He gently lifted me, and I blushed and lurched to my bare feet, holding the untied skirt around my hips. I felt a breeze on my bare legs, a cold dribble down my thigh. As he buttoned his pants and tried to dab off the stains with a silk handkerchief, I blushed all the harder. He offered a tasseled velvet pillow to me, and I only hesitated a moment before sopping up the mess with the velvet and tossing it, stain down, back onto the bench. Hitching up the mess of my skirts, I fumbled with what went where, how to get the skirt back on and smoothed down as if it had never been touched. In that moment, struggling in the darkness, waiting to be discovered, I felt a strange sort of shame. And then the Bludman in my heart rose up and said fuck the shame. I turned to face Vale, the cloud of skirts in one hand.
“One day, we’re going to do that, and then you’re going to hold me in the crook of your arm while I sleep.”
His eyes went soft, his fingers curling and uncurling on his thighs as if he ached to hold me, right then. He’d already slipped his white gloves back on, and his hands looked alien, too white for having touched my body so recently. “I will do that, yes. There is nothing I want more.”
“This meant something.”
“It did, bébé.”
“We’re going to find Cherie.”
“We are.”
“But first, I have to go out there and find the prince, because that’s my job.”
His eyes went dark and flat. “But you’re mine.”
I bared my teeth at that word. “Not to control. Not to own.”
“That’s not what I meant, bébé. When will you see that it’s a different sort of possession?”
“When men stop trying to claim me like wild animals pissing on their territory!”
He blanched and swallowed hard. “Perhaps you are right, then. I only wanted to cherish and protect you, but I see how that could be misconstrued. Better find a place to wash away the smell of me, then.”
My jaw dropped open, and I hid my rage and shame by turning my back to him as I hastily tied my skirts tighter and arranged them to fall just so, a blooming flower again. How many times did I have to tell the jackass that I wasn’t sleeping with anybody? How long before he believed me? And how dare he try to make me feel bad when I was still dizzy from our time on the bench?
“Vale, I don’t—” When I turned around, he was gone. “You enormous ass,” I muttered as I slipped on my shoes.
Just then, Auguste poked his head into the tent.
“There you are, mademoiselle. The prince is waiting.”
There was no mirror to check my tumbled hair, no way to know if it was obvious why my cheeks were flushed. All I could do was nod and run a finger around my lips and sweep my bangs to the side.
Auguste held open the velvet flap, and I stepped through into a swirling chaos of sight and sound, a blizzard of sequins and feathers and eyes bright with lust and hunger. I hunted for the prince but saw only a sea of tuxedos until a slender gentleman in foreign dress stepped forward and gave a strange bow, the same one the prince had used.
“Mademoiselle, my master awaits you in the pachyderm.”
With a gracious nod, I took his arm, noting that he smelled of pipe smoke and hot metal under an unrelenting sun. As he escorted me down the brick hall that led to the elephant, did he feel my fingers tremble? Perhaps for the first time, I missed my gloves. For what the prince of Kyro had paid, biting him would never be enough.
22
The normally bleak courtyard was lit with twinkling lanterns, and I had to shove one aside as the prince’s servant led me to the pachyderm’s door. He bowed again at the bottom of the stairs, and I nodded regally, my eyes drawn to the swaybacked lines of gently swinging lamps. It looked so romantic and innocent down here, the sort of place where a young couple might huddle together over steaming cups of coffee, waiting for the perfect moment for their first kiss. But no. This was Paris, and Mortmartre, and Paradis, and there was only one thing that brought couples to the world-famous copper pachyderm late at night. Well, two things. And I was pretty sure the prince wanted them both—at the same time.
I took a deep breath and put on my professional smile before I opened the door to the stairs. If there was one thing I had learned in my short time at Paradis, it was that men could be easily fooled into thinking that you utterly worshipped them, so long as your smile and your eyes focused on them as if they were the only thing in the world.
Upstairs, I swanned into the room like a queen. The prince wasn’t facing the door, waiting for me expectantly, so my carefully practiced smile was utterly wasted. The room was empty. Which had to mean he was in the bedroom area, which was awfully presumptuous, even for a prince. I heard the door to the courtyard close and lock, far below me, and resigned myself to getting out of the elephant as quickly as I could and without the prince making any more headway than any other wealthy suitor had. Slipping a hand into the hidden pocket of my skirt, I made sure the sleeping powder was there. If I had to use it early, so be it. I wasn’t sleeping with the prince of Kyro or anyone else.