side table hard enough that tea sloshed over the side.
Leo’s heart swelled to bursting. Was this love, then? When even a bit of temper—so obviously just a kneejerk reaction to Linnea’s fears—made Leo want to wrap her up and fix things for her?
God help him when he and Eddie ever started a family of their own some day. He would be wrapped around their childrens’ fingers in a heartbeat.
“I was not happy, Linnie,” Astrid said, her eyes and the tips of her nose turning red as her lip started to tremble. “Eddie can hover. I’m okay with him hovering. If he… if he comes back, he can hover some more. He’s so g-g-good at it.”
“I know,” Linnea said, slumping as the fight went out of her all at once. Oliver wrapped an arm around her shoulders as she added in a strained whisper, “Eddie’s the best at hovering.”
Astrid burst into full blown tears again, shoving her mug at Hugo and launching herself out of the chair, back at Leo.
“I’ve got you, little one,” Leo said, tucking her close. “And he does tend to hover a bit, doesn’t he?” he teased gently, suddenly understanding Eddie’s overprotective nature at a cellular level. “But only because he loves you.”
“I know,” Astrid said in a small voice that made her sound far younger and more vulnerable than her fifteen years.
“None of us didn’t want Eddie to be around this morning,” Tilde said, leaning into Oliver’s other side on the settee. He wrapped his free arm around her. “It’s just that he never does stuff just for himself. At least, not before you came along, Leo. And we all knew you guys have been sexting—”
“Tilde,” Linnea hissed, her cheeks going red as she leaned around Oliver to glare at her sister.
“They have, though,” Tilde said defensively. “We all heard it, Linnie.” She looked back at Leo. “So… so we just figured you convinced him to come spend the night.”
“Eddie would have told us,” Linnea insisted.
Tilde shook her head. “He couldn’t. His phone was dead.”
“If he’d come here, he would have called us from Leo’s phone.”
“How come you guys didn’t think of that this morning when we didn’t have a message from him?” Astrid asked, her lip trembling again. “You… you said he would be here.”
And now all the Bloms looked like they might cry.
They loved and appreciated Eddie, but Eddie was their guardian, and they chafed under his overprotectiveness as much as they counted on it. It was easy to see that their fear now was exaggerated because of the scars they all carried from losing their parents, but on a day-to-day basis—in the way of children everywhere, even grown ones like these—they tended to be more self-absorbed by their own lives than looking to worry about Eddie the way he did about them. And now… now they felt guilty.
“This isn’t your fault,” Leo said, eyeing each of them in turn.
“But… Eddie’s really not here?” Astrid asked in that small voice that just about killed him, tipping her face up to him before looking around the room again, like maybe she’d simply missed Eddie hiding behind the rack of ball gowns or behind the settee on the other side of the room.
“He’s not,” Leo said, keeping his voice steady even though the thought of Eddie missing would be unbearable if he let himself entertain the kind of possibilities and fears that were clearly playing out in the Bloms’ minds at the moment. Leo smoothed Astrid’s bangs back from her face, looking down into wet eyes the exact same colors as Eddie’s. “I will find him, sweetheart,” he promised again. “I’ll go now, and I’ll get him back here in time for the ball.”
“If I may, Your Highness,” Hugo said, reminding Leo of his unobtrusive but… fine, also reassuring presence.
Leo turned to him.
“If you’d allow me to be the one to fetch Master Edvin—”
“Fetch him?” Oliver cut in, leaning forward intently. “You know where he is, Hugo?”
Hugo’s eyes softened, an apologetic look on his face. “Your pardon, Master Oliver. I should have said ‘find’ him. Starting, of course, by checking the Royal Archives, and with, I’m certain, the full resources of the palace at my disposal to investigate—”
“I’ll find Eddie, Hugo,” Leo interrupted, bristling at the thought of anything else.
Hugo folded his hand behind his back. “The Royal Ball is an event with far-reaching diplomatic effects, and you have duties as such that can’t be ignored,” he said. And then, his voice softening, he added, “But