sleepless night. She sighed again and kicked the covers off, untangling herself from the bedding. The cool night air hit her bare feet and she shivered from head to toe. But she’d go outside right now in the dark and dunk her head in the snow if it meant it would snap her out of this funk. If she was back in New York and a bout of insomnia had hit her, she’d be sitting up in the living room, watching old movies on the couch, if not asleep then at least comfortable.

Laying here restless in bed was just another reminder of how far from home she really was.

Not bothering to get dressed, she wandered out of her room still in her pajamas: a band T-shirt she’d had forever, plus a hoodie and sweatpants. Her mother had bought her matching satin sets, which Eva had left at the palace. She wasn’t intending to do any fashion catwalks in her sleepwear, not to mention it was winter. Heaven forbid she’d rather be warm than fashionable.

Maybe it wasn’t such a stupid idea to go out and dunk her head in the snowdrifts. She needed something to get rid of this foul mood. She didn’t want to be thinking about past arguments with her mother. How useless.

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