Page 87 of The Court of Venus

I didn’t see, not until he reached over and brushed his thumb across my cheek.

What was magic for, if not this? He didn’t need words to tell me what he felt.

His calloused hand warming my skin, his steady gaze leaning ever closer, I began to cry. With love. With fear. I wanted to save him—I wanted him to marry the Bastian princess to secure his father’s alliance. I wanted him to have gray-eyed sons. I wanted him to stay far away from me.

But he was moving closer. His mouth was already parted. I closed my eyes and let my doom come for me.

When our lips touched, we both shuddered. One of Hal’s hands wound into my loose hair, the other still resting softly against my cheek. We pulled back and smiled at each other, then leaned in once more. He was more intent, boyishly eager this time. He bit down gently on my bottom lip and tugged. I sighed at how good it felt, and nearly asked him if he would mind doing it again.

“Do you know—” he said, kissing his way across my jaw, “what I’m feeling now?”

Yes. I did. He was deliriously, miraculously happy.

His stubble rubbed my cheeks and lips raw. I was flipped onto my back. He stared down at me, shook his head, then kissed me again and again. As our tongues met, as the kisses deepened, his hand slid up my thigh and stalled.

I dragged it higher.

We were both panting, flushed, in slight disbelief. “I should stop,” he said. “Now.”

I wiggled beneath him, and his laugh became a groan. I felt something in him wrench and twist.

He rolled off me, brushing twigs from his doublet, and lunged for a branch he’d noticed on the ground. As I touched my lips, he threw it as far as he could, shouting at nothing. No one answered, not even the birds. We were alone here. There was no court to judge us.

“What are you doing?” I called. “Come back.”

He knelt before me, graver than I’d ever seen him. “Meet me tonight.”

I traced his lips until he smiled and bit down on my finger. “When?”

“Whenever you can. Whenever Prospero is to bed. In my father’s private chapel.”

I shook my head no as the understanding dawned.

“Why not?” Hal swore under his breath. “Why can’t I decide this for myself?”

“Whatever you may have decided, my answer is still no.” I was firm this time, pulling my finger from his mouth. “They won’t allow this. And if we did it under their noses, and they had no choice but to agree to it, in twenty years, when you’re king and have no heir, and they all hate me and whisper as I pass, you’ll regret it. And I’ll have to endure that hatred. They’ll say I tricked you. They’ll say I bewitched you, that I sunk my teeth in your mind.”

“My parents had a love match.” He had said the very same to Prospero.

He was defiant in his opinion that people were fundamentally good. I knew better. “I won’t subject you to me.”

He scoffed.

“We can meet in corners. Hidden places. You marry the Bastian princess, as was agreed. You have your sons.”

“You think you deserve such a life? Has someone made you feel you deserve that?”

I turned away from him. I was angry, suddenly, at what this had turned into. Because he’d been sighing into my neck only moments before, and the idea of standing before his court and sensing their disapproval was nothing like that pleasure.

“You do not have to be so honorable,” I whispered.

“I can be dishonorable.” He sighed and took my face in his hands again. “If that’s truly what you want.”

As he kissed me, I imagined a future. His father’s chapel, the marble altar with a blue cloth laid across it, the silver carafe and goblets. Us kneeling, side by side. Lowering our foreheads to the stone, and then silently, in the candlelight, praying. I didn’t know what he would pray for—but I knew I would pray, over and over, that he would not come to hate me for this. We would twine our hands together, lower our foreheads so they met above where our hands were clasped. Hal would initiate the vows; I would repeat after him. I will, I will, I will. Under heaven. Under the seven planets. Until the day I die.

“Bianca, Princess of Alvion,” he would say, lowering the crown onto my head. The weight so crushing, my neck would snap.

I had waited for Roland by the fire all night, poking it to keep it alive until dawn. When he finally stumbled into our apartments, he’d taken one look at me and shut himself in his bedchamber.