interaction with a man. As though she really had been raised by wolves and not just by a family who had a simpler lifestyle.
“You don’t know how to dance,” he said, answering his earlier question for her.
She shook her head, trying not to focus on the places where his hands were making contact. The way his fingers were laced through hers, the way his palm rested on her lower back. This didn’t feel as if she was going along with it simply to keep him sweet. This felt like something else. It was confusing. Terrifying.
It couldn’t happen.
Attraction had no place in any of this. It had no place in her life, not until she figured out what she wanted her life to look like. How could she even begin to answer that question until she got to know herself better? For some reason, standing in the center of this ballroom, held tightly in his arms, she was so acutely aware of how thin her life experiences had been until now. Every single thing was tied to her title. A title she had never been able to claim or use.
But oh, how she had suffered for it. The realization should feel...desolate. But for some reason, standing there in his arms, it was cushioned. Perhaps because someone was finally touching her. She finally felt connected. And so she asked him.
“Do you like my hair?” She couldn’t bring herself to look at his face in case she caught him in a lie.
“Yes,” he said, the answer slow, cautious. “Though I quite liked it before. There is something captivating about the wilder aspects you carry, I must confess.”
She couldn’t stop herself from looking up at him now. He was still holding her, neither of them moving. This was no way to conduct a dance lesson, and yet she found she wasn’t interested in discontinuing the conversation. “What do you like about my wildness?”
“You are fierce. You fight. I can’t help being compelled by that. You are everything you feel, rather than being what others should see. How can I not be intrigued by that?”
“Because you can only be what is acceptable?”
“Because I’m surrounded by people who behave themselves.” It was a deflection, she was aware. He didn’t deny her accusation, but he didn’t admit to it either. “It is refreshing to see someone who doesn’t.”
“You’ve only seen me here. I spent a great many years behaving myself by the standards of my surroundings.”
“Tell me,” he said, and then he started to move. Leading her in a dance that had no music.
She held tightly to him, trying to keep from stumbling. “Tell you about my life with the clan?”
“Yes. Tell me what it meant to behave there.”
“It’s hard to explain. They cared for me. But I wasn’t one of them.” Standing in the palace, in this dress, she suddenly realized it was true. “I lived among them, but I could never say that I was accepted. Sometimes I felt as though the leader and his wife might actually... Sometimes I thought they might see me as another child...but once they had children of their own, it became very clear that wasn’t the case.” She’d never spoken these words out loud before. Had hardly formed them in her mind. “They were surrogate caregivers. Not a family. They observed a kind of careful distance with me, and I was expected to do the same.”
“Then you didn’t spend your childhood running wild?”
A smile tugged to the corner of her lips. “I did. I had all the freedom a child could wish for. I spent a lot of time wandering through the forest on my own. Talking to myself. Talking to the trees.”
“Were you lonely?” he asked, and there was a strange edge to the question, a roughness that scraped against raw places inside her.
She swallowed, ignoring the discomfort inside her. “I don’t know how to answer that. It was my daily life. It was normal for me. I wasn’t aware of anything missing.”
It was this place, this man, that made her so aware of all she hadn’t had. Of the life she should have lived. Of the years she’d gone without being touched.
She and Andres weren’t even lovers and he touched her frequently. As though it were the most casual and easy thing.
He was touching her now. Holding her close. And she was forgetting what she was here to do. Forgetting her ultimate goal. That she was only playing along now so she could use his trust later.
Right now all she could focus on was this. The way his hands felt over the flimsy fabric of the dress. The way it felt when he said she was beautiful.
The way it felt to have a man look at her, not through her.
What did those things matter? What did beauty matter? It had never mattered before.
She looked away from him, trying to regain control of her thoughts. “What about you?”
“I did not wander through the woods,” he said.
There was something strange in his voice. She couldn’t quite place what it was. More of him not saying what he was thinking. “You weren’t lonely?”
“The palace is always full of people. And these days I do love a party.”
Just then, looking at him, at the stark, raw emotion that flickered in his eyes for just a moment, she was struck again by that thought she’d had about being defined by her station. Except she wondered if it had been the same for him. If he was more what his title was than who he was inside. If anyone valued him at all as a man, and not as a prince.
“That doesn’t matter. The camp was always crowded. There were always people. But I was never a part of them in the same way. Families, blood family, shared space. Caravans. Sometimes they would sleep altogether around the campfire. Family is the cornerstone of the clan. And I didn’t have one.”
“I had a family,” he said, his voice rough.
“Are your parents dead too?” It was a terribly inappropriate question, one she knew she shouldn’t have asked. Andres was very careful with his words. Sometimes he was direct, tactless, but that was by choice, never on accident. Other times he was careful to make a wide circle around the point, disguising it, wrapping it in something more palatable.
But she had been raised in an environment where words weren’t wasted. Where honesty, honor mattered.
Still, she regretted these words.
“My father is,” he said, his tone hard. “Not my mother. At least, not as far as I know.”
“She isn’t here.” It wasn’t a question.
“She hasn’t been. Not for years.”
“Where did she go?”
“I, my brother, my father, and all of our Secret Service don’t know the answer to that. When she disappeared, she disappeared. Not, I suspect, because she was so accomplished at subterfuge, but because she did what no one expected her to do.”
“What’s that?”
She expected him to stop their conversation, expected him to scold her for being too bold. Instead, a faint smile tipped the corners of his mouth upward. “I think she just walked away. With nothing but the clothes she was wearing.”
“Why?” Zara had imagined doing just that. But she hadn’t. Because she had no money, no identification, no skills, nothing. And yet, to hear Andres say it, it was what his mother had done.
“I suspect because it was all a bit too much for her.”
“Being royal?”
He stopped moving then, but he didn’t release his hold on her. “Perhaps.”
There was something beneath that answer, words that weren’t being spoken. He frustrated her. Made her want to pound on his chest until the truth came out. But she shouldn’t care. So she didn’t.
“Perhaps