I spin and let go of the very uncomfortable Lady Nuala so I can face the group fully. “All three of you, of course.” I lean forward and whisper. “Truly, I won’t hold tonight’s unfortunate mistake against you. I’m not that sort.”
Lady Nuala dips another shallow curtsy and murmurs something I can’t quite understand. Both Lady Nuala and Lady Giselle were in that group of bullies who surrounded me when Lady Cyn warned me away from the King over a year ago. I don’t deny the satisfaction of revenging myself publicly for their cowardly private intimidation.
“You must tell me,” Lady Cyn says, and I hear hesitation in her voice, “what this…thing is that you’re doing here.” She gestures vaguely—faking disinterest—at the sparkles on my lips.
“Isn’t it glorious?” I say, preening shamelessly. “His Majesty has always been attracted to things that glitter.”
“I see. Well, don’t worry,” she says, her smile hard. “You’ll acquire real jewels soon, I’m sure. Wouldn’t want our Queen to appear as though she came from nowhere, would we?”
“I don’t know about that,” I say, scorning her weak verbal assault. “His Majesty was so enraptured by my mouth that he…said so specifically.”
A well-timed pause is sometimes the sharpest of weapons. Lady Cyn’s jaw literally drops, and I congratulate myself on shattering her careful self-control. I bring Molli and Lord Aaron back to my sides as I turn away from their group and make as if to continue our stroll.
After two steps I pause and look back over my shoulder, my companions accommodating me brilliantly, as though we’d planned the encounter to the smallest detail. I tip my head coquettishly. “I’ve had the lipstick specially made, so the Society people can have no objection. I suspect it will soon be all the rage. I’ll have some samples to share at my party—I’m certain you’ll want to be in on the latest fashion.”
“Of course,” Lady Cyn says, her lips thin.
“And we all want to please our King, don’t we?”
TO CALL ME homely when I was fourteen would have been a compliment. I’d grown so quickly I could scarcely put one foot in front of the other without falling to my knobby knees. Add to that my rather unsightly case of acne and a nose that already strained the word dignified, and I was the epitome of the woes of puberty.
I was normal.
Which would have been fine if my father hadn’t just inherited his position at court. Suddenly, the possibility of not merely a good marriage, but a grand or even royal one, turned my mother into a person I’d never known. Before my coming out, she took me to several dentists, surgeons, and dermatologists in Paris. She also secretly enrolled me in private lessons with Giovanni di Parma. An instructor of prima ballerinas, he was skeptical but intrigued when my mother approached him to teach me, essentially, Elegance: The Advanced Course.
But it ended up being so much more than that. He taught me what my newfound beauty and grace were. And what they weren’t.
“These are your tools,” he said to me one day after I broke down and told him the whole plot. “Your mother can’t use them if you do not allow her to. She can force you to appear a certain way, to acquire these graces and skills, but if the desire to entrap this King doesn’t come from within, it will provoke a passing base instinct in him, no more.”
And he was right. I looked the way my mother expected, carried myself with the grace and poise Giovanni had given me, but though my mother threw me in the King’s path at every opportunity, I never endeavored to win him. And he hardly noticed me.
Until that night when he had no choice.
Since then, the false perfection my mother bought me, the trained grace worked into me so strenuously that it appears utterly natural, have become my armor. As the King’s affianced, I’ve been prematurely thrust into an arena of social predators, and it’s helpful that, between my height and my carefully learned poise, I do seem older. The truth is that the court of King Wyndham trades mainly in favor, esteem, and beauty. All of which I have in abundance, thanks to my sociopathic mother, who thinks I’m her lever. I hate it as much as I depend on it, and if I’m honest, I often wish I were bucktoothed and awkward again.
It’s precisely ten to three when we arrive at a lovely building in the Rue de la Garenne. The words Giovanni’s School of Ballet for Fine Entertainment are etched, in French, into a marble fa?ade, and the sight brings to the surface emotions I’ve been stifling for months.
A security troll, surely assigned by the King to spy on me, opens the car door and extends a hand. Giovanni himself awaits at the entrance—a lean man with a typical dancer’s build, three centimeters shorter than me. He flashes a smile before bowing formally and kissing my gloved fingertips.
I glance at my chaperon. “Knock to fetch me back at four. Not a minute sooner, or later.” Without waiting for a response, I precede Giovanni into the studio.
Pretense collapses with the closing of the door.
“Darling!” Giovanni cries.