Emilie of the Royal Heart

Chapter 63: The Baker (Not Really, it's just the Prince Daydreaming)

Emilie led him down the hallway until they turned a corner and then she slowed her pace. Aurora followed obediently, though she could feel the curiosity and concern he kept quiet. When she spun back to face him, he glanced her over and brushed his thumb across the back of her hand.

"What do you have to say?" he prompted in a tender murmur, "are you alright?"

There was a time when she never would've imagined his eyes could convey so much warmth. His gaze was so rich, his brown eyes could cry gold and gemstones. His circlet crown was made of ivory and it stood starkly against his thickly coiled, black haircut. The coarse edges of his hair peeked over top of the ornamental curls and the fox emblem over his forehead. The black diamond studs in his ears called to her discreetly. He watched her as she watched him and it made her blush.

There was a time when she pretended he was the best part of all her days. She didn't know when something so hollow became so full. The heat of his body was a pattern she wanted to memorize with both hands. Flustering him was her newest passion. She so loved how he would look away when she teased him and then how she would have to guide his gaze back to her. As many nights as she could have of him reading to her in the study wasn't enough. Aurora could read seven hundred years of his genealogy and it would still make her heart glister like his diamonds.

"I'm fine," Emilie promised in a breath, "I'm doing very, very good."

"Then what-"

She placed her hands on his chest and gingerly walked him backward into the wall. She had full intention to slam him into the stone, but then she remembered about his shoulder injury and decided on this instead. Once Aurora was peering back at her with squinty eyes, pressed securely between the palace and her, Emilie grabbed onto both sides of his face and pounced on him with passionate kiss. The momentum of it was like nothing she had ever delivered before. Every little piece of her wanted every little piece of him and she didn't want it for right now, she wanted it forever.

As soon as their lips fitted against each other, Aurora returned to her what she sent to him, but it seemed to have tore through him like a lightning strike because his whole body went rigid with shock. His hands at his sides opened and his notebook fell to the floor.

The sound of it smacking the tiles was the trigger that set him into motion. As Emilie snaked her arms around his neck and her fingers into his hair, Aurora clamped his arms around her with his hands urgently clutching her and pulling at fistfuls of her clothes.

They kissed zealously. Their lips twisted together almost fanatically, infused with the excitement of being reunited with their idol, their darling.

Emilie stamped into the kiss her desire for all the things they would never have. Sharing a bed went crushing into his upper lip. Sharing a throne off into the corner of his mouth. The rest of their nights in the study. The rest of their days walking together through the palace. All the Southern Tours. All the Northern ones. She couldn't stop until she kissed their whole lives along his mouth. She was scared to lose it. She wanted him to remember it even if it didn't happen.

Every touch of his hands came back to her like his own unlived memories. His hand between her shoulder blades. A thousand nights getting nothing done but ogling each other in the library. His fingers brushing along her neck. Whispering secrets to each other in the middle of an expectant crowd. He touched her face. Weaving themselves into each other into the sheets into the sounds into the dark.

Their wedding. Emilie's hands shook as they framed Aurora's face. Her kiss slowed. She saw the way Aurora looked at her when she said her vows. She heard the way he used his princely voice when he started and how it tapered off into something so fragile and intimate at the end. She held her closed lips against Aurora's. She couldn't bear to live in the impossible future anymore.

"What am I... going to do..." Aurora croaked, "when you're gone?"

She tasted tears on his face. Emilie drew away so that she could sweep them along his cheekbones.

"You were a good Prince before I arrived," she said to comfort him, though her own voice was shaking, "when I'm gone, you will be one then too."

"I could..." he muttered, a brittle chuckle crackling from him as he glanced up at her, "I could abdicate. I could follow you to Zuhia."

"Don't do that," Emilie pleaded with a wobbly smile.

"Why not?"

"Because what would you do in Zuhia? Bake bread with my mother while I travel the province trying to get someone to pay for a hypnotist's skills?"

Aurora swallowed and let his gaze fall, "I could learn to bake bread..."

"Not with these royal hands, I'm afraid," she cupped his hands in hers and raised them to her lips. She kissed his knuckles. "Fellen needs you."

"I need you. What happens if Fellen needs me, but I need you? What is there to do?"

Emilie bent down and picked up his notebook. She gave it to him, folding his fingers over it. With a sniff, she clasped his other hand and walked with him back down the hall, retracing their steps to the study.

"When in doubt, Rory, we must read law."