Page 25 of Not Another Happily Ever After

And there it is again, that breathless whisper. Only this time, his voice sounds hoarse. Unsteady.

He looks about as uncertain as I feel. His chest lifts and falls rapidly beneath my palm.

It isn’t until his eyes drop to where my hand still lingers on his chest that I realize…

Oh. “Oh!”I begin to pull away when he catches my wrist.

I gasp, my eyes locking onto where his gloved fingers gently wrap around me, the heat from my core now coloring my cheeks.

Slowly, and without daring to release the breath I’m holding, I look up at him. His piercing green eyes find mine. Only this time, they don’t dart away. They stare back, mirroring my surprise, as if he is just as shocked by what he did as I am.

Then he blinks, remembering himself, and the warmth I swear I saw vanishes. Or maybe it was the realization of whose arm it was that he held. Whatever the reason might be, his face falls, my arm drops, and there is little time to process it before my mind is whipped back to reality.

Or rather, a tantalizing, somewhat perverse version of it. The dark knight before me unfastens the clasp that lay low around his neck, letting his heavy wool cloak fall into the swell of hisarms. His masked features hide all but the bridge of his nose and eyes full of strange longing. They wander down the length of my body, his throat working when they find the peaks of my breast upright beneath my rain-soaked dress.

I suck in a breath when he reaches for me again.

“You’re shivering,” he forces out, looking far more offended by the cold than I. He wraps his cloak around my shoulders, and I shudder.

One glance down at my bluing hands shows they are, in fact, trembling.No thanks to my new gown.

“This dress leavesa lotto be desired.” I play my discomfort off with a shrug, but the dark knight is not so easily pacified. In fact, he looks downright bothered.

“The dress—it’s…” He tugs at the collar of his tunic, as if it’s the reason for his stutter. “It isn’t…”

He trails off, seemingly at a loss for words.

I peer down to where his eyes have narrowed.

Oh. “Oh my.” I suppose the raging inferno low in my belly made it hard to notice the dress has gone completely see-through. Then again, I haven’t noticed much of anything since we’d collided, least of all the torrential downpour. Even now, pelted by wind-strewn droplets, I’m too stunned to speak as he struggles to fasten the clasp at my own neck with unsteady hands.

It’s only then I realize he’s trembling too.

I stare, utterly transfixed by the way his hands seem to shake more as they near the skin heaving over the top of my dress. Almost as ifIam the one who has him so shaken.Me. The beastly princess of Castle Ruin. Striking a nerve in the dark knight.

A small smile dances across my lips. It’s highly certainly, of course, but when all you’ve ever been is a disappointment or a point of ridicule in men’s eyes, it’s hard to dismiss the ideathat I might have evoked something new. Though the masked knight adjusting his cloak around my shoulders hardly feels like a stranger. His gaze, however fleeting, burns with an unspoken passion.

Or maybe it’s just fear.

I shouldn’t care to know either way. I’m to be married after all. I should leave well enough alone, accept the gesture for what it is—an act of obligatory kindness—and bid him farewell.

That would be the sophisticated thing to do, Sunday.

“Do I frighten you, Sir—” I pause, realizing I don’t know the dark knight’s real name. Calling him the masked murderer to his face certainly doesn’t feel right. “Commander?” I reach, falling flat. Yet again.

The knight’s eyes flicker up toward mine for only a second before returning to where his fingers finish fastening the last hook-and-eye closure around my neck.

“Frog,” he finally answers, his voice gruff through his iron mask.

“Frog?” I repeat the word slowly, convinced I must have heard him wrong. But he nods in reply.

I thoughtmyname was different.Sunday was given to me simply because it was the day I was born on. My mother didn’t see fit in growing attached to the child whose life was destined to be chopped up and pieced away.

But Frog? What reason would a mother have for naming her child after such a creature?Unless…

Frog must see the question written all over my face.

“It’s just what my friends call me. I’m not actually a frog,” he says.