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"Your Highness — is that *true?*"
The eyes around the table lit up all at once.
"When you say separated — does that mean things have truly gotten worse between you?"
"Oh dear, how dreadful..."
Not one face in the group made any attempt to conceal its excitement. I could practically see the gossip forming behind their eyes like weather.
*I knew it. This is exactly why she pulled me over here.*
Camilla had already leapt to her feet, waving her hands in a performance of damage control.
"This is entirely my fault — everyone, please, don't go repeating any of this, I beg you—"
She looked, to any casual observer, like a devoted friend desperately protecting someone's honor. But as she turned back and forth issuing her little instructions, the corner of her mouth kept pulling upward — and then catching itself, and pulling upward again.
*Camilla.* I watched her with something close to amusement. *I never gave you enough credit for being this transparent.*
I let the noise settle for exactly a moment, and then spoke in a perfectly relaxed voice.
"Camilla, don't strain yourself."
She stopped moving.
When she turned to look at me, something flickered behind her eyes — not quite panic, but close enough.
I crossed my legs slowly and held her gaze.
"It's true that my husband and I are separated. Is there some reason I should be embarrassed about that?"
A sharp silence fell over the table. Then, all at once, the whispering began.
"Did she really just — ?"
"I always suspected something was off between them, even from the beginning..."
They were whispering, not speaking. Still, the room was well-lit and not very large, and I have perfectly good hearing.
Camilla, for her part, looked unsettled. This was not what she had planned. My composure — the complete absence of shame or discomfort — seemed to irritate her in a way she couldn't quite manage.
She recovered herself after a moment and smiled again, though there was a slight tremor at the edge of it.
"Your Highness... you don't mind admitting something like that so freely?"
"What should I mind?"
Her brow tightened.
*She's easy to read when she's rattled.*
I turned away from her and addressed the table at large.
"As everyone here is already aware, the Grand Duke and I have been estranged for several years. We have been working to change that — and the separation has been part of that effort. A deliberate one."
"Oh..."
"It created certain difficulties at first. There were moments when I nearly gave up entirely." I paused — and then let a slow, mischievous expression settle across my face. "But then, because of that distance..."
I glanced around the table with a conspiratorial lift of my brows.
"Things between us have become very — *very* — warm. Day and night."
The reaction was immediate. A ripple of hushed gasps and bitten lips and barely suppressed squeals moved through the group. More than a few faces had gone faintly pink. They looked at me with the expression of women who were simultaneously scandalized and deeply envious.
The corner of Camilla's mouth twitched.
"Your Highness — no matter how you feel, surely you aren't concealing the truth? The truth that will become obvious to everyone soon enough?"
"What truth?"
"That your relationship cannot possibly have healed so easily." She let a thread of sympathy into her voice. "All the ladies present know that."
It was well-executed, I had to admit. The gentle delivery. The regretful smile. Enough to plant a seed of doubt without saying anything that could be directly refuted.
The women who had been regarding me with envy moments ago began to shift again.
"She has a point, I suppose — it's not as though these things resolve overnight..."
"No, quite. There was always something strained between them, wasn't there?"
Camilla seemed to feel the atmosphere swinging back her way, and the tension in her shoulders eased.
I looked at her steadily and raised one corner of my mouth.
"You're right that you won't believe me, Camilla. You were beside me at the very lowest point of our estrangement — you have more reason than anyone to be skeptical." I turned to the rest of the table. "And I imagine it would be equally difficult for the other ladies to take my word for it, given what they've heard."
A careful silence. No one confirmed or denied.
I smiled pleasantly and looked toward the nearest attendant.
"Would you bring His Highness the Grand Duke to me, please?"
Camilla's expression shifted. She said nothing, but I watched the calculation moving behind her eyes.
I watched it right back, with leisure.
The attendant returned quickly.
"His Highness the Grand Duke, Your Highness."
When I turned, Cedric was already crossing the room toward us — and I watched what happened to the air in the room when he entered it. There was no other way to describe it: everything seemed to blur slightly at the edges and then reassemble itself with him at the center. He moved with that particular unhurried ease of his, and every pair of eyes at the table followed him without quite meaning to.
When he stopped beside me, the collected exhales of approximately a dozen noblewomen were audible.
"You sent for me. What's happened?"
That low, familiar voice, close enough to feel.
I rose and smoothed my skirt.
"I was just explaining to everyone why we decided to spend some time apart." I turned to face him. "You arrived at exactly the right moment."
"...Why we decided to separate?"
Both brows rose slightly. I could see him recalibrating — running through the social context, the audience, the potential missteps of the next thirty seconds — all in the span of about one breath.
I stepped closer before he could land on the wrong conclusion.
"Yes — because we wanted to rebuild things properly." I closed the remaining distance between us and slid both arms around his neck, tilting my face up toward his. "And it worked. Wonderfully, as it turns out."
A faint ripple moved through his expression — something between surprise and attention — as the gap between us narrowed to the length of a breath.
"Cedric," I murmured, near his ear. "This is purely business."
I touched two fingers lightly to his lips. The signal.
For a moment he was very still. Then, instead of pulling back, he simply looked down at me — measured, present — his blue eyes steady and unusually bright. His throat moved. The tip of his tongue traced briefly across his own lips, dry from the warm room.
I pressed my mouth to his.
I felt his shoulders tense in the first instant — a reflex, quickly released. And then, a beat later, he was moving with me, slow and deliberate, as though the room and everything in it had become entirely beside the point.
The awareness of where we were, and why, and who was watching — all of it dissolved. What remained was warm and quiet and entirely too absorbing. My pulse had risen past anything I could reasonably excuse, and the heat that spread from the point of contact outward had nothing whatsoever to do with the room temperature.
*Stop. I should stop.*
*I don't want to stop.*
That argument occupied approximately three seconds of my attention before I finally drew back, carefully, as though extracting myself from something that had its own gravity.
I looked up at Cedric.
He looked back at me — the expression of a man surfacing from somewhere deep, still finding his bearings.
When our eyes met properly, a second wave moved through my chest, strong enough that I had to make a deliberate effort to turn my head.
The room came back into focus.
Dozens of eyes were fixed on us. The expressions ranged from dazed adoration to open envy to breathless astonishment. No one seemed to be thinking about Camilla's rumor anymore.
Almost no one.
At the edge of the group, partially obscured by the crowd — *Adrian.*
I hadn't heard him arrive.
His blue-violet eyes, which usually held that quiet, gentle warmth, were different now. Complicated. Something that looked like sadness, and beneath it, something that looked like defeat.
I found I couldn't look away immediately.
Cedric, who had been watching my face, followed my gaze slowly. It settled on Adrian — and stayed there.
*He saw.*
I turned back to the table before I had to figure out what that meant.
"I hope that settles the question," I said lightly. "Does everyone feel confident enough in what I said?"
The nodding was immediate and unanimous, from women who had the glazed expressions of people who had briefly forgotten what question had been asked in the first place.
*Good. The separation will stop being interesting gossip by tomorrow morning.*
I glanced at Camilla.
Her face was red. Her lower lip had been bitten into submission. When she realized I was looking at her, she assembled a smile with visible effort.
"It seems things really are improving between you... I'm so very glad, Your Highness."
A tremor ran through the corner of her mouth as she said it.
Cedric pulled his gaze from Adrian's direction and looked at Camilla with the blank, unbothered expression of someone who has already forgotten there was anything to be bothered about.
"It seems the Countess needed some convincing," he said mildly.
Camilla's face crumpled.
"No — not at all! I would never doubt His Highness's word—"
He didn't respond. He simply looked at her for a moment, in that particular way of his, until she ran out of sentence.
Then he glanced toward Adrian once more — just briefly — and the corner of his mouth curved.
He looked back at me instead.
"Rebecca was entirely right." His fingers found my chin — a light touch, tilting my face up toward his. "There has been quite a lot of progress between us lately."
A pause.
"To the point, in fact, where even a short time apart feels like—" his voice dropped just enough to be private without being quiet— "a great deal longer than it is."
His lips came down to mine again — softer this time, unhurried — as though proving a point that only the two of us were meant to understand.
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