Tea Party Ambush
The garden was already in full swing with the tea party. The sight of tables decorated with lavish blooms cut from the greenhouse and noble ladies dressed in fresh, bright colors made Sylvia’s expression stiffen almost at once.
She simply wasn’t used to gatherings like this. After fifteen, she had spent more time on the training grounds than at home, and after coming of age, she had spent even less time in the capital than out on assignment. Then, without warning, she was expected to attend a tea party.
Let’s not cause any trouble.
She muttered the words to herself and clenched her fist, only to spot a familiar face among the people wearing welcoming smiles.
Rosalind!
Rosalind, whom she had parted from that very morning, must have been invited too.
Rosalind knitted her brows and shot Sylvia a look that plainly said, Why are you here? Sylvia shook her head to show she had no idea either.
If Rosalind had been invited too, was this really just about building friendly ties with people connected to Heston?
Sylvia took her seat and stole a glance at Catherine.
Since yesterday had been the engagement ceremony, most of the conversation was about how beautiful Catherine had looked and how perfectly suited she and Heston seemed for one another.
The other young ladies quickly clustered around the princess and began pestering her to tell them how the secret romance with Heston had begun and how the proposal had gone. Whenever the princess grew flustered and trailed off, the maid beside her would step in and answer for her.
“It all began, of course, with the retrieval ceremony! Her Highness always takes such good care of the heroes who devote themselves to the empire. Even though she herself won great honors on the battlefield, she still places the achievements of others above her own! In any case, it seems she went to thank Sir Heston for the tremendous thing he accomplished this time and spoke with him alone for a while. But then Sir Heston—”
As the story went on and on, Sylvia’s throat grew dry with an inexplicable thirst, and she hastily took a sip of tea. She had expected this sort of talk, but hearing it in person was even harder than she had imagined.
It was painful to listen to other people discuss the Heston she didn’t know as if he were a stranger, painful to learn the different sort of face he showed the person he loved, and even more painful to dwell on it and feel the loss all over again.
Rosalind, seated beside her, edged closer as if on purpose and held out her arm, which was pebbled with gooseflesh.
“Can you believe Heston did that?”
“If he didn’t, he wouldn’t have proposed after three months.”
Sylvia deliberately kept her tone flat. Rosalind, failing to get the reaction she wanted, shrugged as though she had lost interest and straightened up again. Sylvia rubbed the arm Rosalind had touched and frowned.
More importantly, what’s wrong with me?
Her heart had been pounding since earlier, and now even her head felt light and unsteady. It couldn’t be a hangover, could it? She’d taken medicine before coming to the Imperial Palace and had been perfectly fine after that.
And unlike a hangover, her body and mind felt more and more sensitive, as if she might start trembling if someone so much as poked her in the back.
Frowning at her strange condition, she lifted her head—and made direct eye contact with Ariel Dunilfur across the table.
Ariel, who prided herself on her exceptional loyalty to the princess, took one look at Sylvia’s expression and failed to hide the insulted look that crossed her face. “It seems the Appleton young lady finds this sort of talk boring?”
“Oh, no. It’s not that—”
Sylvia hurriedly denied it, but by then they had already sunk their teeth in. Their smiles widened all the more, and they leaned in with wickedly sweet voices.
“There’s no need to deny it. Your friendship with Sir Heston is truly remarkable. Even Lady Rosalind just told us earlier that if we wanted to know anything about Sir Heston, we should ask the Appleton young lady instead. She said your bond is so deep you probably know more than his own sister.”
What an appalling thing to say, as if pouring oil on a burning house.
When Sylvia turned to Rosalind with wounded eyes, Rosalind merely lifted her shoulders as if to say, No, I didn’t expect you to be here! and popped a finger food into her mouth, looking away innocently.
The maids sitting beside the princess showed no mercy to poor Sylvia’s predicament. Instead, they pressed closer and smiled broadly as they tightened the net around her.
“That’s right, Lady Appleton. Please help us. Sir Lockwood is so mysterious it’s impossible to tell what he’s thinking. Remember the other day? He even proposed right in front of the temple without warning. We were so shocked. Is Sir Heston always so bold?”
The faces staring at her so intently clearly wanted an answer. Sylvia blushed and slowly opened her mouth.
“Of course Sir Heston… isn’t usually like that. He’s rather cautious.”
But they paid her no mind at all, merely exchanging looks and curling the corners of their mouths.
“A cautious man does that? Come to think of it, when he recovered the holy relic this time, didn’t he still thrust his hand into the core of the monster even while everyone else was warning him it was dangerous? Of course, the fact that he recovered the holy relic was wonderful, but sometimes when he’s that reckless, he really is frightening.”
The princess’s maids would never truly be speaking ill of Heston. They were only waving Sylvia toward the trap, urging her to walk straight into it and defend him without hesitation.
If she quickly bristled and rushed to Heston’s defense, then, with the princess saying nothing, people would soon be whispering that Sylvia was a woman who didn’t know her place. But if she stayed silent or agreed with the gossip, they would say she had watched her longtime friend and partner Heston come under fire without defending him even once.
“O-of course, Sir Heston does have a bold side. But when he acts that way, it’s because… because he—”
Sylvia knew that to get through this, she couldn’t simply throw away the cards they had laid before her; she had to add to them and play them back harder. In other words, she had to say that Heston only acted like that because he loved the princess so deeply.
It left a bitter taste in her mouth to say such a thing aloud, but her body was becoming more and more strange, so she was eager to give them the answer they wanted and turn their attention away from her. That was when, as she stumbled over the words—
“Haah.”
A low moan suddenly brushed her ear. The heat that had been rising dully through her body snapped taut at that sound, sending shivers through her spine. Sylvia’s face flushed all the way to the nape of her neck as she clutching the hem of her dress.
What is this? Why am I like this? Why all of a sudden… my body… like last night…
Her arms trembled.
Her body, burning up without any warning, was beyond alarming. And even worse, that moan sounded like Owen’s.
Low, with the faintest scrape of metal in it.
It was exactly like the moan Owen had made last night when he had gripped her shoulder without the slightest restraint, shoved the grotesque pillar at her with unfocused eyes, and then buried his face against her shoulder.
No, no. I need to pull myself together. If I make a mistake here and Father hears about it, it’s over.
Forcing her fogged, feverish mind awake, Sylvia kept going through sheer willpower.
“Heston will do whatever it takes to get what he wants, no matter what. I think, perhaps, his feelings for the princess—”
But then a fierce surge of arousal rolled through her as if something below had been touched too roughly.
Sylvia broke off and had no choice but to bow her head hard.
I’ve lost my mind.
When she cut herself off mid-sentence and dropped her head, the princess’s circle lifted their brows. They already knew perfectly well how Sylvia felt about Heston, so they assumed she was merely being overcome by passion.
Rosalind, however, remembered how strongly Sylvia had smelled of alcohol when they met earlier that morning, and seeing the flushed nape of her neck, she thought she must be ill.
“Sylvie, I think you might be sick…”
With her nerves stretched raw, the touch of a hand on her lower back made Sylvia jolt in alarm. If she hadn’t been biting her lip, an odd moan might have slipped out.
Sylvia was nearly tearful at the state of her own body.
Did any of this even make sense? Getting aroused in a situation like this? As she thought of Owen from the night before and clenched involuntarily between her thighs, she wanted nothing more than to shove her face into a cup of tea and die.
“Haah, ngh. Hah.”
And the more horrifying part was that the moans echoing at her ear only grew worse, as if they were cresting toward release.
If her body hadn’t been burning like this, Sylvia would have thought someone had cast a mind-disrupting spell on her.
Or perhaps someone had cast a mind-disrupting spell and slipped something strange into her tea as well?
Even though the tea in the pot had been shared by everyone present, making that possibility nearly impossible, she would have preferred the idea of some hideous villain relentlessly targeting her over the alternative—that she was turning into a pervert at a tea party because she was thinking about the man she had slept with last night.
“S-so, um. I—”
Sylvia tried to rise from her seat, but her legs gave out and she ended up clutching the tablecloth instead. The dishes toppled at a noisy tilt and crashed over with a clang.
Her face didn’t even have the chance to flush any redder from the embarrassing accident. All she could think about was running.
As she faltered to her feet and apologized, displeased stares landed on her. Sylvia stammered out her apology.
“S-sorry. I’m really not feeling well right now. I’ll, I’ll go ahead and get up.”
Then she fled.
She could feel the stunned gazes of the others at her back, but there was nothing she could do. Right now, the first priority was calming this body of hers down.
As everyone watched Sylvia disappear, Catherine’s black eyes sank lower than usual.
She had clearly seen the red mark left on the nape of Sylvia’s neck when Sylvia bowed her head and her hair fell away from it.
This is troublesome.
That red mark looked, no matter how she examined it, like the imprint of someone’s lips. She didn’t know whose lips they were, but if it was really—
Let’s hope it wasn’t Heston.
Catherine thought with a cold smile.