A Kiss like Roses: Fairy Tale Synergy Book 1

by Colton, Eliza

  Home, sweet home. No matter how long it took, we’d return to the way we were years ago before Father fell ill… and I was patient. We all were.

  I was home.

  We’d be okay.

  A small part of me felt grief and longing towards Shao, the missing, crucial piece in my life. I wondered if the time would pass at all, or if I’d be swallowed up by his absence.

  Yet time ticked by, as consistent and painfully reliable as ever.

  Aided by the flurry of hectic changes and activities that occupied my time, I stopped counting the seconds between every minute. I stopped willing time to simultaneously stop—so I could recover—and hurry up until my heart was mended.

  Within two months, my family’s life returned to an echo of the old days, although my time with Shao was a sore topic that we never spoke of.

  We moved back to our home. Our neighbor, who had purchased it at a steep discount when we’d been desperate for money, found a small kindling of guilt in his heart and sold it back to us for the same price. I was surprised he had a heart at all.

  Meanwhile, Father became quite the talk of upper-class society. His misfortune (and my resulting desperate acts) had been often gossiped of before, and everyone was shocked that we had acquired a cure for him after so long.

  Though the judgmental stares of the nobles were hard to stomach, Father also got significant more commissions because of it, so we decided it was fair.

  Under normal circumstances, it’d have been hard for him to find jobs again, even with less wealthy nobles, because of how much time he’d taken off. He’d been long replaced.

  But gossip was gossip, and artists who’d scoffed at my Father’s paintings four years ago now pestered him for dozens of paintings, seeking an excuse to bombard him with questions.

  Had he robbed a bank? Stolen from the royal treasury? Discovered dormant magical powers?

  A few suspected he was related to Shao’s return to the palace, since the timelines added up, but none of them could figure out how.

  Father always replied with a sullen smile and a tangentially related pun of his choosing.

  The nobles’ interest trickled down, but Father’s connections and portfolio had been rekindled by now. We were still in debt, but it was manageable.

  Connie and I worked part time as maids to anyone who’d hire us. Our work was tedious but survivable. Thanks to Father’s recovery, no one had to work more than thirty to forty hours unless they wanted to.

  I wanted to, and unsurprisingly, I was the only one who felt that way. My hours numbered in the sixties or seventies. I spent most of my free time either asleep or dying from exhaustion, but I didn’t mind it.

  In fact, I preferred it. Constant work and fatigue distracted me from my thoughts.

  There was another reason I preferred to work: it gave me an excuse not to follow Father to his workplace as I often had in the past. Though he no longer painted for the most powerful families, his clientele was still obscenely wealthy and lived close to the palace.

  It would have killed me to see Shao again, and I didn’t think I’d survive seeing some dainty little princess dangling at his arm.

  “Bea!” Connie barged into the mansion I was cleaning, surprising me out of my wandering thoughts. Her hands were tightly holding a mountain of sheets.

  “The family may be away on vacation, but that doesn’t mean you can storm in here as you please when I’m supposed to be working,” I chided. She rolled her eyes and ignored me, a far cry from the mature older sister she’d taken the part of during the past three years.

  I preferred her this way, but that was a given.

  “Look at this!” She said, throwing her papers at my face. “It came in the mail this morning.” I winced as I grabbed them and straightened them out.

  “Let’s see…” I scanned over the documents, mumbling key points to myself. “Hereditas Academy welcomes you back… Scholarship…”

  My jaw dropped.

  “What?”

  Connie bounced with excitement, a huge grin on her face. “Didn’t Father paint for one of the descendants of the academy’s founder? Maybe he really, really, really liked Father’s work and pulled some strings—”

  I shook my head, setting the papers down on the counter.

  “None of the top three academies have ever offered scholarships,” I said. They didn’t need to, since ninety five percent of their students were the upper crest of society. Father had struggled to pay our tuition even before the misfortune, only barely making the payment deadlines.

  “They’ve started as of a couple weeks ago,” Connie said. “Isn’t that wonderful?”

  It was, but my chest filled with hesitation and worry, not joy.

  Sudden scholarships did not drop out of thin air, and two students who dropped out due to financial concerns meant nothing to wealthy, prestigious academies.

  There was a reason behind the letters and forms.

  Shao.

  Impossible.

  Shao hadn’t sent a single letter since he’d left. I was irrelevant. A pawn, necessary for his recovery—but worthless and forgettable now that he no longer needed me.

  He’d already given me a cure worth fifty million, and a single kiss and a stolen heart were nothing compared to the life of my father.

  Why would he do this for me?

  My mind whirled.

  It didn’t make sense for Shao to have been involved, but everything about this situation reeked of his interference. I couldn’t make sense of it.

  I suppressed these thoughts. I was nothing to Shao, and I had to remember that. Hope was treacherous. It only led to shattered hearts.

  If he thought of me with anything but pity and contempt, he’d at least have sent letters before spending however much money to help my family study again.

  Connie was probably right. The scholarship and our readmittance had been either through a stroke of luck or thanks to one of Father’s customers’ whims.

  “Um, yes, fantastic,” I mumbled at last. “I should return to work now. Talk later?”

  Connie tapped her nails against the counter. “You’re overworking yourself.”

  I quirked a half smile. “It’s not even close to how much you were working, Connie.”

  “That was out of necessity,” she said. “We don’t need to kill ourselves with work anymore.”

  “I won’t die from a few months of work as simple as cleaning,” I said as I dusted the top of the shelf next to me.

  “Bee.”

  “Besides, it’s kind of fun once you get used to it.”

  “Bee.”

  “Alright, I know what you’re thinking, but you can make music with dusters and broomsticks, see—” I rambled on, unwilling to hear whatever Connie wished to tell me, and I tapped the duster against the shelf to the rhythm of a nursery rhyme.

  She sighed, but her lips were curved up into a smile.

  “Beatrice, you should forget about him,” she said. I bat my lashes at her.

  “Whom are you referring to?”

  She flicked me on my forehead, and I jumped back with a theatric yelp, posing with my duster in a defensive posture as if it were a dagger. Connie giggled.

  “Oh, don’t make me laugh when I’m trying to play the wise older sister role,” she said.

  “Don’t bother,” I replied. “You’ve lost practice, and you’re quite bad at it now.”

  Another flick—this one, I narrowly managed to evade, and I bumped her fingers with the handle of my duster.

  “I don’t even know what you’re doing anymore,” Connie said with another giggle. “But you know what I’m talking about. Prince Asha. Forget about him.”

  “Who’s Prince Asha?” I asked, and Connie feigned an exasperated huff. (To be fair, her exasperation was heartfelt.)

  “Oh, I don’t know. The man you’ve been moping over since you returned, maybe.”

  “I have not been moping—”

  “Says the girl who mistakes me fo
r him every time I wake her up.”

  Ouch. That was cruel.

  Playfully shoving her, I said, “It’s alright, Connie.” The nickname felt foreign in my mouth, but it was what I’d called her until three years ago, and we’d returned it to practice. “Don’t they say falling in love is the best cure for a heartache? Now that I’ll attend school again, I’m sure I’ll find someone new to fawn over.”

  She snorted. “I wish that could work, but you were always so absorbed in your studies… Have you ever even crushed on anyone?”

  Yeah. Shao.

  “I liked that one neighbor we had when we were seven,” I said.

  Connie lifted her brow. “Really. Seven.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said, puffing my chest up. “What was his name? Sam? Dan? It was one of those single syllable names. Boy had the most beautiful blue eyes.”

  “His name was Sean, and his eyes were black,” said Connie. “Aren’t you just thinking of Prince Asha again?”

  Well, crap.

  “Sorry, no, I was thinking of the other guy I had a crush on. For this crush, I was fourteen!”

  “Right. I appreciate how proud you can be over a fourteen-year-old crush. Who was this lucky boy?”

  I dug through my memories. Who at the academy had blue eyes?

  “James,” I said. “Wait, no. Harper. Harper had blue eyes, right?”

  Connie kneaded her brows with her fingertips, and it was clear she was using every effort she could muster not to seize the duster and swat some sense into me with it.

  (Using the feathery part, hopefully.)

  (With newly recovered Connie, I couldn’t be so sure.)

  “When we start school again, the first thing I’m doing is finding you some bumbling blue eyed idiot,” she said. “Since clearly that’s all you care about.”

  “That’s not—” I stopped myself just in time from admitting that what I cared about was Shao himself. Not just his eyes, his scent, his voice, or even his kindness.

  I wanted everything about him, both good and bad.

  I wanted to feel his warmth next to me. His lips against mine, softer this time and with love instead of fear.

  None of this was possible.

  “It’s definitely all I care about,” I settled on saying, adding a somber nod as a final touch to seal my seriousness. I adjusted my grip on my letters, moving sideways to straighten them out against the countertop.

  Connie scoffed. “Beatrice—”

  A thin, narrow piece of paper slipped out of the pile of mail. It had only been lifted by the force of the papers sandwiching it. It was so small and unnoticeable that it had shuffled around between the papers and out of my grip.

  Connie quirked her brows, and I narrowed mine as I bent down to pick it up.

  The black ink used to write on it was cheap and blotted, bleeding out to the other side illegibly. I turned it around, and the words knocked the air out of my throat.

  I’m coming.

  Beneath those simple words in a scrawled, hurried handwriting befitting of a healer, there was an even rougher and illegible signature. Shao.

  I didn’t know how it had gotten into my stack of mail. I handed it to Connie, who looked at it with an indecipherable frown.

  “Bee—”

  “How dare he?” I cried. “He ignores my existence for two months, and the next thing he says is that he’s coming? Coming where? Why’s he even keeping tabs on where I live? Could the letter be any more effortless?”

  I continued crying out in shame and disgust and, worst of all, hope and forgiveness. I struggled to squelch down those feelings, but it was stubborn.

  Connie put her hand to my arm, giving me a chagrined smile. “I wouldn’t put too much stock in his words, although I know you want to.”

  I shook my head, my eyes widening. “What are you talking about? I’m… I know he’s untrustworthy. Isn’t that what I just said?”

  “I’m your sister,” Connie replied. “And, Bee, you’re incredibly obvious. You miss him. You’re happy to receive the letter. And I want this for you.” She paused and looked away, filling the silence with doubt and my sinking hopes.

  “What’s the catch?” I asked because I knew there was one.

  “He told me he’d return within the next week,” Connie replied. “When you were out.”

  I wrinkled my nose. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t he—”

  “I wanted to surprise you with his visit,” Connie said, licking her lips. “But he never came, and he never even sent a letter, so I…” Fidgeting with her hands and arms, she turned her gaze down towards the floor. She shuffled her feet.

  “So, you thought he forgot about me,” I said, the words leaving my tongue in an acerbic, cold haze. She was right. I’d been hurt enough by his absence and silence without his empty promises. So why had he returned to my life? Why had he sent me such a sloppy, halfhearted piece of paper that would be shameful to call a letter?

  Shaking my head, I smiled back up at Connie and steered the conversation away to happier, more casual talks of the academy and our future studies. Wariness marked her crinkling forehead as she replied, but we were soon gossiping as we always did, merry and hopeful.

  Both of those emotions were feigned, but we strove to ignore that.

  Chapter 29

  Connie and I rushed through the dark streets, which were illuminated by the windows of the candle-lit houses. We were late going home. Caught up in our conversations until the sun started to set, I’d failed to complete my job. Connie had stayed behind with me to help.

  We dashed to the table and plopped down into adjacent seats, smiling politely as we picked up our forks and pretended we weren’t panting or sweating from running half a mile.

  “My daughters used to be obsessed with being punctual,” Father said. He feigned a glare at Mother. “What has happened in my absence? Clearly someone has failed to discipline them.”

  She huffed, stealing a cut of steak from Father’s plate in retaliation. “Your illness has twisted your memories. Your children have always been this discourteous.”

  Pointing a fork at him, she added, “Who could we possibly blame but their father, who dragged them with him to work every day because he feared they’d trip to death on a pebble if they spent a second away from him?”

  “You make me sound like I was wrong for caring about our children,” he said.

  Mother shrugged. “Are they our children? I never could have guessed. I thought I magically got pregnant from an affair you had with a secret mistress.”

  Father heaved a sigh. “Don’t slander me in front of my daughters. They’ll get the wrong idea.”

  “Your daughters?” Mother snorted. “Funny. You were just trying to argue they were mine too.”

  “Dear—”

  “You didn’t need to wait for us,” I said, interrupting their mock argument. I had a sneaking suspicion they’d start making out if this continued, and that was not something I wanted to think about, much less see.

  If they wanted to make up for lost time, they could do that after my sister and I left for the academy. Or never. Preferably never.

  Connie nodded at me in support, and it was clear she was thinking the same thing.

  Father turned to me, and his eyes shook with a pitying expression I couldn’t decipher, his lips quivering at their corners.

  “Father?”

  “I… have news for us,” he declared, clearing his throat.

  I blinked in confusion. Normally, he was enthusiastic and playful, although he still had moments of weakness remnant from his illness. Why did he sound so hesitant?

  My parents glanced at each other, and I felt a tight knot in my stomach.

  “Y-you see,” Father started, only to trail off again.

  “Just tell her, dear,” Mother said. “Your silence is worrying her more.”

  I was grateful that she understood my feelings, but why couldn’t she tell me herself instead of prodding Father to?

/>   Piercing the same spot on his food repeatedly, Father took a deep breath, steadying himself to tell me, when he was interrupted by a knock.

  “I’ll get it,” I grumbled, then pointed at Father with the spoon in my hand, the potato soup that I’d collected spilling back into the bowl. “When I’m back, you’d better have collected your thoughts and found the courage to tell me.”

  I made a half-scowl, half-sneer that I hoped was menacing, but my parents only laughed, my Mother’s palm covering her mouth. I couldn’t tell if they were laughing at me for being stupid or if they thought I was being as adorably stupid as a child throwing a tantrum… Wait. That was both the same thing, wasn’t it?

  Irritated by the interruption, I skulked over to the door as a thousand questions wandered in my head. Who could it be at this hour? It seemed a bit late for mail, and besides, Connie had already brought today’s batch to me earlier.

  Who in the world would interrupt a family dinner after the sun had long set?

  The banging on the door only grew more incessant and louder, and I heard my parents murmuring with increasingly heated, concerned voices as I reached the door and thrust it open, too impatient to peek out the window or peep hole first.

  Standing in front of me was a gangly man only a few inches taller than me, and he looked down at me almost sheepishly as he brushed away a strand of his cropped, jet-black hair. He had classically handsome features, but he was too wiry and thin-boned and almost gawky looking.

  Though, to be honest, the truth was that my eyes had become too spoiled by Shao’s sculpted jaw and sharp eyes for me to appreciate the looks of any other men.

  “Who are you?” I snapped, and I realized my parents and Connie had joined me when I heard my sister give a low whistle from behind me. Was she checking this boy out?

  “Bea—” Father began, and I wondered if this was the topic of conversation he’d danced around. I raised my brows.

  “Your father’s new student,” the black-haired boy replied, sauntering into the house past me as if he owned the place.

  Rather than joining Father, however, he stopped several feet away from me—a distance far enough that he wasn’t encroaching on my personal bubble, and yet it felt tantalizing. Taunting. He looked back at me with a sardonic stare that felt all too familiar and foreign at the same time.