Total pages in book: 85
Estimated words: 80283 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 401(@200wpm)___ 321(@250wpm)___ 268(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 80283 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 401(@200wpm)___ 321(@250wpm)___ 268(@300wpm)
Now it’s my turn to do the skeptical eyebrow dance.
He laughs, a husky rumble that makes my skin feel cozy and…ticklish at the same time. “I don’t. I think you’re a kid. I thought a lot of wild things when I was a kid. When you get older, your thoughts change.”
“Maybe,” I say, but I don’t mean it, and I’m pretty sure Jeffrey can tell I don’t mean it.
But he keeps smiling at me anyway, a nice smile that makes the ticklish feeling shivering across my bare arms even worse.
“You want to watch a movie or something?” he asks. “We have a theater in the east wing, and a decent film collection. You can pick whatever you’d like. I’ll make popcorn.”
“Can we have popcorn and play cards, instead?” I hear myself asking, bold as you please. I don’t know what’s come over me, but whatever it is makes me brave enough to add, “Movies are okay, but I’d love to talk more. I usually stutter too much to talk to anyone outside my family, and I already know all their stories. I’d like to hear some of yours.”
“Yeah.” He nods slowly. “That sounds good. I’d like to talk, too. Just let me go grab a clean shirt.”
I nod, my gaze falling to the floor. “Okay. I’ll…wait here.”
“Though, you know, not liking movies is like not liking cake,” he adds as he backs toward the door. “Everyone likes cake.”
I shrug. “I know. I’m weird.”
He smiles again. “No, you’re interesting. There’s a difference. Don’t let anyone make you feel bad for being interesting.”
“All right,” I say, deciding I might have a little crush on Prince Jeffrey.
By the end of the night—after we’ve played cards, talked books, and crept down to the castle’s kitchen to steal cookies from the biggest cookie jar I’ve ever seen—my crush has become a fully flowered obsession.
On the drive back to Rinderland the next day, I write his name in my journal a hundred times, so distracted I forget to be carsick and my mother decides I’m coming down with a cold and should be sent directly to bed upon arriving home.
Lying in my bed that night, and many nights after, I read and reread Lady Chatterley’s Lover and think of Jeffrey, eventually imagining the two of us doing the things the lady and her stable hand are doing in those illustrations.
It takes years—four of them to be exact—for Jeffrey to fade from my memory. It isn’t until Rafe, the cook’s son, and I are trapped in the gazebo during a storm and end up adding kissing to our friendship that I start to simmer for someone else. But that’s all it ever is with Rafe—a sweet, delicious simmer that I refuse to allow to become a boil.
When he wants us to be each other’s first, I put him off, not wanting either of us to get any more attached. And when he eventually proposes, I say no.
It breaks my heart, but I say no. Because even at twenty, long past the days of childhood fancies, the curse is real for me.
My seven-year-old memories are dim and fading fast, but what I recall from my afternoon with the Romani woman remains sharp around the edges. Logically, I know that I was a dreamy child who might have imagined the entire thing. But I’m also the dreamy adult that child grew up to be, and I can’t help believing in magic.
And spells.
And the curse plaguing the Rindish royals.
There’s so much evidence—from history, as well as my own experience—that I can’t see any reason to doubt it. And then Sabrina agrees to go to Gallantia in my place for the month leading up to the royal wedding, and I have even more evidence that the future I was promised is real.
My sister is going to fall in love with Andrew, marry him in my place, and live happily ever after, and I’m going to die on my twenty-sixth birthday, probably from a fall down the stairs.
Or off a horse. Or out a window.
The Romani woman didn’t give me the “how” of my death, only the “when,” but an alarming number of my first-born ancestors died on their twenty-sixth birthday from tumbling out of or off of something. There are exceptions, firstborn relatives who lived longer or shorter lives—anomalies that give some reason for hope. But my hope is small and fragile, a mouse with a toothpick for a sword.
The fear is a giant beast with razor-sharp teeth.
The fear drives me to work harder, faster, fighting to finish my final collection before time runs out. Most people probably wouldn’t consider designing lingerie an activity worthy of the last few months of a person’s life, but my heart and soul go into every stitch. I’m making art, something beautiful that will live on after I’m gone, just like Lawrence’s novel.