I curled onto my side and watched the sun sink below the gray stone wall. Keelynn hadn’t been back to tell me how her meetings went today. Maybe that was for the best. Seeing her joy only made my own melancholy harder to bear.
I hated that my own happiness was so wrapped up in someone else. Someone unreliable and unpredictable and downright maddening.
A knock sounded at the door. Probably Eava come to bring me some tea. I’d told her not to wait on me, yet she persisted. I sat up and pinned on a smile, back to pretending once more. “Come in.”
Rían, not Eava stepped inside, his eyes guarded as he drank me in. How handsome he looked in his black attire. How deliciously villainous.
His deep voice sent chills down my spine. “Get up.”
As if I would do what he said simply because he used a commanding tone. I settled back against my pillows and folded my arms. I would get up when I was good and ready and not a moment before. “I’d rather not.”
His eyes made one unmistakable pass down the thin white shift I wore before returning to mine. “I said, get out of the bed.”
“Lose the tone and I’ll consider it.”
He squeezed the back of his neck, the veins in his forehead bulging. “If your arse isn’t off that mattress in the next three seconds, I’m not teaching you to glamour yourself.”
I could ignore the tone this once. Hope sparked in my chest as I kicked the covers to the side and stepped out of the bed. Then I remembered that the last time he’d promised to help, he’d bound my magic. If he thought he could do so a second time, he had another thing coming.
Rían’s jaw pulsed when his gaze landed on the silky hem that didn’t quite reach my knees. “Where did you get that shift?”
“I don’t see how that’s any of your business.”
The harsh breath he expelled through his nose sounded a lot like victory for me. “Fine. Don’t tell me.”
Fine. I wouldn’t. “What do I need to do?”
“First, you need to get dressed.”
His eyes tracked my hand as I smoothed my palm down my silk-clad waist. “But this is so comfortable.”
With a flick of his wrist, I was no longer in the shift but in a dowdy blue dress big enough to fit two of me. As if I wanted to wearhiscolor. I lifted the thing over my head and let it fall to the ground. In the back of my armoire, I found one of the dresses I used to garden in and pulled that on instead.
Sufficiently covered, I offered the irritating prince a mocking curtsey. “I am dressed, Your Highness. What shall I do next? I am but your humble servant.”
Although he crossed his arms over his chest and scowled, I could have sworn I caught a smile playing on the edge of his lips. “Now who has a tone?”
He was so bloody obnoxious. It was a wonder I loved the man at all.
He held up a finger, and all I could think about was biting it off. That’d teach him not to point it in my face. “Before I teach you a thing, know this: I will not release you from our bargain until you can hold a glamour through a feckin’ hurricane. If you can’t, I will chain you up until the wedding is over.”
I wouldn’t put it past him to do it either. “How do I know you’re not lying? That you’re not going to bind my magic again?”
He shrugged like he didn’t care either way. “You’re going to have to trust me.”
What difference did it make if he did bind my magic? If I could learn to glamour myself, there was a chance he would release me from this infernal bargain. Otherwise, I could be stuck hiding in this castle for the rest of my days.
My magic began to hum when he stepped nearer. This would work. It had to. I refused to watch my sister marry Tadhg from the other side of a window. I wanted to be right by her side, where I belonged. Where I should have been all along.
“We’ll work on your body first, and then your face,” Rían said. “You’ll want to alter your most recognizable features. Maybe go with smaller breasts and leaner hips. Think of someone with those attributes.”
Almost everyone from my circle back in Graystones had smaller breasts and leaner bloody hips. I thought of Lady Luisa Miller. I’d always been jealous of her statuesque frame. “I have someone.”
“Good. Take my hand.” My palm slid against his; heat flared from the contact, and my heart began to thump harder in my chest. “Now close your eyes.”
I cast him a wary glance. “Don’t bind my magic.”
His mouth flattened. “I won’t.”