I'm No Cinderella

Chapter 19

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The Gift

    I ended up begging Eden to escort me to my lessons with Signora Flori the next day, and every day after that.

    The unaccompanied walk across the main floor to the kitchen after my etiquette lessons, though, turned out to be much easier than I had anticipated. There were many servants bustling around at that hour, enough to help me to feel less vulnerable, alone in the alpha's castle.

    The cooks had returned to regarding me with that same wary deference that I had worked so hard to overcome. I tried some of my old tricks, even asked direct questions regarding information that they had shared about their personal lives.

It was no use.

The princess had reminded them of my rank, albeit temporary, and it would take a lot more effort for them to forget it a second time.

Returning to the royal quarters had proven to be the most blood chillingly terrifying part of my days without Matteo there as a constant shadow. It took three days for me to gain the courage to explore on my own, instead of slinking back to my room to sulk before the hearth to await dinner with the royal family.

There were many sitting rooms just down the hall from the royal quarters, each decorated in a different hue. They appeared, for the most part, unused. A thin blanketing of dust covered the majority of the surfaces, however, there was one in particular that seemed slightly more lived-in than the others.

This sitting room  was decorated with dark wood furniture, and heavy burgundy drapes. I could still see the dust particles floating on a beam of sunlight coming in through the window, but the desk near the door was clean. The settee appeared recently dusted as well.

As I perused one of the bookshelves built into the wall on either side of the unlit hearth, I found another difference. The books in this sitting room were not the great adventures and poems that every one of the others had held. There were some science and mathematics tomes, as the alpha had seemed to prefer in his own room, but those weren't what caught my attention.

I ran my fingertips along the spines of the books, the likes of which I had never seen before. Anatomy of a Shifter. A Complete Guide to Early Childhood Development of the Shifter Species. Navigating The Change. Controlling Your Instincts. The First Shift.

I pulled two from the shelf at random, Anatomy of a Shifter and Controlling Your Instincts, and settled at the desk.

~*~

    Dinner was uneventful, much to my relief.

    There hadn't been a single incident in the three days since I had taught the princesses and Matteo to cook. It was almost as if we had fallen into some kind of an unspoken truce.

    "Will you accompany me for a walk?" The prince's question didn't surprise me. He had been asking the same thing every night for nearly a month. This time, for once, I was actually excited to accept.

    He hid his shock well.

    With the information from the books swirling fresh in my mind, I was bursting with questions. But, once we had started our seemingly aimless meandering through the castle grounds, suddenly my mouth had gone dry. He was so much bigger than I was, every inch of his body radiating power and grace. The thought of someone like that, so strong and confident, wasting even a year of their time on someone as weak and insignificant as me was still so very strange, even after all this time.