Chapter 4: The Night Before the Wedding

The palace seamstress offered me a wedding gown from the royal wardrobe, and I thanked her and said no.

The gown I wanted to marry in did not exist yet.

The housekeeper found me four yards of ivory silk that had been sitting in a cupboard since the old queen's time.

I spread it across the desk and began to cut.

By ten at night I had the bodice pinned.

By midnight the room smelled of warm lamp oil and thread, and I had stopped thinking about Graymoor at all.

Someone knocked on the corridor door.

I opened it with pins in my mouth.

Lucan stood there with a covered tray in both hands, and he was not wearing his coat.

"You didn't come down to supper," he said.

"I lost track."

"The cook sent this up. I said I'd carry it."

"You could have sent a maid," I said around the pins.

"I could have."

He didn't say why he hadn't.

I took the pins out of my mouth and reached for the tray, and our fingers met on the handle.

It was the first time he had touched me with nothing in the way.

His hand was warm and rough across the knuckles, and neither of us let go for the length of a breath.

"The terms," I said.

"In private we don't touch," he agreed, and let go first.

I put the tray on the bed.

Under the cover was soup, a heel of bread and a plate of small cold apples.

Lucan stayed in the doorway.

He looked at the silk and the paper pattern and the pile of pins.

"You're making the gown yourself," he said.

"I'm tired of wearing what other people give me."

Keep reading free with an account. Start He Kept Me as a Spare, But I Married a Prince from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.