Page 28 of Samhain
I came loud and hard and hoped they could hear me in England.
Fuck all of you, you bastards!
For the next week, I tested the limits of my newfound ability. I walked barefoot on grass, astonished when it grew inches behind me. I held flowers, purposely asking them to flourish or not based on my whim, and they listened.
They listened!
The spirit of every plant I touched surged in my veins like manifestations of the great beyond. It tingled through my body with little vibrations. My connection to the earth had never been as great as standing in the wild with the thrill of nature’s energy coursing over my skin and down my throat to my lungs. I’d never felt more alive, more human.
Lying in bed next to Carter without telling him took work. In the two months we’d been here, he’d become my best friend, my confidant. I’d told him things I hadn’t even mentioned to Ivy or Lex. In many ways, Carter had become my best friend. With a heart full of sorrow, I pondered whether he might be my only friend.
He had a screenplay open on his lap, and I pretended to read a smutty novel one of my cousins had sent me. But I couldn’t focus. I chewed my bottom lip, thoughts racing through my mind.
“You know,” Carter said, “of the four of us, you always were the loudest thinker.”
I sighed in exasperation. “That’s not true. Your precious Weeds thinks a lot louder than me.”
He tilted his head in my direction. “What’s bothering you, Juliet?”
“Have you”—I shook my head, trying to keep it cool—“noticed anything strange recently?”
He chuckled and closed the script, setting it on the nightstand before rolling on his side to face me and putting his head in his palm, balanced on his elbow. “Strange things happen to me all the time. What’s going on?”
I sighed, rubbing my tired eyes. “It’s just—I have this feeling in my gut. I think Ivy might have been right about the fairies.”
“Fairies?” He narrowed his eyes. “What do you mean?”
I swallowed and put my book down, sinking farther into the mattress so I could lay on my side and face him, mirroring his pose. I grabbed his hand, linking our thumbs, brushing our vows up against each other, palm to palm. “I have this intuition. Something’s changed.” I stared at him, looking for any sign he was lying, that he had experienced something like growing flowers with his bare hands. But his furrowed brow and the confused expression in his puppy dog eyes told me he had no idea what I meant. “Gran is sending someone for me.”
Carter frowned, a defeated look haunting his gaze, and he kissed my knuckles. “We knew that would happen eventually. How long do we have?”
“Days. Weeks. I have no idea.” I hated how much my life had never been my own.
He hummed and rolled on top of me, positioning his hips between my thighs, his half-erect cock poised right at my opening. Tingles shot through my body when he kissed my neck, followed by little nibbles that went down my collarbone.
“Guess we ought to make the most of it, huh?”
He disappeared under the covers and yanked my panties down to my ankles. Then I forgot all about fairies and focused on other magical fingers.
A few days later, we went to an event in Las Vegas that Sharon had arranged—a charity dinner with a bunch of aristocrats I’d never met before. Carter had agreed to come, so I didn’t have to go alone. Per my grandmother’s instructions, we kept the PDA at a minimum and when journalists asked who he was, I said he was a good friend from college. When they asked why we’d been caught hugging on the overlook, Carter smiled and chimed in with, “Don’t you hug your friends?”
“We’ve been through a lot together,” I added.
“Are you referring to Lex Fairfax and Ivy Washington?” one of them asked. “Didn’t you two used to date?” came another question from someone else. “How do you feel about them coming out as a couple? Did they cheat on you?”
Questions flew at us faster than we could answer, and I plastered that fake veneer smile on my face, pretending like they didn’t hurt.
Did they cheat on you?
Yes. And resoundingly…no.
“What a personal thing to ask,” I said. “Such bad manners.” I waved a finger at them and chidingly tsked before heading inside to the banquet. Despite having Carter with me, the whole thing was long and tedious, and I couldn’t wait for it to be over. The minutes churned agonizingly by. The only upside was the money we raised for the Danae Foundation, a nonprofit aimed at curbing climate change and building sustainability.
Sometime after dinner, I stood at the bar, sipping a glass of wine and waiting for Carter to return from the bathroom when a familiar deep voice said from behind me, “Red wine? You know how that makes you an insufferable twat.”
“Bleeding Christ.” I jumped and nearly spilled my drink on my new dress. When I set my glare on the intruder, my heart sank into my stomach. I understood then what Gran had meant by sending someone to fetch me.
My cousin, Edward, the second son to the heir to the throne, stood next to the bar with a smug grin. Like me, he’d been a royal fuckup in his youth, but he was male and a few years older, so he’d gone through the worst of it in the days before smartphones. He hadn’t taken the brunt of the social media scrutiny the way I had.
