Daphne didn’t usually make such spectacular errors in judgment. But she knew at once that she had said the wrong thing. Jefferson took a step back, rapidly doubling the distance between them. Her smile slipped from her face.
“I’m sorry if I gave you the wrong impression,” the prince said hastily. “When we were snowboarding, I thought you knew that it was just as friends. I’m with someone else now.”
Daphne’s lungs constricted. She took a great, gasping breath, fighting to stay upright. There was nowhere near enough oxygen at this elevation.
“Oh.” Her voice seemed to emanate from a great distance, as cool and elegant as always. “I’ll see you later, then.”
She had been so certain that Jefferson still cared, that she could persuade him to come back to her. Especially now that she was finally, after all these years, willing to put sex on the table.
She tried not to think of the implications of that—of what must be going on at that ski house between him and Nina. But no matter how hard she tried to shut them out, a barrage of images flooded Daphne’s mind, each more excruciating than the next. Jefferson introducing Nina to his grandmother. Texting her a string of cartoon hearts in the middle of the day. Lifting her hair to drop a kiss on the back of her neck. All the things he had done with Daphne, at least at the beginning, he would be doing with her.
Daphne had given up everything for Jefferson, had designed her entire life around him. Now her future seemed to flatten out before her, shadowing and blurring at the edges until it led nowhere at all.
The sounds of the party receded to a dull roar beneath the thudding of her heart. She pushed blindly back inside.
“Daphne?”
Princess Samantha stood near the bar, clutching a tumbler of clear liquid that certainly wasn’t water. She leaned forward, a little too close to Daphne; but that had always been Samantha’s way. She simply refused to inhabit the normal space between people.
“Are you having fun?” Samantha asked, a touch of challenge to the question.
“This party is amazing, as always.”
Daphne thought she’d sounded convincing, but Samantha gave a huff of amused disbelief. “Really? Because you seem as miserable as I am.”
Daphne was so startled by the comment that she didn’t bother denying it. “My night didn’t quite go as I’d hoped,” she heard herself say. And then, shocking herself even further—“Why are you miserable?”
“Does it matter?” the princess asked, with a touch of bitterness. She kept darting glances at someone across the room.
Daphne followed her gaze, to where Princess Beatrice stood next to Theodore Eaton. They were both smiling, both talking to the same group of guests; yet the longer Daphne watched them, the more it seemed that their movements were coordinated but disparate, as if they were trains operating on parallel tracks. Beatrice never seemed to look at Theodore, but around him.
“I see that your sister made it back in time.”
“Yeah,” Samantha said dismissively. She held up her now-empty glass and gave it a shake, a provocative gleam in her eyes. “Care to join me?”
Daphne’s eyes flicked toward the dance floor, where hordes of people were gathered, awaiting the countdown to midnight. Several of the party planner’s interns had begun to circulate glowing necklaces and noisemakers.
Why shouldn’t she have a drink, for once?
For the first time in her life, Daphne was drunk in public.
After she and Samantha took that first round of shots, Daphne had insisted on switching to champagne, which at least looked classy. But she was on her third—or was it fourth?—glass, and at that altitude, on an empty stomach, it was really going to her head.
She and Samantha were on the dance floor now, jumping and giggling as if they’d always been the best of friends. If Daphne hadn’t been so drunk she might have smiled at the irony of it. For years she’d driven herself to distraction, brainstorming ways to make Jefferson’s twin sister like her—when the entire time, all she’d needed to do was be Samantha’s drinking buddy.
Daphne twirled in a circle, her stack of glowing necklaces bouncing as she moved. Near the DJ booth she saw Sir Sanjay Murthy with his two teenage sons, who’d attended Forsythe Academy with Jefferson. They both winked at her encouragingly. Daphne blew them a breezy kiss in reply.
She’d never known how utterly liberating it was, to drink until the edges of reality felt liquid and blurred. To do something delightfully illicit, just to prove that none of it mattered. Was this how Samantha felt all the time? If so, small wonder she’d turned out the way she had.
A pair of hands closed around her waist, and Daphne didn’t even swat them away, just leaned back provocatively.
“Come on, Daphne. You’re better than this,” Ethan whispered into her ear. His breath was somehow warm and cool at once, sending uncanny shivers down her spine.
“I’m doing just fine, thank you,” she informed him.
When Ethan tried to spin her around to face him, Daphne’s heel slipped, and she lost her balance.
A few people glanced over, but Ethan managed to catch her before she crashed to the dance floor. He expertly folded her into a spin, making it seem like the whole thing had just been an overeager dance move. The onlookers turned away, rapidly losing interest.
“Five minutes till midnight!” proclaimed the DJ, who proceeded to amp up the volume even higher.