Her unseeing eyes did not catch the baron’s departure. One minute he was there – she thought she saw, for the briefest flash, his blue eyes holding hers – and then he was gone, vanished into the crowd. Alethea stared at the empty air he had occupied, feeling unfocused and unbalanced and completely unsure of herself. Tristan was her friend. He was her friend, and he was younger than her, and he was a prince...she had never thought of him as anything different. But somehow her mind and her heart had come out of alignment, and now the latter was speaking to her in a language she could not understand. How could she have developed feelings for him, without ever thinking about them? He was just a boy! And she...she was practically a woman...
The alcohol hummed in her blood. She tightened her fingers around the goblet as it slipped, but too late; her attention shifted finally to the present just in time to see it fall. And then stop falling. She watched, hypnotized, the beautiful glint of the frozen liquid in the light, like blown glass. It moved then, pooled and stilled – the vessel lifted to eye level.
“Thank you, my lord," she said generally, accepting the glass (only to replace it immediately on a passing tray) and then his hand, in a practiced gesture. She slipped into his embrace as easily as her dressing gown. The force of his eyes was familiar, reassuring – men had looked at her since she had first entered adolescence, and she had been groomed to court their regard, to expect it. Slowly, her awareness shifted away from the children dancing opposite the floor and into her own body, into her steps following Mordred’s and the pressure of his hand on her hand, her waist, her shoulder. They turned, touching wrists. In the haze of champagne, his face seemed oddly clear.
“Blue is your color,” the lady complimented, in a moment when the dance brought them close, and smiled. She was looking at his eyes, not his coat, when she said it. The music blurred dizzyingly in the background, the crowd spun into one colorful smear, and for a time Alethea forgot her jealousy of Megan and the tightness in her chest. Mordred was safer, in a way; his reaction to her felt more predictable. But in another way, his beauty felt dangerous or forbidden, like that of his dragon familiar. She studied him with storm blue eyes rimmed in gold, tracing his fine features with her glance, realizing (not for the first time) that she would have loved the opportunity to draw him.
But could she capture the intensity of his gaze?
“You rescued me; it has been so long since I have attended a ball, I think I’d forgotten what to do.” Her smile was grateful this time, vulnerable. She knew how to draw a man’s attention, but she didn’t know to guard herself from it, once it was trained on her. Alethea’s education, too, was far from completed.
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