Page 28 of A Princess, Stolen (A Kiss of Revenge, Blood, and Love #1)

I stared ahead. Sea, clouds, and spray increasingly blurred into an indefinable surface. A surface like a canvas, saturated with memories. Mom looked at me from outside.

She looks straight at me. As if she wants to tell me something .

I blinked.

Her eyes are suddenly like barn doors of terror, and suddenly, I see much more than just her eyes. I see the Voyageur II, Dad’s smallest yacht. Our last trip as a trio.

Mom and I are on the sun deck and Mom jumps up from her lounge chair and screams, “Oh my God, it’s on fire!” I turn in the direction she’s looking. Dark smoke is pushing out of the door to the yacht’s large living area like an evil fogman.

“Nicholas!” she shouts.

I start to scream. “Dad! Daddy!” I want to run to him, but Mom holds me back. Heat spreads across my skin and then Dad emerges from the door, a wet sleeve pressed to his mouth and nose.

“Up!” In a panic, he pulls me up the steps to the highest deck.

Mom follows. “Where are the life jackets? Where’s the fire extinguisher?

” she screams. Over and over. After that, there’s just a dark hole of black, stifling smoke and the acrid smell of burning plastic.

Mom runs back and forth across the deck, runs back down to search for the fire extinguisher and life jackets, but comes directly back because everything is on fire.

“We have to jump!” I hear Dad shout.

“I can’t swim! And neither can Willa!” Mom starts crying and pulls me out of Dad’s arms. Now I’m crying too. Suddenly, I’m terribly scared. I don’t want to jump into the water; I’ll sink like a stone!

I’m crying and hear Dad shouting, “Give her to me! Give her to me!”

“Dad!” I scream, reaching out to him. “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!”

I’m suddenly so cold. Mom is gone. “Mom?” I shout.

As if in a dream, I get up, slip out the door, and run down many steps to where there should be smoke, but now there is none.

I rip open a door and the wind rages at me like an angry giant, yelling at me.

“Mom, where are you?” Rain sprays over me and everything tilts from right to left.

I can hardly walk and carefully maneuver around a bollard.

I have to go down to the railing, to the water.

Mom always wants me to get into the water, even that time in Boston when I almost fell into the Charles River if the bus driver hadn’t spotted me.

Maybe she wants me to get into the water!

“Willa!” My name hisses through time and space, a whiplash that hits me in the other world, but I don’t care .

“Stop! Now!” The person is far away.

“Mom?” I slip on the wet steps and crash against the railing but get back up. It’s hard to stand upright because everything is shaking. I hold on tightly to the railing, and suddenly, I see her.

She is standing at the railing amidships, staring into the water.

“Mom,” I whisper, and my heart fills with sorrow and joy. I want to laugh and cry because I have finally found her again after years. She hasn’t shown herself for so long, but now she is here! Now I scream as loud as I can, “Mom!”

But Mom doesn’t react. She stretches her arms out to the side. “I’m the little bird!” she calls incoherently and then she jumps into the raging ocean and is immediately swallowed by a monstrous gray wave. I stare at the water in shock.

“Willa, damn it! Put the life jacket back on immediately!”

Something about the words makes me pause. It drips slowly but steadily into my mind .

I stand there like a wet poodle, one hand on the railing soaked to the bone by the rain. Mom! My yearning call echoes only in a part of my soul. And within myself, I simultaneously understand a painful truth.

Mom was never here. I was delirious again.

Dazed, I blinked. Once, twice. I was standing alone at the railing, but now, for a reason I couldn’t explain, I started running along the railing as if getting a running start for a time jump as if I could jump back into the past.

“Willa!” Through the wind and rain, I recognized Nathan’s voice.

“By all seven storms and my life, I swear to you, if you don’t get your…

” His words disappeared in the flood of spray that caught me completely off guard.

A torrent of water flooded the deck. It happened too fast. My legs were swept out from under me by the suction.

I fell and the icy mass of water washed me feetfirst through the railing.

I heard myself scream, but the wind ripped my words to shreds.

In a state of shock, I tried to grab the lowest rung of the parapet but didn’t catch it.

At that moment, two hands grabbed my arms. Firmly.

Very, very firmly. For several breaths, my legs hung over the side and the world stood still.

All I could feel was the cold water lapping over my body back into the sea and Nathan’s grip holding me.

I briefly saw the expression on his chalk-white face.

His gray eyes were wide and staring. My heart was racing, and three seconds later, he pulled me back to my feet.

He pulled me away from the railing, up the steps, and into the sheltered stairwell that led to the bridge.

There, he put his hands on my shoulders and pressed me hard against the wall. He looked at me grimly, his face in the shadows, so dark that his eyes glowed like two light gray flames.

And then he kissed me. Not gently and tenderly, but wildly and angrily. Almost like the roaring, raging sea, like a howl. At first, I was paralyzed. He tasted of salt and ocean, his lips wet with rain. Instinctively, I raised my hand to push him away but I didn’t.

I let him, felt his tongue cool and determined in my mouth as if that was the reprimand he hadn’t yet uttered.

All his shock and anger. I was paralyzed from head to toe, and even though his hands were pressing me harder and harder against the wall, I didn’t want him to stop even though I’d almost fallen overboard.

Even though my legs and everything else about me were shaking so uncontrollably that I probably couldn’t stand without help.

The feeling was too sweet despite Nathan’s anger, and it hurled me back eight years.

To the summer in Louisiana. To heat and excitement.

To childlike innocence and the need to discover the world with Nathan.

When he backed away, there was something relentless in his gaze that didn’t match my feelings, and even then, he didn’t loosen his grip on my shoulders.

“Don’t do that again, damn it! Never walk right along the railing in this weather again, do you understand?

” My heart was pounding and I couldn’t manage a nod.

“The water ties you up like a lasso and pulls you in! What were you thinking?”

I must have run down the stairs and out into the open when the memory kicked in since there was no other explanation.

“I…it wasn’t intentional…” The shock was too deep in my bones as well as the shock of being kissed by him so suddenly and angrily. I was completely confused.

Abruptly, he stepped back and released me. “It wasn’t intentional? Then why did you do it?”

My shoulders hurt, but the chaos in my mind was much worse. There was no question that Nathan was extremely angry with me, but then why did he kiss me? And why did I want that?

Shocked at myself, I blinked. “I was…I was in a trance or something.”

“And you took off your life jacket while in a trance too?” he asked, stunned.

As if that was the only thing that could leave you stunned! He had just kissed me!

“I saw Mom,” I replied harshly because I felt the need to explain myself and I was rather angry because I’d enjoyed his kiss so much. “She wanted me to come into the water with her.”

“She wanted…” He seemed speechless for a few seconds, surely thinking I was crazy. But then, something strange happened to his eyes. They lost their anger. He swallowed. “You see dead people?”

“Only Mom,” I said defiantly, although his sudden gentleness simply pushed my growing anger aside. “Actually, it happened some time ago…and only when the temperature dropped.”

“Only when the temperature dropped?” He took another step toward me so that he was standing right in front of me.

I felt his breath breaking in tiny bursts against my face, tart and fresh, and infinitely confusing. It sent a hot-cold shiver through every cell in my body.

“Really…it’s scientifically proven…that you see ghosts especially when it gets cold,” I stammered, but he grabbed my wet braids, wrapped them around the edges of his hands, and pulled me toward him.

“I thought there were no ghosts?” he asked in a whisper.

“There aren’t,” I whispered, “only when the temperature drops…”

“Only when the temperature drops…are you sure, ghost girl?”

His lips were dreadfully close to mine. My stomach tingled, and I felt betrayed by my body.

Nathan kissed me again. This time, more gently but without letting go of my braids.

I tasted peppermint and the sea as my heart pounded in my throat and a burning sweet tremor fluttered deep in my stomach.

An impatient, shimmering longing for something I couldn’t explain.

Maybe for distance. Maybe for space. Maybe for courage.

Maybe for the freedom that I always associated with him.

This is completely crazy!

He pushed me against the wall again, holding me there with his body so that I didn’t topple over with the swells.

Instinctively and to steady myself, I wrapped my arms around his waist. I grasped the fabric of his hoodie tightly in my fingers, and at that moment, it almost seemed to me as if this kiss could overcome countries, borders, and time just like all the many forgotten memories in my mind.

As if it could bridge eight years and return me to the time of the Palace of Shards.

As if it could give me back something that I had lost a long time ago.