by Noelle Adams
He took my hand and led me to his rumpled bed.
The lump returned to my throat as I climbed onto it. “Thank you for everything,” I said, a little stiffly. “These weeks with you have been…amazing. I’m going to miss you so much.”
“Me too.” The words were almost distant, but I knew he wasn’t really being cool and standoffish. He felt things so deeply. His expression might be stoic, but the haunted anguish barely leashed in his eyes was heartbreaking. I had to turn away from it.
“I’m sorry it has to end this way,” I continued, my voice breaking once more on the last word. “That we didn’t get any more time.”
The bedroom was filled with a heavy silence as I waited for Jack’s reply.
For just a moment, I felt a flicker of irrational hope—the same flicker I'd felt on the bench in the city this afternoon. However unrealistic an attempt at a relationship between us might be, I knew I would jump at the chance if Jack made even the slightest signal that he wanted to try it, if he thought he could deal with all my baggage.
It wasn’t him, though. He let people make their own decisions. He’d never try to stop them or pressure them otherwise.
He wasn’t going to try to pressure me.
As if in confirmation of this fact, Jack finally said, “I know. We’re just from two different worlds, like you said.”
I swallowed hard. “Anyway, I hope you know how much this time has meant to me. I mean, it might be—” I cut myself off as a wave of grief washed over me. I sucked in a raspy breath and managed to compose myself. “It might be the best weeks of my life.”
Despite my best efforts, tears stung my eyes, and a couple even slipped down my cheeks. I swiped them away impatiently.
Jack’s face was suddenly tense, so tense it made me afraid. He seemed to shudder with some sort of intensity. Then he bit out, “Me too.”
For some reason, his curt response—and everything it implied—proved my undoing. I started to shake uncontrollably, and my face contorted as I tried desperately to hold back sobs.
Jack made a gruff sound in his throat and stretched out his arms in invitation. I moved into them—letting him gather me to his chest, hold me against him, press kisses into my hair.
I shook against him for a few moments, breathing him in and trying to take comfort in his warmth and strength. Rather than dwelling on the fact that this was the last time I’d ever feel him this way.
My sobs eased after a minute, but I didn’t try to pull away. I just started to kiss his shoulder, then his neck, then his jaw. Until I found and claimed his mouth.
He opened easily to my kiss, adjusting my body in his lap so I was straddling his hips and then pressing my upper body against his. The kiss was slow and deep, and I felt like I was drinking him in. Jack’s hands stroked over my hair and my back until he finally settled on my bottom.
After a few minutes, I felt him harden against my groin, and I moaned as I wedged a hand between our bodies to find and squeeze his erection through the thin fabric of his pajama pants.
Jack grunted against my mouth as I fondled him. My nipples were erect beneath the cotton of my gown, and they brushed against the hard lines of Jack’s chest. I squirmed above him, even as I kept reminding myself that this was goodbye.
“Amalie?” Jack rasped, pulling his mouth away and leaning his forehead against mine. His breathing was hot and uneven.
“Yes,” I said, intuitively understanding his unspoken question. “I want to. Once more.”
My emotions were still too close to the surface for me to be as wet as usual, but I was aroused enough for comfortable penetration. And I wanted to do this. I wanted to make love to Jack.
One last time.
My nightgown was already bunched up around my hips, so all we had to do was free Jack’s erection from his pants and push my panties aside. Jack held himself in place, aligning himself at my entrance, and I lowered myself, sheathing his hard flesh with my body.
We both moaned at the full penetration. Then I twined my arms around his neck, and we fell into another kiss, our lips and tongues clinging and stroking as I started to rock rhythmically in his lap.
He felt so big against and beneath me. So strong. So hot. So Jack. And, letting my need and the sensations guide my motion, I felt like I could never get enough of him.
I knew I had to let him go.
“Goodbye,” I mumbled against his mouth, holding him as tightly as I could and feeling tears aching in my eyes. “Goodbye, Jack.”
He grunted, his fingers digging into the soft flesh of my bottom. His neck jerked slightly, breaking off the kiss. Then he buried his face against my neck. “Goodbye,” he said, panting against my skin.
I clung to him desperately as the sensations rose up with my grief. I clung to him with my arms, my legs, my lips, my everything, and I tried to hold myself back from climax.
Didn’t want this to end.
It would end. He would leave. Tomorrow, he’d be on his way to Geneva and back to Minneapolis. Back to his life. It was reality. I could feel its pull, its inevitability aching in my heart.
My rocking became faster, clumsier as I pressed messy kisses on the side of his head, on any part of him I could reach.
“Amalie,” Jack said, lifting his face to capture my mouth again. His voice was thick and hoarse, the sexiest and saddest thing I’d ever heard. His hips bucked up against my pelvis, and his body grew tighter and tighter as the frantic motion of our bodies intensified. “Amalie,” he breathed against my lips.
My head fell back as pleasure welled up inside me, hopelessly tangled with sorrow. Both spilled over. Tears streamed down my face as my spine arched involuntarily. “Jack!”
Jack tried to wipe away my tears with his hands and his lips, but the gesture caused me to shake even more helplessly.
I was crying now. And about to come. And the clash of the feelings was terrifying and powerful and the truest embodiment of my conflicted heart.
Jack kissed me one more time with clumsy, unfocused passion. Tremors had started to run through his body as he tried to rein in his release.
Then I came, sobbing, clutching him, riding out the waves of pleasure as his control broke beneath me and he fell into climax too.
We gasped and slumped together against the pillows, holding each other in an urgent grip that softened as our bodies relaxed.
Neither of us spoke for several minutes.
When I glanced at the clock again, I knew I needed to get back to my room before anyone saw me here. It would lead to one more argument I simply didn’t have strength for.
I shifted on top of him, and Jack immediately loosened his embrace.
“You can sleep here with me tonight, if you want,” he said softly, his voice still a little hoarse.
“No. I better not.” I felt another lump in my throat, so I swallowed hard and rubbed at the tear streaks on my cheeks.
Jack just nodded, his eyes lingering on my face.
I managed to get off the bed and smooth out my nightgown. Then I went to my own room and cleaned myself up a little. But I didn’t take a shower. I didn’t want to wash Jack from my body.
I wanted to feel him on my skin for as long as I could.
Eight
The next morning, when I went downstairs at my normal time, my mother wasn’t in the breakfast room. Her absence was so strange that I simply stood in the doorway and stared at her empty seat for a long moment.
My head was even fuzzier and more aching than it had been the morning before. I’d gotten almost no sleep, and I’d cried most of the time.
“She had a headache last night,” a voice came from the direction of the sideboard. “She’s probably sleeping in.”
I turned my head to see Victoria, looking pale and pretty and sober, her plate full of fruit and bacon. I hadn’t seen my sister hardly at all the day before, except at a distance during lunch and croquet. She hadn’t said a word to me.
“Oh.”
“You look t
errible,” Victoria added, scanning me from head to toe.
“I feel terrible.”
“I thought you were blissfully happy. Isn’t that why you turned your back on us?”
“I didn’t—” I cut off the words, partly because I knew they were futile and partly because my throat was closing up. I’d gotten too little sleep and had been bombarded with too much emotion. I might cry at any moment.
Victoria took my halted comment as if I’d actually said the words. “That’s what it feels like,” she murmured, turning around to pour herself a glass of milk. She’d always had strange eating habits—at least as far as I was concerned. She never drank coffee or tea, and she drank milk with every meal, even at fancy dinners when everyone else was drinking wine.
It had never fazed her a bit—the idea that other people would think she was strange. I suddenly envied her, wishing I could be the same way, brush off other people’s opinions like they were nothing but lint on my sleeve.
“I’m sorry it feels that way,” I said at last. “I truly am. But I’m doing the best I can. I’ve ended things with Jack because I couldn’t give you all up.” My voice cracked as I said the words, as I made them really real.
Victoria gave me a quick, searching look. “You have?”
“Yes. Are you happy now?”
“No, I’m not happy. You obviously aren’t, and I still have to marry Edward.”
“You do not have to marry him. They can’t force you, Victoria. Just tell them you won’t.”
“I don’t believe you understand the state of our finances. Someone needs to do something.”
“There are other options—”
“No. It’s a done deal. I spoke to Edward yesterday, and the decision is made.”
“Victoria—” My eyes were filled with tears now—for my sister, not for me.
“It will be fine,” she said mildly. “We can live separate lives. Since he barely speaks to me, it’s not like he’s going to be constantly bothering me. Someone had to do something. It’s not the end of the world.”
“I never wanted that for you,” I said at last, pulling myself together.
“What kind of world do you think we live in? Since when has anyone gotten everything they want?”
They didn’t. I knew that was true, as well as I knew anything. Happiness was always negotiated by making the best of what was offered.
“I want you to be happy,” I told her.
“I will be. I think I will be. Doing things to help my family makes me happy.”
“There’s a difference between doing things to help them and letting them force you into something that’s not right.”
“Who’s to say what’s right? This feels right to me.”
“Okay. I don’t agree with it, but I’ll accept it, if you mean that. So maybe you can understand how what feels right to me might not look like what you want it to.”
“I thought you said you broke up with Jack.”
“I did.” I closed my eyes for a moment against the pain. “I did. He wanted me to give you all up, give up my identity almost completely, and I just couldn’t do that. But nothing else has changed. I’m still not sure the life that’s best for me is the one where I stay home and let Mother make decisions for me.”
Victoria’s expression had changed. She didn’t look quite so cold, as if something I’d said had truly struck home for her. “What will you do?”
“I don’t know. I want to keep taking classes in art history—get a graduate degree. I’m going to figure out a way to make that happen, one way or another.”
“Maybe you can.” Victoria paused, still standing near the sideboard and holding her untouched plate. “He truly wanted you to give up your family? I thought he seemed…different than that.”
“I don’t know. He said he didn’t want me to do that. But he wanted nothing to do with you all—and nothing to do with Villemont or my position here. I don’t see how a relationship could work if one of us closes such an important part of the other’s life out.” As I spoke, a few tears streamed down my face, the acknowledgement that no matter how hard it had been, I’d made the right decision.
It might work in melodramatic novels and movies. It might even feel romantic. But my life, my identity, my history, my family was just as important as his was. It had just as much value. And he didn’t seem to understand that.
“It couldn’t,” Victoria said softly. Then, without warning, she put her plate on the table and started out of the room. Before she left, she touched my arm very lightly. “I’m sorry. I could see how you felt about him. But you need a man who loves all of you, one who will make sacrifices for you—not expect you to make them for him.”
I shook with silent sobs as my sister walked out of the room—feeling better and broken at the very same time. Before I could recover, someone else came into the room. I was blinded by tears but could make out Jack’s big body and broad shoulders.
Then I felt him, as he pulled me into his arms.
I cried against him, even though he couldn’t possibly know what was the matter with me.
“I’m sorry,” I choked out, after a minute. “I feel like I’m falling apart. It’s just that Victoria—”
“I know. I overheard.”
I cried again at the knowledge that he’d heard what we’d said and he must have been hurt by it.
I didn’t want him to be hurt.
I was finally pulling myself together and wiping away my tears when Jack said, “Amalie.”
His arms were still around me, and I looked up at him, seeing a deep emotion twisting on his face. “Jack?”
Before he could get any more words out, someone else entered the breakfast room.
“Good morning, Amalie,” my mother said. “Young man, would you please remove your hands from my daughter?”
Jack blinked in surprise. “I was just—”
“I don’t care what you were doing,” she continued in a clipped tone. “This is a public room.”
“Stop it,” I burst out. “Just stop it! He wasn’t doing anything inappropriate. I was upset, and he was comforting me.”
Both Jack and my mother looked surprised by my tone.
“This is a public roo—” my mother began.
I didn’t let her finish the sentence. “I don’t care if it’s a public room. I don’t care if we’re on the royal balcony and the whole of Villemont can see us. You don’t get to dictate what he does.”
“I’m not—”
“Yes, you are. Exactly as you try to dictate my life. And it’s just wrong, Mother. It’s just wrong. I love you. And I love Father and Henry and Victoria and Lisette. And I love Villemont, and I want to play a part in public life here. But you’re backing me into a corner because other things are important to me too. I’m going to go to graduate school and study art history, and you can’t stop me from that. And you can’t stop me from loving Jack if I want. And if you keep it up, you’re going to push me away, when I know that’s the last thing you want.”
My mother looked absolutely stunned. “You’ve never spoken to me like this before.”
“I know,” I said, in a milder tone, wiping away a few stray tears. “I’m sorry if it’s rude, but I just can’t go on this way. There has to be some way for me to be part of this family and for me to still be…me.”
“You’re a princess. You aren’t just a regular girl.”
“Then there has to be some way for me to be both.”
Jack was standing silently beside me, and I had no idea what was going on in his mind. And I realized it didn’t matter if he thought I was crazy, or if he was leaving me in an hour, or if my mother thought I had staged a revolt.
I’d finally done the right thing.
“Life is never as simple as that,” my mother murmured, not quite as bold and polished as normal. “Not for a Rothman.”
“I understand that,” I replied, “but some things are simpler than we think.”
I felt like I was on th
e verge of breaking down, and there was really nothing else to say. My mother had gone to get her coffee and was clearly starting to pretend the entire conversation had never happened.
I’d never gotten my coffee. Or my breakfast. Or even sat down. But I turned around and left the room anyway.
I was too flustered to wait for Jack, to talk to him, to even see what he would do now, to do anything but hurry down the hall to give myself space to think.
I nearly ran into my father and Edward Farmingham Channing IV. I had no idea what the younger man was doing here so early, but I assumed it had something to do with negotiating the terms of his marriage to Victoria.
My near collision flustered me even more. I gaped up at my father.
“The Guard is getting ready to strut,” my father said, not responding at all to my state of mind, which must be obvious by my expression. “Come watch with us.”
Each week, the Royal Guard did an elaborate processional—compete with drums and pipes—mostly for tourists. But my father made a point of watching at least once a month, as a show of his appreciate for the Guard.
I’d intended to invite Jack to watch the “strut,” as my father had always called it, but I’d forgotten all about it in the face of everything else.
Unable to speak through my emotion, I just walked with my father and Edward to the side door where we took our places on a well-guarded platform, where we could have a good view of the proceedings. The courtyard was full of tourists, and the Guard began as soon as my father gave a wave of his hand.
I stood on the platform and tried not to cry. I should have just gone to my room. Now I was trapped, and I had to pretend to smile and wave at the observers.
I hoped Jack was all right. I’d left him all alone with my mother.
“Amalie!”
The familiar voice bellowed out over the noise from the procession, and I knew at once who it was, even before I turned to see Jack hurrying down the front steps of the palace.
The row of marching guards was in between me and Jack, so he had to stop, even when he saw me.
