Timothy was not certain where to look. “You don’t want me,” he argued at last. “You were forced into this just as I was.”
“As a child, it felt that way,” Nathaniel agreed. Timothy shot him a surprised glance. Nathaniel’s eyes were closed. “I was raised fully aware I was going to marry you, and though I remembered dear Aunt Robin’s Egg’s blessing, I had no concept of what love was, or what she had been trying to tell me. Then I got older and I felt differently.”
Timothy failed to keep the curiosity from his voice. “Differently?”
Nathaniel was still kneeling before him. He opened his eyes and once again left Timothy stunned. “My beloved aunt died. I was fourteen and all I had left of her was her gift to me. I thought about it often over the next years, until I realized what a gift it truly was. I was betrothed, but she told me I would desire my betrothed. Unlike everyone else who has to search, maybe spend a whole life searching, I knew exactly where my true love was, and he was waiting for me the same way I was waiting for him. Or so I thought.”
Timothy pushed the fur away, irritated with the heat coursing through his skin and restless with how Nathaniel refused to move from his position at Timothy’s feet. “You were looking forward to meeting me again?”
Timothy had leapt over the castle wall and Nathaniel had simply been there, waiting.
“I was only eighteen. I had no idea what I was in for.” Nathaniel’s tone was hardly a match to what he was saying.
Timothy frowned. “What were you in for?”
“Being treated like a monster. Being thought of as so frightening and repulsive that you threw yourself under a horse only minutes after meeting me. In your efforts to escape me, you’ve put yourself under a nearly irreversible sleeping spell and almost broken your neck twice that I know of. You danced with me and barely said two words, and then slept in the stable rather than spend another moment with me. If it didn’t hurt so much, I’d admire your persistence. Part of me still does. In response to it, I refused to give up as well.” Nathaniel paused. “You never answered my letters.”
“I kept them.” It was impossible not to flush and feel shaky at the admission, and at the heavy way Nathaniel considered him. The careful study no longer seemed designed to irritate. Instead, it was more cautious, the look of a man who was not sure of his welcome. Timothy continued to frown, mostly out of habit. “But I am small and bookish, an embarrassment. Your family—”
“Think I have always been too serious, and have never been so entertained as when you fling your sharp words at me and show up in unexpected places,” Nathaniel cut in before Timothy could finish. “Although, they did not understand your reluctance to marry me any more than I did. My father thought it was nerves. My mother…” Nathaniel’s voice went dry again. “My mother suggested a different reason and an entirely different approach. Now I wonder.”
“You have wanted to marry me all along?” Timothy could not believe it. “But you are handsome, kind, honorable, and brave, just as a prince should be.”
“And you are clever and fearless and determined,exactlywhat a prince should be.” Nathaniel shifted and somehow their bodies were much closer. Nathaniel was between Timothy’s knees, or would be if he continued in that direction and Timothy’s skirt were not in the way. “I have wanted to speak you, to know you, since we were boys. I knew it was as my aunt had predicted, but I did not understand what that meant until you made your first visit to Neri. The moment the servants unrolled the rug to reveal you, irritated and disheveled, your eyes found mine before you tried to get to your feet. For that single moment, your eyes were wide and bright and full of happiness to see me. You had clearly meant to be smuggled out of the castle but you had ended up back with me, and before you began yelling, you looked for me until you found me, and you werehappy.”
Knowing himself so obvious was shaming but it was Nathaniel who was flushed with emotion. “Then I was happy, too, happier than I had ever been before. There is no one else like you, Timothy of House Dirus. I like your height. You are not so little. When we danced, I thought how nice it was to have your head at my shoulder.”
“You did?” It was the barest squeak. Timothy could not fully believe what he was hearing but he had no reason to doubt it. Not even Prince Nathaniel was so polite as to pretend to be in love.
Nathaniel nodded. “You were awkward as a boy but so was I. At eighteen, I still had knobby knees and feet I hadn’t grown into. I’m sure you noticed.” Tim pretended that he had, watching Nathaniel in open fascination as he kept talking. “At sixteen, you were clumsy but your skin was starting to clear, and when I kissed you, you woke up. For a few moments, I feared you wouldn’t, and that Robin’s Egg had been wrong. But you woke and I knew then it was true. You were meant to be mine as I was meant to be yours. The night of your eighteenth birthday, I spent hours rehearsing ways to invite you into the garden with me. You dashed off to sleep with the horses instead.”
“Would you have kissed me in the garden?” Timothy kicked out in his excitement and Nathaniel caught his feet in his hands. His toes were still cold, Timothy was surprised to realize. He was aflame but his feet were chilled.
Nathaniel’s hands felt as hot as Timothy’s face. He slid his thumbs down to the arch of Timothy’s feet. Then he nodded.
“Oh, yes.” Nathaniel’s desire was dry, too—as dry as a tinderbox. “I was going to take my mother’s advice. I wanted to feel your mouth under mine again in better circumstances.”
“I have no memory of that kiss.” Timothy extended his toes and shivered all over in surprise when Nathaniel’s fingers pressed there as well, big and warm, first through the slippers and then without them after pausing to remove them. “My first and only kiss,” Timothy added, soft with embarrassment and something like hope.
“If you wished me to, I would kiss you again right now.” Nathaniel’s hands were doing things to Timothy’s ability to control his body. It seemed Nathaniel didn’t just have to be near; he could also touch Timothy to do this to him.
Timothy panted with hunger but turned his head. “What about your lover? This is your room but you have not been sleeping here.”
Nathaniel made a noise that was pleasingly rude. It seemed Timothy could spur the perfect prince as no one else could. “You do get ideas into your head, don’t you?” Nathaniel’s fingers curled around Tim’s ankles, hot as a firebrand. To think those servants had wondered about Nathaniel’s mouth when his hands were equally interesting. “I have not been sleeping, not a wink. I am—I was—two months from a wedding to the man I love, a man who hates—hated—me. If you tell me you’ve been sleeping well, I will accuse you of lying.”
“The man you love.” Timothy gulped. “But I am Little Prince.”
“MyLittle Prince,” Nathaniel countered and tugged on Timothy’s legs to bring him forward. Timothy’s hands landed on his shoulders, the same ones he had dreamt of night after night in his tower with his prick in his hand and no one to laugh at him. His heart was pounding, his skin raw with new sensations. He looked from Nathaniel’s eyes to his mouth. Timothy had succeeded in his best escape to date only to wind up here, his head tilted down for a kiss that was too slow in coming, a kiss he wanted among many other things. Things Prince Nathaniel might have given him sooner if he had only thought to ask.
“There is no curse,” Timothy murmured, letting the understanding shiver through him. “You’re my true love,” he realized all over again a moment later, and tumbled down from his seat.
Nathaniel fell backwards to the floor, taking Timothy with him, because somehow his arms were already around Timothy’s waist to help him take Timothy’s weight. His eyes were wide, his expression apprehensive as Timothy wriggled up to look down at him. Timothy could not blame him for that. He had given Nathaniel many reasons to worry.
But this time, he brought his hand up to gently brush his fingers over Nathaniel’s lips, and then his own, while wondering how it must have felt to have to kiss a sleeping, bespelled Timothy with no assurance that it would work.
“That was no way for us to kiss the first time,” Timothy decided aloud, in a voice that had gone husky. Nathaniel was very warm underneath him and Timothy wanted to press against him with an alarming urgency. “Me asleep, and you terrified. Then I ruined what would have been the second attempt.”
Nathaniel raised his eyes from Timothy’s mouth, his eyebrows up in a way that seemed pointed.
