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“Oh, no you don’t,” she whispered fiercely. “You just lie there and don’t move, Nick Tanaka, or I might just forget you’re injured and smack you.”

He watched her wipe her eyes,

He watched again, bewildered, when they grew overly bright a second time.

“Just don’t move,” she scolded, still in that vampire-soft, lower-than-a-whisper voice. “Don’t do anything. Close your eyes.”

“I can’t believe you’re yelling at him right now,” a different voice muttered.

The gorgeous woman by Nick’s side didn’t answer.

She never took her stunning eyes off his.

Nick didn’t take his focus off her, either.

He was still staring at her heart-shaped face, her shocking, blue-green eyes, riveting even under the light of the dome’s stars, when his mind slowly fuzzed out.

* * *

“Is that one married?Yer man, there?”

The woman adjusted her corset the tiny amount it would move, smoothing her dress and throwing back her shoulders so that the top of her cleavage instantly became more prominent.

“He isn’t, is he? I’ve never seen him with a woman…”

The hopeful look in her eyes, and the even more hopeful note in her lilting French, would have irritated Nick on its own.

As it was, he found himself annoyed by more than both of those things.

She wasn’t the first young noblewoman to approach Nick, assuming him to be somehow related to Jem and therefore able to speak to his eligibility.

And true, Nick had managed to secure himself a title and lands in the past decade, mostly to keep people at their distance and to stop the marauding pillagers who made their way through the region every few years, but he hated this part of the whole thing.

At least twice a year, Jem announced they needed to make an appearance at one of the royal events, or risk angering the King, something neither of them wanted to have to hassle with. It was one thing to blow off the endless galas, balls, winter feasts, and summer tournaments, but another entirely to not attend the King’s daughter’s wedding when they were specifically invited.

Now, it seemed, they were being eyeballed as possible prospects by a number of parents of young daughters, not to mention the uncles and brothers of young widows, and even the King himself, who’d likely want to marry them off for his own political advantage.

Really, the gaggle of women who’d apparently assumed them both to be old men, when they’d only heard their names and titles and hadn’t yet seen their faces, were really the least of their problems. King Louis had been pulling nobles to Versaille for greater control over the aristocracy for the past decade. Nick and Jem had managed to side-step that by any number of means, including at least one semi-pathetic claim of illness.

Now the entire court could see that neither of them were ill.

Further, they were young, visibly unattached in the eyes of the court and King, and running out of excuses to keep their distance.

Gah, they should have stayed in theCôte d’Azur.

To hell with Paris and Versaille, and especially to hell with the court and entourage of the narcissistic Sun King.

Nick wasn’t thrilled with the thought of having to deal with this shit on a regular basis.

He wasn’t thrilled with the thought of having the King try to pressure them into marrying, either, as some part of his scheme to gain more power over the French nobility, not to mention Europe itself. They should have gone to England already, but Jem hated the weather there, and Russia was completely out of the question for a bunch of reasons.

America had its attractions, but Nick honestly wasn’t sure about going there, either.

The more he squirmed under the conundrum in which they’d found themselves, the more he fought back a more physical reaction that would have changed his eye color, not to mention the shape of his teeth. No, he couldn’t let himself go there, not now. He and Jem would discuss it later, when they got back to the rooms they’d been assigned while they were here.

Still, he felt his discomfort extend his fangs by a few millimeters anyway.

It those same few seconds, he made a decision.