“It wasn’t intentional!”
“That’s even worse!” Petunia gasped. “It happened when you didn’t evenintendit to? It’s … it’s … that means you didn’t even realize how much you’ve allowed yourself to trust him. Mari, you must have dropped your guard entirely with him.”
“Is that so bad?” Mariselle asked in a small voice.
“Yes! He’s a Rowanwood! You need to stop and think rationally about all of this instead of gallivanting through your subconscious with the enemy.”
“But he’s not the enemy anymore,” Mariselle whispered. “He truly isn’t. And after spending some time with his family, I don’t believe any of them are.”
Petunia groaned dramatically and flopped back onto her pillows, one arm flung across her forehead. “You’re hopeless.”
Mariselle sighed, a soft, dreamy sound, and mirrored her cousin’s action, falling back onto her own bed with one hand over her heart. “I know.”
“Completely, utterly, beyond all reasonable salvation,” Petunia continued.
“Mmm,” Mariselle hummed in absent agreement, her gaze fixed on nothing as she held the mirror loosely at her side while replaying the feeling of Evryn’s fingers threading through her hair.
“You’re not going to get over this, are you?”
Mariselle rolled onto her stomach and propped herself up on one elbow as she gazed into the mirror. “I don’t think one can justget overlove, Tunia,” Mariselle replied softly.
“Your parents shall expire on the spot when you tell them you wish to go through with this,” Petunia pointed out. “Their melodrama will echo through the ages.”
“Perhaps they’ll come around,” Mariselle suggested, though her voicelacked conviction. “Once they see Dreamland, once they understand what Evryn and I have accomplished together …”
She stared past the mirror, reliving the sensation of his fingers sliding between hers. Remembering how tightly she’d held onto him, how his touch made her feel secure and safe in a way she’d rarely known.
Anticipation tightened inside her. “Oh, Tunia, I don’t know how I am to last until I can see him again tomorrow. The time feels as though it’s stretching endlessly before me.”
“Tragic indeed. I shall alert the gossip birds to spread the news: Lady slowly perishes of impatience.”
Mariselle ignored her. “And when Idosee him, what then? What am I to say? Oh, Tunia, it’s the most maddening conundrum. I long to be near him, and yet I haven’t the faintest idea what I’ll say once I am.”
Petunia threw an arm over her eyes and yawned. “You could ask him about his conversational muscles,” she mumbled.
“Petunia! That isn’t remotely helpful.”
“Why? He’s clearly the sort to possess conversational muscles.”
“No, dear cousin, he possesses muscles that are very much made for lifting things.” Mariselle’s skin flushed at the memory of Evryn helping her down over the Dreamland ruins, his shoulders broad and firm beneath her hands. “I know because I have … ah … been lifted.”
Petunia lowered her arm, brows shooting upward.
“Over the Dreamland ruins!” Mariselle added hastily, her face burning.
“Yes, that definitely sounded like what you meant.”
“Petunia Dawndale!”
“Mariselle Brightcrest!”
Mariselle started laughing. “What now? Are we simply stating each other’s names until?—”
She froze, a sound reaching her ears from somewhere outside her room. Footsteps. Muffled voices.
“Oh no,” she whispered, then flattened her palm on the mirror’s surface before shoving it beneath her pillow. She scrambled off her bed in the same instant her bedroom door burst open, revealing her father standing in the doorway, still fully dressed despite the late hour. Behind him loomed her mother, wrapped in a silk dressing gown, her face a mask of cold fury.
“I told you I heard voices,” Lady Brightcrest said, her gaze sweeping theroom. “And look, here she stands! Still in her evening gown and looking entirely … compromised.”
