Chapter 5
The beanstalk Driscoll grew for me to climb fell away right as I reached for the short brown rope hanging from the window. My hand latched onto it, and I swung my other arm to reach up and grip onto the ledge.
That’s when a scream rent the air, and suddenly my vision was a blur of black feathers and brown hair and pale skin. A body flew past me out the window, a hand grappling for the ledge and clasping it tight.
“Let go of my hair,” a female voice snapped.
Melodic, sweet, like music to my ears.
My brain finally caught up with the frenzy of activity, and I looked down to realize that I hadn’t grabbed onto a rope at all—it was hair. Her hair.
I let go of it, hand reaching for the ledge, muscles bunching as I tightened my hold.
Driscoll shouted up from below. “What’s going on?”
“Well, I’m currently fighting for my life,” I shouted back. “Thanks for asking.”
“Don’t let go!” he yelled back. “You’ll go splat like a bug.”
Thanks, Driscoll.
“What is wrong with you?” Leoni shouted. “He doesn’t need to hear that right now.”
“Who is that? Who are you?” the woman beside me hissed as she also clutched onto the ledge, her knuckles white, all the color drained from her face, that braid of hers whipping undone, long hair streaming out behind her. Her voice was frantic, her legs kicking wildly.
The wind roared in my ears, everything a blanket of milky-white fog.
It was her. Bloody waters. After months of dreaming about her, she was here, in the flesh. Beautiful with round green eyes, a small pointed nose, those adorable freckles?—
“Are you mute?” Her words ripped me back to reality, both of us struggling as the wind threatened to whip us from this ledge and to our deaths.
“Splat like a bug.”
Great. Now I couldn’t stop picturing myself flattened on the ground below. I could just hear the gossip already. What an uproar that would cause. The headlines wrote themselves.
The famous playboy prince falls to his death like an idiot.
The first time Prince Lochlan took anything seriously in his life—and he died.
The playboy prince is now the dead prince.
I shook my head. This wasn’t helping.
The woman kicked at the stone, trying to find some sort of footing, but her boots kept slipping, and her hands were sliding from the ledge as well.
Right. I had to do something.
I did not come all this way just to watch her die, to die along with her. My teeth gritted together as I dug my feet into that rough stone, then used all my strength to pull myself up. I grunted as my muscles shook with the effort, until I managed to get myself onto that ledge. I hopped up through the window, and the woman gazed up at me with fear stark in her eyes. That same fear she’d had in my dream.
“I’ve got you,” I said and reached down, my hands wrapping around her waist and pulling her up into my chest.
She slammed into me with an oomph, those green eyes stirring something deep inside of me that I didn’t understand. I clutched tight to her, hardly able to believe she was real, that she was in my arms, that we were alive.
I’d done it. I’d found her. I gazed down at her, feeling so blissfully alive.
Adrenaline pumped through me, and I suddenly had the urge to kiss her. To lean down and sweep my lips across hers. After hearing her voice, seeing her face for so many nights in a row, I felt like I knew her.
A familiar smile came to my lips, the one that generally made women melt. One woman had actually fainted when I used this smile on her. I’d caught her, of course, and when she’d woken, she thanked me with a kiss.
The woman stared up at me, not moving, an unreadable expression on her face. All I knew was that we were alive, and I wanted to feel something. To feel anything after the last year spent missing so much of myself.
“It’s not every day I yank a beautiful woman out of her tower,” I said, leaning down.
She yelped, freezing me in place right as a searing pain shot through my head. My hold on her slackened as she stepped back, her figure growing fuzzy.
“Okay, so a kiss was the wrong move, then,” I slurred.
She split in half, her form growing hazy, and I cocked my head. “There’s two of you,” I said, confused. Spots dotted my vision, and I stumbled before falling and slamming against the ground. I gazed up at her, and my last thought before I fell into darkness was to wonder who in the spirits below had I just rescued.