The walk back from the West Wing dining parlor was long and unnervingly quiet. Prince Dominic moved through the torchlit corridors of his palace, but his mind was still seated at that candlelit table, opposite the confounding woman who called herself Lady Viviana. He replayed the evening's strange, tense performance in his head, turning it over and over like a puzzle box with no visible seams.
Her true expression, the one he had glimpsed when he first entered the dining parlor, had been the most honest thing he had seen from her yet. It was a look of pure, undisguised distaste. In that moment, she wasn't pretending. She was simply a woman who did not want to be there, a woman who held him in contempt. And oddly, he had respected that raw honesty far more than her practiced smiles and polite deceptions.
