Chapter Ten
CHAPTER
TEN
Alastair’s lips are so familiar and sweet, but I shouldn’t be here. Why is that?
I run my fingers through his blond hair as he pushes my dress up my thighs and moves my panties aside. His head is between my legs. I want to stop him, but all I can do is close my eyes.
When I look again, it’s Brayden’s messy brown hair. He kisses my inner thigh, his brown eyes glancing up to meet mine as my uneasiness fades. Now I’m aching. His tongue. His fingers. I want to see his face.
I reach for him…
Knocking pulled her out of the dream. Alastair and Brayden—Goddess above, what the hell was that about?
The already dark day had shifted into true twilight.
Disoriented, Scarlett startled at her unfamiliar surroundings before remembering she wasn’t in her room at home in Soleil, but rather in Brayden’s castle in Clair de Lune.
More knocking at the door. “Scarlett, are you in there? It’s me, Brayden.”
Longing pulsed in her still. Scarlett rubbed her face to clear the dream from her head. “Come in.”
“Were you sleeping?” He stood by the doorway looking unsure.
She stared at him, her cheeks burning hot. She couldn’t stop picturing his head between her legs. “I’m up now.” She pushed herself upright.
“Should I come back later?” He stepped backward.
She shook her head. “No. I should stay up unless I want to be awake all night. Have you seen Beni and Manon? Are they all right?”
“They’re fine. Manon is talking to Lachlan. Beni made friends on the archery field and was out all afternoon. He’s in the dining room with them now.”
“Oh, good.” Scarlett tried to look anywhere but at him.
Brayden sat at the foot of her bed, smiling gently. Her face grew hotter. She’d been so turned on in the dream, and he was right here—
Stop it.
She tried to clear her mind, but it didn’t help when Brayden asked, “Feeling better?”
“Yes.” She swung her legs over the edge of the bed and stood with surprising ease.
She looked at Brayden as she smoothed her black silk dress and fluffed her clean hair.
It was nice to be clean in front of him, if nothing else, but the way he was watching her reassured her she looked better than just freshly showered.
Scarlett walked around the room testing her balance without the cane. Everything seemed back to normal. “I still feel…”
Her dad’s face flashed into her mind, and she let out a shuddering breath. It was still all too much. Everything she’d processed during the energy healing had helped, but there was so much grief left—grief so potent it forced itself out of her without her permission.
Brayden enveloped her in his arms. She leaned into him, inhaling his woodsy scent.
A spark of joy lit in her chest from being near him, but mixed with her grief, it confused her.
Was that what the dream had been about—jumping from Alastair to Brayden in her imagination just to stay distracted from the pain? She was too tired to make sense of it.
“Is there anything I can do?” he asked.
“This.” She held him tighter, so grateful there wasn’t glass between them.
“All right.” He rubbed her back.
As she took a few deep breaths, the heaviness in her heart eased somewhat. Scarlett looked at him. He smiled at her, his gaze soft with affection. She’d never been able to see all of that in the mirror.
“There is one other thing you could do for me,” she said, her voice hesitant, because she didn’t want their closeness to end.
His fingers stilled on her back. “Name it.”
She wanted to ask for lots of things, but the fate of her country hung in the balance, and she couldn’t afford to be distracted. Scarlett pulled out of his grip and took a step back.
“I need paper and a pen to start writing letters to people in Soleil.”
He tilted his head to one side as his fingers brushed his lips. She could practically hear him thinking she should relax, not write letters. But then his easygoing smile returned a second later.
“Psh. That’s easy. Let’s get some food and then go to Lachlan’s study. You can write your letters there.”
Being on the other side of the mirror was surreal. Scarlett had seen the brown tweed couch and the mahogany desk through the glass so often that the details were familiar, yet it was her first time being immersed in the room. Like the hug with Brayden, it was more vivid being here in real life.
She went to the mirror. An opaque black covering hid it from view.
“We’ll keep it covered as long as you’re here, and there’s a silencing spell on it,” said Brayden.
“Can I peek through it quickly? Just to see what it’s like from this end.”
“Sure.”
He peeled back the cover. Her dressing room was there on the other side, still in disarray from their hasty departure that morning. Seeing it made her heart race as if she were still there. She backed away, not wanting to relive their escape, and Brayden replaced the cover.
“It must be a trip seeing it from this side.” He strode over to Lachlan’s desk, Scarlett trailing behind him, and pulled some paper out of a drawer. “I wonder if I’ll ever see this room through your mirror.”
She liked the hopeful way he said that. “I hope so. I want you to visit when all this settles down. I’ll get Laylani thrown in jail and get the border legislation passed so you can come anytime.
With her gone, I’ll have my house all to myself.
Plenty of space for you.” She said it with a touch of humor knowing she was making it sound easy, when, in fact, she’d listed enough tasks to potentially fill a lifetime.
He chuckled. “I love the confidence. You reckon it’ll be hard to prove what she did?”
“I’ll find a way.” Scarlett sat at Lachlan’s desk and picked up a pen.
Brayden stretched out on the tweed couch and started tossing a ball he’d taken from the desk into the air above him. “Who are you writing to first?”
“Elestine Spencer.” She pondered what to say for a moment.
Then she wrote a letter conveying the essentials of the abduction and what Beni had overheard Laylani saying to the doctor.
She closed it by asking Elestine to keep everything to herself for the time being.
Scarlett signed the letter and walked to the couch to hand it to Brayden. “How’s that?”
He skimmed the page. “This isn’t the whole truth, right?”
She shook her head. “Dad always said, ‘Never write anything down that you don’t want on the front page of the paper.’”
Brayden nodded in approval. “Good advice. Tell me the whole story front to back.”
Scarlett paced the office as she talked him through the chain of events, beginning with her dad’s death, continuing with the ominous threat from Moira Ashworth and her abduction, and ending with Laylani putting her into a medically induced coma in her own home.
She came to a halt in front of him. “Do I sound paranoid?”
He shook his head, eyes full of worry. “No. The chain of events is suspicious.”
“What if I’m wrong? What other explanation is there?” she asked. “If it’s not Moira, how did I end up unconscious for almost a month?”
Brayden’s brow furrowed as he considered this. “It’s possible Laylani acted on her own. Maybe Moira wasn’t involved and your dad’s death was someone else. Who were his enemies?”
“Plenty of people don’t like his politics, but most of them aren’t public figures.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, if you believe—like many do—that opening the border to tourism and trade is the first step toward legalizing magic, there are people who’d be impacted negatively by that. Namely, those who profit from Soleil’s black market.”
“Are any of those people well-known?” asked Brayden.
“No. Although I did meet someone before my dad died. Alastair dragged me to an illegal boxing match between a hydra and a dire wolf.” She told him all she could remember about the night, including Cass saving them from being arrested.
“As we were walking through the tunnels, Cass mentioned she bribes the police for immunity from raids.” Scarlett ran the tip of her finger over her bottom lip as she pondered it all.
“That’s interesting. So the police stand to lose bribes if the black market is legalized.
How high up does that money go? Beyond the head of police, up into the Soleil Bureau and the government?
That could be a motive for Moira or one of her sidekicks.
If Cass is any indication, perhaps the black market itself wouldn’t have gone after your father. ”
Scarlett stared sightlessly, considering all the possibilities.
“I need to look into it more, but I agree. Cass said they’d make more money if the matches were legal, and the police’s cut from the fights is bigger than what the house keeps.
Their audience could be much larger if the fights were legal.
The black market is way more than boxing matches, so I don’t have any idea if that motivation would extend to people selling other magical things, but it’s possible. ”
“So now we have two suspects. The police and Loira.”
“Loira?”
“You know, Moira plus Laylani. Loira. Or we could use Maylani if you like that better.”
Scarlett shook her head, but she was smiling as she sat back down at Lachlan’s desk. She put the letter to Elestine to the side. “Who else should I write to? Probably Alastair. We haven’t spoken since the breakup. He’d be pissed off to only hear about me from his mother.”
Brayden’s face went blank. “I don’t know if you owe him that courtesy, but I’d appreciate a letter from you if I were him.” After a moment he asked, “Do you miss him at all?”
She huffed. “No. Breaking up was the right thing to do.”
Although it was confusing that her dad had died the day after their breakup. Her life had been split in two, the before and the after, and Alastair was firmly part of the before—a time she longed for. But returning to him wouldn’t fix what was broken. He’d make things worse, not better.