“
Your highness,” he said below the burble of conversations. “You have just snubbed the Baroness of Crawford.”
“Have I?” Her fine eyes were alight and her mouth offered him the smile he found himself wishing she reserved for him alone. “I must be terribly rude.”
“On her afternoon calls tomorrow she will undoubtedly inform her every acquaintance of your outrageous foreign snobbery.”
“She did not notice I passed. None of them ever do.”
“Why—”
“Oh, let’s not talk about that,” she said hurriedly. “Tell me what you wished to speak with me about.”
“Did I?”
“Of course you did. You were staring at me from all the way across the room.” Her tongue was sweet and gentle over the harsh Saxon syllables of his native language.
She wrote in French, the language most of her people adopted at birth— though Cam had learned from her diary that the Sensaire dialect was, in some instances, quite a different thing indeed. He wished he knew the endearments she spoke to her fantasy version of him.
“I thought it rather the opposite,” he said honestly.
“Oh, it could not have been, my lord. Princesses do not stare.”
He glanced aside. “Only queens, I suppose.”
She shifted her attention to her mother and released a short breath of frustration.
“Daggers, as they say,” he murmured.
“Daggers indeed.”
“She doesn’t like it when I speak with you, does she?” he said because he knew it to be true, and justifiably so. If Claire were eight years older, he wouldn’t like her talking to a man like him either.
“No. She does not. But I do.” She seemed to study him. Her lips parted, then closed abruptly.
“Your highness?” he said quietly.
“Sometimes,” she said upon a rush of air, “I wish that I were an entirely different person and not a princess at all.”
He watched her eyes, wide and without any hint of spoiled complaint in them. “Do you?”
“Yes. For instance, I wish that I were standing here wearing a shockingly red satin gown and singing Christmas carols at the top of my lungs.”
He chuckled. “Do you like singing, princess?”
“Singing?” Twin creases appeared between her brows. “What about the red gown? Shouldn’t you ask me about that first?”
“Probably. But since I should like to see you wearing a shockingly red satin gown, it wasn’t my principal curiosity.”
Her mouth split into a perfect smile.
“Now you’ve done it,” he said. “Your mother will have you cleaning the floors in punishment for that grin.”
Candlelight twinkled in her eyes. “Princesses do not grin, my lord.”
“Perhaps not. But they smile beautifully.”
-Cam & Jacqueline
”
”