Jerin jerked away from her with a hiss and a curse. “My sisters! Oh, gods, if they caught us, they’d kill me!”
“They would kill me.” Ren hurriedly refastened her trousers. “And Cullen’s sisters would kill Lylia if they knew what she did.”
“Lylia?” Jerin glanced around for the others. “What did she do?”
Ren laughed, buttoning her shirt. “She used Cullen to distract your sisters, to get you alone, the little minx.”
Jerin winced, remembering Lylia’s sweet stolen kisses. How many men had the young princess lured out and kissed before him? “They do this often?”
Ren grinned, cupping his chin with a warm hand and running a callused thumb along his cheek. “No. which is quite encouraging in all regards.” She glanced down the path as sounds of the others reached them. “Here they come.”
Cullen wore a crown of flowers, and looked extremely tousled, and pleased. Eldest had a slightly smug expression, which made Jerin wonder what exactly had taken place before-and perhaps even after-Lylia had caught up with them. The young princess grinned at her older sister, as if well satisfied with the whole affair.
“The dressing gong will sound soon,” Ren said, making a show of pulling out her pocket watch and checking the time. “We should retire to get decent.”
Clearly, it was ambush.
Lylia and Odelia lazed in Ren’s study, idly bouncing a ball between them, as if they had nothing better to do. Odelia, on the divan, gave a nonchalant. “Hoy.” Lylia, sideways in the leather armchair with her booted feet on the antique cherry end table, feigned a look of surprise. Plainly, they had been waiting for her. joining sides to do gory battle, but over what?
“Well?” Ren pushed Lylia’s feet off of the end table.
“Well, what?” Lylia put on her doe-eyed innocent look, perfected and much abused over the years. It worked well with people outside the family, but Ren had witnessed too many of Lylia’s maneuverings to believe it.
“What are you two here for?” Ren asked.
Odelia smirked at Lylia. “Told you she would know.”
Lylia stuck out her tongue at Odelia, then addressed Ren levelly. “What are you doing about Trini and Halley?”
“Trini?” Ren could understand their worrying about Halley’s prolonged absence, but they’d worked alongside Trini that very morning. “What’s wrong with Trini?”
“She’s taken a tray in her rooms every meal since Jerin arrived,” Lylia groused. “She’s refusing to meet him. She’s still saying it’s too soon to get married.”
Ren jerked in surprise at the word “married.” She hadn’t talked to her sisters about a possible marriage in hopes of staving off any negative reactions before they had a chance to meet Jerin personally.
Apparently Lylia, Odelia, and, unfortunately, Trini all knew why the Whistlers had been invited to the palace.
“Completely pigheaded.” Odelia added, hopefully meaning Trini. Odelia lay back on the divan, tossing the ball upward until it nearly touched the ceiling and catching it when it dropped.
“This is a perfect opportunity, and she’s letting it slip away.” Lylia launched herself out of her seat to rove through Ren’s study with restless energy. “Every nobleman available for us to marry has been raised like a vacuous songbird. Other than ignoring traditions and marrying Cullen, quite frankly, I don’t see another alternative on the market.”
“ ‘Vacuous.’ Is that really a word?” Odelia asked as the ball rose again in another orbit.
Ren settled herself on the edge of her desk, trying to smother a smile. Obviously both of them were for marrying Jerin-but then, she had figured they would be. “We can’t marry Cullen.”
“There’s precedent for royal cousins marrying,” Lylia stated firmly.
Ren shook her head. “The parents weren’t full siblings in those cases. The bloodlines are too close with us and Cullen. I checked it one time-his mother was full sister to Father.”
Odelia caught the ball and sat up in one smooth motion. “You two are serious! Cullen? Holy Mothers, you’re both as bad as Trini.”
“What’s wrong with Cullen?” Lylia asked, jerking up her chin.
“Besides being more like our brother than our cousin?” Odelia scoffed. Then, apparently realizing that she about to fall into full warfare with Lylia, she threw up her hands. “Forget I said anything. We’re here to talk about Jerin and Trini and Halley.”
Lylia swallowed her attack, and nodded. “Trini can’t be allowed to get away with this. It would be one thing if she met Jerin and found fault with him, but she’s being completely irrational. We need to get married. She has to be reasonable.”
Odelia snorted. “Trini is never going to be reasonable when the subject is men.”
“What Keifer did to her couldn’t have been that bad!” Lylia snapped, then glanced to them, uncertain.
“Could it?”
This is going to hurt a little, right, Keifer? Oh, no, Ren, it’s going to hurt a lot! Ren flinched at the memory. At the time she believed the pain had been unavoidable. Since then, she had grown sure that Keifer had enjoyed inflicting much more pain than necessary.
“Oh, don’t do that!” Lylia snapped at their carefully blanked faces. “Since I was ten. every time I ask about this, everyone gets quiet and then they change the subject. I’m an adult now! I’m a royal princess of the realm. I have a right and a duty to know what happened.”
Ren sighed. Lylia was right. “You might not remember, but Keifer was very beautiful. Eldest and the others fell in love with his beauty, and didn’t care that he wasn’t very intelligent.”
“I’ve seen dogs smarter than him,” Odelia muttered, then added wistfully, “But he was beautiful.”
“Trini was only thirteen,” Ren continued. “She wasn’t interested in men yet, and I think she saw him more clearly than the rest of us. She saw that he was stupid, spoiled, and ill-tempered. She called him a breeding bull. She tried to block the marriage, but she wasn’t an adult yet, and she was vastly outnumbered.”
“Back then, she was much like you, Lylia.” Sorrow tinged Odelia’s voice. “She had a sharp tongue and she was fearless in using it. She could get him so mad.”
In the beginning, it would take several minutes of cutting remarks before Keifer would react. Toward the end, a single facial expression from Trini could make Keifer explode. Trini played it as a game, even taking bets that she could get Keifer to throw things at the dinner table or scream in public.
“So, what happened?” Lylia asked. “What did Keifer doT‘
Ren swallowed old anger and disgust. “He hit her in the head with a paperweight and, while she was stunned, dragged her to his bed and tied her there. He beat her, and-and serviced her. and everything else he could think of to hurt her.”
Odelia cataloged the injuries. “He broke her nose and blackened her eyes. He broke two of her fingers, and burned her on one hip, like a cattle brand, for calling him a cow. He was threatening to cut her face when Eldest showed up.”
Lylia look horrified. “And we didn’t send him back to his sisters?”
“Eldest got Trini cleaned up and half convinced it was all her fault before our mothers saw her.” Ren swallowed the rage again that her Eldest acted not in the best interest of their sister, but for her own desire to keep Keifer as a husband. “Keifer turned all sweet on Eldest, said he was sorry and that he really didn’t mean to do it, that Trini drove him to it. Eldest was blindly in love with him.”
“Obviously,” Lylia murmured.
“So what do we do about Trini?” Odelia flopped back onto the divan. “She’s going to think we’re just like Eldest, in love with a pretty face.”
“And you’re not?” Ren asked as Odelia tossed her ball skyward again.
Odelia threw her a surprised look and nearly missed her ball. “No! Well, Jerin’s beautiful, but he’s also very gentle and sweet and caring. After I was attacked, Jerin was like a father comforting his little one.
Me! I wasn’t a princess of the realm to him. 1 was just a stranger he found half dead in a stream.”
Lylia sighed. “If Trini would only talk to him. He’s so intelligent for a man.”
Ren caught herself before she, too, sang Jerin’s praises. “We’re in complete agreement that Jerin isn’t like
