Love Stories

Chapter Twelve

For the next week Leah lived under a constant storm of black looks, loud knocks, and incessant pleading. He even endangered his "reputation" with how stubborn he was. But she knew now that there was nothing that could damage his reputation any further, this could only hurt her. Because she'd tried. She'd been down every road they could take and they were all cold, empty and alone. He only promised with his words. His heart was far away. She could see that now, with every day she had passed waiting for him before. Those eyes were gone. They were innocent because they had been closed. Now she saw him with open eyes. He was all wrong.

                Jren's twisted mind played tricks on itself. It was a game to him, to see how fancy he could make his words sound, see how far they could take her with him, see if he could even make himself believe his lies. That look she remembered now, the one that dawned all over his face when Leah used to think something had occurred to him. It had. And the something was love for himself, love for his lies, love for the way she believed them. Not anymore.

                The whole realization didn't decrease the pain, though. She'd almost known him for a year. That meant she'd loved him for almost a year and now that all came down to nothing. And it was different than Nash because Jren had never actually loved her. Either way the pain was just as much. Aiden sensed something was wrong on their way back to Valdara, but Leah refused to answer any of his questions. He'd warned her from the start about Jren, but she wouldn't believe him. Now everything was wrong.

                The journey back to Valdara felt excrutiatingly slow to Leah, but eventually it ended and they reached the capital. A letter was waiting for her from Keldan since he had known she would be leaving. The whole time she had been in Runderin she had continued to write with her father under the pretense of writing Keldan, though she often wrote them both. To her joy Keldan wrote that he was returning to Valdara. Of course that meant it would still be a month until he arrived but it was something to look forward to.

                The conversation with her father had followed the path of telling each other about their present and past lives and even though they had been conversing for over a year, Leah still felt like she hardly knew him. She couldn't wait until Keldan could tell her all about him and the Grace Isles. All the while the pressure of Jren weighed on her, or the fact that there was no pressure from Jren. She'd known him for so long it felt so odd for him not to be there. The only good thing was that she'd never been in Valdara with him and there wasn't anything around her to remind her of him. She hadn't told either her father or Keldan about him because she hadn't thought either would approve and besides, Jren had wanted it to be a secret.

                It had been two years since Leah had been in Valdara for more than a week. And after all that time life there felt boring and she resolved that she would finally find something to occupy her time with. To relieve herself of the monotony of life Leah returned to the arts; drawing and painting. It wasn't much but Leah passed the month until Keldan returned by drawing, painting, and putting a little more effort into getting to know the court ladies.

                It ended up being a month and a week until Keldan returned and by the end of it Leah was very impatient. They hadn't seen each other in at least a good year. She was waiting, more than impatient, in the castle's courtyard when he rode up. It was true he could never go anywhere quietly. It was all for the show, so when he rode through the gate the people subsided back to whatever it was they had been doing before. The people tended to follow their prince when he came back from somewhere after a long time, and this had been a long time.

                Nothing about Keldan had changed. He wore his hair the same way, a little too long, and his beard and mustache the same way, a little too neat, and his smile, a little too secretively impish. "Keldan!" Leah exclaimed, doing her best to frown at him.