Chapter 8 #3
But … could she? If Sebastien felt he must be loyal to his own father, he might feel compelled to tell the king about Sarah and the sort of advice she gave. And Rose couldn’t risk putting Sarah’s life on the line.
“There are so many to choose from,” she said, not quite answering the question. “I’m exhausted from thinking about them all, frankly, and I have a headache.” All true, if not the whole truth.
“Heavy is the crown, my queen.” Sebastien sat in one of her big chairs by the fireplace. Nina and Nonna sprawled into a furry circle on the rug she’d taken to keeping there for them. “Come cuddle with me,” he said, patting his knee.
Gratefully, Rose sat on Sebastien’s lap, leaning her head against his chest as he combed his fingers through her long hair, massaging her scalp, his golden touch vanishing her headache like magic. “You want to tell me about it?” he asked after a few moments.
Oh, how she did. And she hated, hated that she couldn’t just spill everything in her mind and heart to him like usual. “I’m too tired to talk,” she said in a blurry voice, which was mostly true. “This is nice, though.”
“I will hold you like this forever,” he promised.
“When we’re old and gray, you’ll come sit on my bony knee before a fire that we’ll have the servants build up to be hotter than the surface of the sun, and I’ll rub your aching head and you’ll tell me all the amazing feats of oneiromancy you performed that day. ”
“That’s a lovely image,” she conceded.
“In fact,” Sebastien continued in a slightly altered tone, “I have a gift for you and an important question to ask.” He reached between them to pull something out of his vest pocket. “A promise, too,” he added, “of that future.”
Her heart stuttered to a stop. “Sebastien, I—”
“I know it’s only been a few months,” he said over her, “which I’m sure will be your very rational argument, but you have decisions to make.
I want you to have all the information you need to weigh your options.
” With deft fingers, he opened the box one-handed, displaying a glittering ring. “Will you marry me, Rose?”
She stared at the jewel, utterly gobsmacked.
Unlike the ring—and, really, all the jewelry Clotaire had showered upon her—this wasn’t a rose.
Instead it was an opal, a perfect sphere, set in a net of silver, gold, and platinum, uplifted so that the light shimmered over its exquisite surface, bringing out a rainbow of color in an orb of pristine white.
She touched it tentatively, moved by its radiance, undermined by doubt.
“No rose metaphors,” Sebastien said softly. “First lesson.”
“Sebastien…” She couldn’t say more, her mouth too dry, her throat too tight.
“It’s the moon, like you,” Sebastien offered, almost shyly, then gave her his real smile. “You never ruled out moon metaphors.”
“I don’t know what to say,” she told him in utter honesty. It felt like so much. Too much. On top of the crushing weight of choosing a future, this forever commitment came as one more burden.
“Didn’t…” Sebastien began, after the silence had lengthened and grown into something unwieldy. He faltered. Cleared his throat. “I had believed that my father would make an offer?”
She stilled. Pulled back to look at his beautiful face, those clear green eyes empty of guile. “What do you know about it?”
She knew, of course, that Sebastien had been tasked by his father to soften her up for an offer from Soren.
She’d known it before she’d touched his intimate, dreaming self, finding that he’d been asked to befriend her, though seducing her had been a sincere desire of his.
And his ambitions to connect himself to her were all his own.
She’d also caught glimpses of his life growing up at Vega, and it made her sick to witness the darkness inside him from those women who’d used him.
Sebastien thought of Rose as the one who’d save him from ever having to trade on his sexual favors again.
It wasn’t exactly the stuff of true love, but her heart hurt for him.
It wasn’t entirely his fault that he viewed intimate relationships as transactional.
“I know that everyone wants their own Oneira,” he said, confirming her thoughts. Sebastien liked her; they were undoubtedly friends. But she was also a means to an end for him and always had been.
“I’m not anywhere near her caliber,” Rose said, her gaze traveling to the ring. It was too much. A sick fear sank through her gut, the sensation of chains vising tighter into her bones.
“Not yet,” Sebastien corrected lightly, tapping the tip of her nose, his grin fading as he searched her face. He set the jewelry box aside. “What’s wrong, Rose?”
“We can’t get married.”
“Well, not yet. We can have a long engagement and…” He trailed off as she was shaking her head.
“You don’t love me,” she told him, knowing it to be true. “And I don’t love you, not like that.”
“What is love?” he retorted with the jaded cynicism of a lifelong courtier. “No one marries for love, except for foolish idealists. You’ve said your parents don’t love each other.”
“Exactly. I don’t want their marriage.”
He sighed with impatience. “We wouldn’t be like that. We’re friends. We care about each other. You know me better than anyone, Rose. And we have great sex,” he added with a wicked smile.
He was right. And it still felt so wrong.
“I thought you would agree with all of that,” he said.
He sounded so wistful, the motherless boy who’d been so alone at court, with no one to care for him except his two spinster sisters.
She and Sebastien had so much in common that way, surprisingly, given their very different lives, neither of them quite fitting in, despite—or perhaps because of—their elevated birthrights.
“Of course all of that is true. But I don’t know about getting married,” she said, because she truly didn’t know.
“We can talk about it more later.” Far off, the bells rang around the academy for lights-out.
“Shall we go to bed?” Sebastien murmured the question against her hair, his caresses turning ardent, his elegant, sensitive fingers rising to cup her breast, lips nuzzling her temple, urging her to lift her lips to his.
“Let me demonstrate how very sincerely I cherish every bit of you.”
She obliged him in the kiss, needing to feel that pure communion with him. Lips and hands and skin didn’t lie, didn’t calculate and strategize. They at least had that much. “Yes,” she answered against his mouth, body yearning into his.
Rising, he carried her to the bed, leaving Nina and Nonna to sleep before the fire.
Draping her over the bed with infinite care, spreading her black hair around her in a fan the way he liked to see it, he undressed her, taking his time.
Naked, she lay in the firelight, entranced by the way it gilded his lean body, absorbing every nuance of her golden lover as he made love to her.
Night and day, the other students called them. For the first time, it arrowed into her the truth of that supposedly playful, romantic titling: night and day could never fully exist at the same time.
They could only meet at the crepuscular edges, and then only fleetingly.