“We’ll take it to your rooms,” Eunice offered, picking up the cake and handing it to me. “And we’ll take the others away,” she said, I caught her meaning and my smile trembled as my face got soft, then she cried, “Just go!”
Perdita slid a thin stick between my fingers under the cake and said, “The candles are lit in your rooms. You can use that stick to light your cake candles so you won’t get any wax on your beautiful icing.”
I stared gratefully into her eyes and gave myself a long moment to do it.
Then I whispered, “Thank you,” and she smiled and that smile lit her whole face.
All of it.
Even her eyes.
Not fake.
She liked me!
They all did.
Hurrah!
I smiled at all of them and then rushed out of the room, balancing the cake as I went thinking joyous thoughts that maybe, just maybe, I was finally going to be really happy in this fairytale world.
About ten seconds later, however, I was cursing how far away our rooms were (because, seriously, it was a trek) when I made it there only to find the candles lit all around the room but there was no Tor to be found.
I checked all the rooms (his bathroom, my bathroom, his dressing room, my dressing room, his sitting room, you get the picture), he wasn’t anywhere.
Shit!
Was I supposed to go somewhere else?
I stood by the bed and tried to think of where I might have to go and it hit me that the balcony off his study faced the city proper, not the sea like the one off our rooms did. Maybe I was supposed to go there.
Holding the cake carefully, I lifted my skirts in one hand and ran to his study as fast as I could without dropping the cake.
When I got there, the double doors were mostly closed, one open an inch. I turned and put my booty in it to open it (I’d have to light the candles later, so much for my big reveal, I didn’t have the time) and stopped dead when I heard Algernon’s voice.
“I apologize for calling you out at this hour but with her performance today…” he paused, “Well, as you know, the men are talking. She’s not herself. So not herself, it’s strange.”
And Tor’s answer made my entire body lock.
“She says she’s from a different world.”
Uh…
What?
I said I was from a different world?
He didn’t believe me?
I thought he’d come to believe me.
I heard Algernon’s sharp bark of surprised laughter before he asked, “A different world?”
“Yes. A different world,” Tor replied. “Gods, it’s unbelievable. She lives it and breathes it. She’s even created words to go with it. She tells me extraordinary stories of the make-believe architecture and fantastical gadgets they have in her world.” He paused and my dazed brain imagined him shaking his handsome head in disgust at the same time it hazily recalled the many nights over dinner or when we were in bed when I’d tell him stories of my world and all the things in it when he went on, “I must admit, it’s stunning how clever she is, how sharp her mind. She’s astonishingly imaginative and she never forgets a word of it. She has to be making it up as she goes along but every lie she tells, she remembers and uses it again.”
Every lie I tell?
“How bizarre,” Algernon muttered.
“It’s remarkable,” Tor said with what, if I wasn’t about to melt into a puddle of steaming heartbreak, I would have noted was clear respect.
“So she’s playing you?
“Indeed,” Tor answered. “I gave her permission to do so and clearly she took me up on the offer.”
I stepped away from the door in order to lean against the wall beside it so my shaking knees wouldn’t fail me.
He thought I was playing him.
He thought I was playing him!
Weeks of it! Nearly two months of it!
He thought I was playing him!
“You gave her permission?” Algernon sounded shocked.
“Certainly. It’s living a lie but living Cora’s lie is better by far than living with the old Cora.”
“It doesn’t make you angry?” Algernon asked.
“Gods no,” Tor replied. “It comes with her sweet body, that charming mouth of hers, her skillful tongue and the possibility that she’s already carrying my heir.”
Holy crap!
“So you’re getting something out of it,” Algernon stated.
“Every bloody night,” Tor replied and I felt pain sharp in my gut, like I’d been punched. “And if my wife lives and breathes her deceits with exuberant imagination out of bed, you can well imagine what she treats me to in it.”
Algernon chuckled a low, manly chuckle.
But I closed my eyes. Slowly.
He thought I was the Cora of this world.
He didn’t believe I was me.
I was falling in love with him…
Fucking shit, I’d already fallen in love with him.
And he was using me.
Using me!
Using me to get his heir.
He was trying to get me pregnant and enjoying himself doing it. And I was letting him.
And enjoying myself doing it, too.
But I loved him.
And he did not love me.
He didn’t even like me.
He was playing me!
Why, why, why did guys have to be dicks in my world and in fairytale world?
Why?
“Well done, sir,” Algernon stated as I made up my mind, straightened from the wall and then walked right into the room.
Both men started when I did, their heads swinging in my direction.
But I only had eyes for Tor as he stared at me walking across the room carrying the swirly, creamy frosted cake with its blue birthday candles that I’d wanted so badly and worked so hard to make for him (seriously, the kitchens in his castle were warm and jolly but the utensils and appliances were so far away from KitchenAid it wasn’t funny).
“Happy birthday,” I whispered and even I heard the ache in my voice.
When Tor heard it, I watched him flinch and the flinch was so reactionary he had no hope of hiding it.
He knew I heard.
Good.
“Cora –” he started.
“In my world,” I cut him off and moved my what I was sure were heartsick eyes to Algernon, “we don’t serve birthday tarts with birthday sparklers, as Perdita told me you do here. In my world,” I looked back at Tor who was frozen to the spot and watching me stop at his desk and set the cake on it, “we serve birthday cake with
