Devrim puts his warm lips against my ear. “How about I start by getting to know the people who care about her?”
Delicious sensations race through my body, and I stare at his mouth as we move around the dance floor. If Aubrey hadn’t come home, I would have given this man everything. The terrifying thing is, I still want to.
My heel snags against the floor, and I stumble, but he catches me and holds me closer. “You needn’t hold me so tightly. I’m fine.”
“I’m not.”
I look up into his eyes, which are dark and sensuous.
“I still need your help.”
The warm vibrations of his voice shiver through me. There’s an enormous room and dozens of people around me, but all I’m aware of is this man in his scarlet uniform, and the possessive grip his hands have on my body.
“Have you tried therapy?”
“It’s not that sort of help.”
“Find someone else to have sex with.”
“It’s not that, either,” he says tightly.
His green and tawny eyes tell a different story. It is that, and it’s a sort of therapy, but it’s something more, too. We want to confide in each other. Share our horrible pasts and comfort each other with words and touches. Despair passes through me, because if he knew how I really came to be here, he’d throw me out of here so fast my feet wouldn’t touch the ground.
“I wish we could just sit and talk. I wish we could….do that as well,” I whisper. “But we can’t. Besides, there’s nowhere for us to meet. Not your home and not mine.”
I wasn’t presenting him with a problem to solve, but he immediately suggests, “A hotel.”
I saw the sort of thing when I was a chambermaid at Hotel Ivera. Rooms being booked by the same man, at the same time, every week. Just one name on the booking, but when I’d go to clean it, there’d be empty bottles of champagne and plates of room service for two. The bed would be disheveled, and I’d sometimes find black or red lingerie discarded between the sheets.
“You want to meet up with me in a hotel? Like a mistress?”
He glances around, quickly, to make sure the other dancers aren’t too close. “I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you.”
I stop dancing and look at him. Really look at him. His uniform. The medals on his chest. His air of belonging and prestige. Under his protection, I could have anything I wanted. Mama’s dream could come true.
“I’d be your dirty secret,” I say, keeping my voice level. “And when the secret leaked out, I’d be laughed at behind your back, and people would gossip about me. Your wife would ridicule me publicly because she’ll be humiliated as well, because you will marry. Is that what you’re suggesting?”
“I could protect you from all that.”
“No, you’d be protected. No one would dare make you feel small, and no one could. But I would. I’d feel so small that I’d wish I were a chambermaid again.”
I pick up my skirts and walk as fast as I can off the dancefloor, dodging around whirling couples. I don’t know if he tries to follow me, because I don’t look back. I’m too busy trying to keep my face from crumbling into tears. I make it to the corridor that leads to the restrooms and hurry down it, making a left turn instead of a right at the end, and hide behind a suit of armor.
A moment later, a gentle voice says, “Wraye?”
There’s a rustle of silk, and then someone presses a tissue into my hand. I see through blurry eyes that it’s Aubrey.
“You were just dancing with Daddy, weren’t you? Was he horrible to you? What did he say?”
I dab my face with the tissue and shake my head. “It’s not the Archduke. It’s this place. The Court. The real world isn’t like this. I’m so tired of pretending.”
She wraps her arms around me and draws me into a hug, and I let the misery wash over me. Aubrey’s tall like her father, and I rest my head on her shoulder.
“Court can be so cruel,” Aubrey says. “I just heard that Briar Balzac has been barred. I didn’t know her very well, but I liked her. So much friendlier than her cousins, Sachelle and Tamsen.”
Hasn’t Mama mentioned the Balzacs? I lift my head from Aubrey’s shoulder, frowning. “Is she the girl who’s illegitimate?”
“Yes, poor thing. She found out in the papers that her father isn’t her father, so she’s not one of us,” Aubrey says, with a disparaging wrinkle of her nose. “You know, noble birth. So unfair. She’s practically exiled from her family now, as well.”
How awful for Briar. This is probably the fault of the gossips at Court. “All Mama wants to talk about at home is who said what at Court. It makes me sick. What if it’s us people are gossiping about one day?”