Page 23 of The Midnight Princess

Miss him? Thatwouldbe a confession worth making. Now that it’s all over, I realize I never missed Pietor. I missed having a fiancé at my side when the press was pestering me about the wedding date or when Parliament was running him through the vetting process, but I never allowed the actual man he is to take up more space in my life than an appointment on my calendar.

I stride forward.

“When does he return?” Jacob asks, gaining my side.

I want to break into a run. I could probably lose him in the forest. “I’m not at liberty to say, but thank you for your interest.”

He chuckles, the low rumble of laughter shaking my insides.

“What?”

“You just told me to back the hell off. Is that what this training is going to be about? Learning more inventive ways to be antisocial? Sign me up.”

I will not laugh. “I did no such thing.”

“Far be it for me to contradict a lady,” he retorts, his tone dry.

My lips twitch. He is a man difficult to hold at arm’s length, and I contemplate the next three months with foreboding. It’s easy to imagine that he will storm past my boundaries if they’re too rigid. Perhaps flexibility is the wiser tactic.

I click my tongue and let him see an actual emotion. Exasperation. “I have to teach you how to hold a conversation because you’re not doing it correctly. You ignore the rules which govern polite society, ask more than you have any right to, and give out way too much.”

“I’m in your hands.” He holds his arms wide, wide enough for me to step into them. I’m shocked to realize that my feet want to carry me forward. Is this what the old pirate explorers felt when a new discovery rose into view? There are, I am finding, parts of myself that were hiding past the rim of the horizon all this time.

I retreat a fraction. “We have to get back,” I say, touching my cold nose with the back of my wrist. “You’ve given me your deepest Little Duckies secrets, but you’re scheduled to practice your accent with your aide.”

Jacob groans, his face pointed to the sky, the scruff of his beard beyond carefully groomed boundaries.

“Alma—I can call you Alma?”

I go hot and cold. “What if I don’t want you to call me Alma? What am I supposed to say? What if a hundred telephoto lenses and civilian cell phone cameras are picking it up?”

Jacob pivots and walks backward, hands stuffed into his jacket. If scripted royal protocol is my second nature, this easiness is his—the careless, powerful way his body takes upspace and the way his eyes never leave my face. I don’t think he even knows he’s flirting.

“Don’t you like it when I call you Alma?”

I do.

Vede.

I do. He says my name like someone who hasn’t heard of the Duchy of Lowenwald or watched me swear allegiance to the Sondish constitution on national TV. He says it like someone who ran into me at the bookstore with a scone on a plate and a copy ofThe Contentments of Saint Olavunder his arm. Like someone I made out with once.

I clutch my hands together. “Whether I like it is not the point. What if I really don’t?”

“It sounds like you do want me to call you Alma.”

I give a little ground to this aggravating man. “You may use my given name, when appropriate.”

“Thanks, Alma. And?”

“And what?”

“You’re going to call me Jacob, right?”

I tilt my head. “Do you notice the way I am not presuming anything?”

“You have to call me Jacob,” he says, missing my point so thoroughly that I want to get his eyes checked. “It’ll be weird if you don’t.”

“My mother is a cousin to half the crowned heads of Europe, and their pet name for her is Lenni. They share memories of summer vacations at the Hunting Lodge every August. Personal letters she receives begin, ‘Meine liebsteLenni’ but the official ones coming from the same source don’t even use the word ‘you.’ It’s always, ‘In honor of Her Majesty’s 55th birthday…’ or ‘We were heartened to hear of Her Majesty’s visit to affected areas…’ It would be best if I didn’t use your name,” I say.