I stared gratefully into her eyes and gave myself a long moment to do it.
Then I whispered, “Thank you,” and she smiled and that smile lit her whole face.
All of it.
Even her eyes.
Not fake.
She liked me!
They all did.
Hurrah!
I smiled at all of them and then rushed out of the room, balancing the cake as I went thinking joyous thoughts that maybe, just maybe, I was finally going to be really happy in this fairytale world.
About ten seconds later, however, I was cursing how far away our rooms were (because, seriously, it was a trek) when I made it there only to find the candles lit all around the room but there was no Tor to be found.
I checked all the rooms (his bathroom, my bathroom, his dressing room, my dressing room, his sitting room, you get the picture), he wasn’t anywhere.
Shit!
Was I supposed to go somewhere else?
I stood by the bed and tried to think of where I might have to go and it hit me that the balcony off his study faced the city proper, not the sea like the one off our rooms did. Maybe I was supposed to go there.
Holding the cake carefully, I lifted my skirts in one hand and ran to his study as fast as I could without dropping the cake.
When I got there, the double doors were mostly closed, one open an inch. I turned and put my booty in it to open it (I’d have to light the candles later, so much for my big reveal, I didn’t have the time) and stopped dead when I heard Algernon’s voice.
“I apologize for calling you out at this hour but with her performance today…” he paused, “Well, as you know, the men are talking. She’s not herself. So not herself, it’s strange.”
And Tor’s answer made my entire body lock.
“She says she’s from a different world.”
Uh…
What?
I said I was from a different world?
He didn’t believe me?
I thought he’d come to believe me.
I heard Algernon’s sharp bark of surprised laughter before he asked, “A different world?”
“Yes. A different world,” Tor replied. “Gods, it’s unbelievable. She lives it and breathes it. She’s even created words to go with it. She tells me extraordinary stories of the make-believe architecture and fantastical gadgets they have in her world.” He paused and my dazed brain imagined him shaking his handsome head in disgust at the same time it hazily recalled the many nights over dinner or when we were in bed when I’d tell him stories of my world and all the things in it when he went on, “I must admit, it’s stunning how clever she is, how sharp her mind. She’s astonishingly imaginative and she never forgets a word of it. She has to be making it up as she goes along but every lie she tells, she remembers and uses it again.”
Every lie I tell?
“How bizarre,” Algernon muttered.
“It’s remarkable,” Tor said with what, if I wasn’t about to melt into a puddle of steaming heartbreak, I would have noted was clear respect.
“So she’s playing you?