Her tone was glib, but her words had a hard, disillusioned edge. He walked to where she stood and poured a generous amount of whiskey into her glass. “We must drown your devastation.”
“Strong spirits only give Cinderella a hangover to go with her heartache,” she said, even as she took a swallow of the whiskey. “It makes her terribly cross in the kitchen.”
“I thought Cinderella was always gentle and kind and uncomplaining.”
“Do you know why?” She looked up at him, her voice suddenly heated. “It’s because these tales have been written by men, men who have never spent so much as an hour in the kitchen. The real Cinderella curses, smokes, and drinks a bit too much. Her feet hurt. Her back hurts. And she’s resentful. She would like her pumpkin coach to run over the Wicked Stepmother. And Prince Toad too, if possible.”
Her fury kindled a flame in him. He wanted to grab her and kiss her anger, her vehemence. He made himself move a few steps away. “Does she now?”
Her lips bent in girlish rue. She ran a finger down the side of her glass. “Did I ruin the fairy tale for you?”
“Hardly. The fairy tale was ruined for me well before you came along.”
“Oh? How so?” She cocked her head, her eyes wide with interest, her own rage momentarily forgotten.
“The prince. A problematic character, don’t you think? He always marries the most beautiful girl—Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White. And of course he also inherits the castle and the kingdom. Makes you wonder what he has ever done to deserve such good fortune, except for having been born to the queen.”
Now he was the one who said too much. And he never said too much.
She heard it, the undercurrent of resentment in his words—her eyebrows raised. But she did not dig in that direction. “No wonder he turns into such a toad.”
He exhaled in relief and raised his glass. “A toast to you, for having escaped your prince’s amphibian clutch.”
She regarded him, her eyes a clarity of infinite depth, so beautiful it hurt. Then she smiled, a smile at once despondent and hopeful. “A toast.”
She poured the contents of the glass down her throat. Cinderella indeed drank a little too much. He was wary of overimbibing, either in a woman or in a man. But he’d build a distillery with his own hands and put it at her disposal if it were the only way to get her to smile again.
In the silence that followed, he belatedly remembered that he was supposed to get her a hack and send her home. He wished his man, Durbin, were around. So he could instruct Durbin to take his time—much time—before returning with the cab.
“Tell me a little of yourself, if you would,” she said, not quite tipsy yet.
He should tense again. Such requests from women always put him on guard, because they invariably led, however circuitously, to questions about his childhood. He suspected that more than once he’d been seduced not for his looks or accomplishments, but because he’d once lived in a slum.
The women had all but begged for sordid anecdotes. Tell me about pub fights. About shagging easy women in back alleys. Treat me as you would treat one of them. They hungrily lapped up what aura of threat they perceived in him to appease the tedium of their existence, never mind that he’d been too young to shag anyone and never fought for the fun of it.
He didn’t tense. He only took a sip of his whiskey. She didn’t need him to tell her about the seedier side of life. “What would you like to know?”
She thought about it. “You seem to think you are not a prince. Then who are you?”
She was not asking for his name, but his story. If she was Cinderella, then who was he?
Just behind her on the bookshelves were all twelve volumes of Galland’s Les Mille et Une Nuits. “Aladdin,” he said.
“Aladdin,” she said, her expression meditative. “A young man of humble origin who comes into control of a powerful djinn, who grants him riches and a beautiful, highborn wife.”
“You can never control a powerful djinn,” he said.
“No?”
“For every wish he grants you, he takes away something you love.”
“What did you wish for?” she asked, naturally enough.
He could make something up, something fanciful and far from the truth. “A father,” he said.
Her grip tightened around her empty glass. “And what did you have to give up?”
“My mother.”
He wondered if the pain in her eyes was but a reflection of his own. Her face lowered. “My mother died when I was six. I miss her still.”
“If she looked anything like you, she must have been very beautiful,” he said impulsively.
Her eyes met his again, her aquamarine gaze a mixture of pleasure and wariness. “She was beautiful. But I don’t think I am.”
“Well, you are very much mistaken in that.”