Total pages in book: 47
Estimated words: 44703 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 224(@200wpm)___ 179(@250wpm)___ 149(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 44703 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 224(@200wpm)___ 179(@250wpm)___ 149(@300wpm)
Something that looks almost like—
No.
I go back to the delegate list.
But my skin is warm again. That sunlight-patch feeling. And my heartbeat is doing its aware thing, its paying-attention thing, and I’m having an extremely firm conversation with myself about how a man like him doesn’t just lose his composure because a twenty-two-year-old human in borrowed heels happens to be sitting across from him.
He wasn’t staring at me.
He was looking in my general direction while thinking about trade policy or Atlantean politics or whatever it is that princes think about.
That’s all.
That is all.
Except.
Twenty minutes later, I glance up again, and his eyes are on me again. And this time, he doesn’t look away immediately. This time, there’s a beat, half a second, maybe less, where our gazes hold, and the air does something that air should not be able to do.
It thickens.
Like the molecules themselves are conspiring against me, rearranging into something heavier, warmer, harder to breathe. And in that half-second, the pull I’ve been fighting since I sat down goes from undertow to riptide, and I can feel it in my stomach, in my throat, in the space behind my ribs.
Then he looks down, and the moment passes, and I’m left sitting there wondering if I’m losing my mind.
Because this is what heartbreak does.
Right?
This is what happens when someone breaks your heart and you spend seven months putting yourself back together with duct tape and determination and an aggressive reading habit. The cracks don’t actually heal. They just...wait. And then your body decides to develop a fixation on the most unattainable man on the planet, because apparently my survival instincts have the self-preservation skills of a lemming with a death wish.
It’s not real. It’s the emotional equivalent of a phantom limb, my heart grasping at sensation because the alternative is the numbness I’ve been living in since Billy’s text. Four sentences. No apology. Seven months ago, and I’m apparently still so broken that sitting across from a beautiful man on a plane makes me invent chemistry out of thin air.
And that’s what this is.
Invention.
Fiction.
Because the alternative, the idea that something real and mutual and terrifying is humming in the space between me and the Prince of Atlantis, is so far beyond the realm of possibility that entertaining it would require a level of delusion I’m not currently capable of.
I steal one more look at him, because apparently I’m a glutton for punishment.
He’s reading again. His profile is sharp against the oval window, backlit by clouds, and the light catches the blue-black sheen of his hair and he looks like something out of a painting. Not a modern painting. Something old. Something from a time when artists believed beauty was evidence of divinity.
He doesn’t look up.
See?
Fiction.
It’s not real, Zia.
It can’t be.
RUBY RETURNS TO BRIEF us on arrival logistics, and her presence breaks the strange, charged atmosphere of the cabin like a window opening in a stuffy room. I breathe easier. I focus on her words. I take notes. I am poised and attentive and fine.
Ruby finishes and retreats again, and then it’s just us, and the descent has begun, and I can feel the plane losing altitude in the slight pressure against my ears.
I’m putting my notes into the shared file when I realize I’ve been staring at the same page for three minutes without saving it. I tap save, and the tablet makes a small chime, and I look up to check if the sound disturbed him.
He’s not reading.
His screen is on the table, face down. His body is angled toward me. Not fully, not obviously, but enough that I can feel the shift in his attention like a change in air pressure.
And he’s looking at me.
Not a glance this time. Not a stolen moment that could be explained away as coincidence. He is watching me with those pale, unreadable eyes, and there is nothing casual about it.
My breath catches.
“Your Highness?”
It comes out barely above a whisper. I don’t mean for it to. I mean for it to be brisk and slightly confused, the appropriate response of an employee who has noticed her employer looking at her. But my voice apparently has other plans.
He doesn’t answer. Not with words.
Instead, he leans forward.
Just slightly. Just enough that the distance shrinks from professional to something else. It makes my blood rush and my thoughts scatter and every sensible instinct I have scream at me to lean back, look away, break whatever is happening right now before it becomes something I can’t undo.
But I don’t lean back.
I don’t look away.
Because his eyes are on mine, and they’re not unreadable anymore. For the first time, I can see what’s in them, vast and deep and barely contained, like looking down into dark water and realizing it goes much, much further than you thought.
His gaze drops to my mouth.