Page 483 of Bad Prince
“You knew?”
She shrugs.
“I know him.”
A beat passes.
Then, because I don’t know how not to say it now, I confess softly, “Last night felt like a wedding night.”
Jade goes very still.
Not mocking.
Not startled.
Just listening.
When she speaks, it’s quiet.
“That means he finally understood the assignment.”
The laugh that comes out of me is shaky and half emotional.
“Apparently.”
She hooks her arm through mine and glances back through the glass at where Tristan is sitting with Leo, head bent, mouth moving, hand still stretched across the table like some part of him can’t quite stop reaching for me even when I’m three yards away.
“He’s gone for you,” she says.
“Yeah.”
She turns her face toward the sea and smiles a little.
“Good. He deserves to be.”
We go back inside a minute later to the smell of coffee and butter and men pretending they weren’t just talking about us.
Tristan looks up the second I reappear. Like he feels the room change when I walk back into it.
He stands just enough to pull out my chair when I sit, then brushes his knuckles against the back of my hand before settling beside me again.
It’s such a small thing.
It does me in anyway.
Leo watches the whole exchange with the expression of a man who is collecting evidence for future ridicule.
“I hate to interrupt,” he says, which means he absolutely doesn’t, “but your phone has gone off six times.”
Tristan pulls it from his pocket.
His expression shifts as he reads the screen.
Not badly.
Just… into that colder, more focused version of himself I’m beginning to recognize as the one he wears when the real world starts trying to intrude.
I glance at him.
