“But, it’s not my birthday,” I told them, moving my eyes to the package in my hand.

“No, but we thought…” Sabina started then faltered.

Eunice picked it up from there. “We weren’t very nice to you when you, erm… first got –”

“Just open it!” Daphne exclaimed and I looked at her to see she was bouncing on her toes in excitement.

“Okay,” I whispered, worried and wondering what the package would hold, hoping it wasn’t poison.

I opened it and as the wrapping fell away I saw I held an exquisitely carved, purple glass bottle in my hand.

“Your scent,” Perdita stated and my body jolted as my head snapped up.

“We asked Josephina, the perfume maker in town, to create something just for you,” Pauline put in.

“No gardenia.” Winnie smiled.

I blinked at them. Then I opened the stopper to the bottle, brought to my nose and sniffed.

The bottle wasn’t exquisite. The scent was. Subtle and fresh, almost beachy but with a flowery essence.

It was sublime.

So sublime, no poison could smell like that.

I looked around the faces.

Did they… could it be? Did they like me? As in, genuinely?

“Do you all… like me?” I asked quietly and got confused looks.

“But… of course!” Sabina cried.

“You’re sweet,” Daphne said.

“And funny,” Eunice added.

“And you saved a wild bird,” Pauline put in.

“You make our prince happy,” Perdita stated and my gaze locked on hers. “Blissfully so,” she finished.

My heart leaped.

“Do you think?” I whispered.

“Your grace, I’m sorry, but I took a swipe of that icing and let me tell you, if he wasn’t blissful before, which he was,” Winnie put in then grinned cheekily. “When he tastes that, he will be!”

Holy crap! They liked me!

“God, I hope so,” I breathed and they all laughed.

Yes! They liked me!

Then Perdita jumped and ordered, “You must go. You don’t have long before the fireworks start.”

“Oh God!” I cried, set the bottle down and mumbled, “I’ll come back for that.”

“We’ll take it to your rooms,” Eunice offered, picking up the cake and handing it to me. “And we’ll take the others away,” she said, I caught her meaning and my smile trembled as my face got soft, then she cried, “Just go!”

Perdita slid a thin stick between my fingers under the cake and said, “The candles are lit in your rooms. You can use that stick to light your cake candles so you won’t get any wax on your beautiful icing.”

I stared gratefully into her eyes and gave myself a long moment to do it.

Then I whispered, “Thank you,” and she smiled and that smile lit her whole face.

All of it.

Even her eyes.

Not fake.

She liked me!

They all did.

Hurrah!

I smiled at all of them and then rushed out of the room, balancing the cake as I went thinking joyous thoughts that maybe, just maybe, I was finally going to be really happy in this fairytale world.

About ten seconds later, however, I was cursing how far away our rooms were (because, seriously, it was a trek) when I made it there only to find the candles lit all around the room but there was no Tor to be found.

I checked all the rooms (his bathroom, my bathroom, his dressing room, my dressing room, his sitting room, you get the picture), he wasn’t anywhere.

Shit!

Was I supposed to go somewhere else?

I stood by the bed and tried to think of where I might have to go and it hit me that the balcony off his study faced the city proper, not the sea like the one off our rooms did. Maybe I was supposed to go there.

Holding the cake carefully, I lifted my skirts in one hand and ran to his study as fast as I could without dropping the cake.

When I got there, the double doors were mostly closed, one open an inch. I turned and put my booty in it to open it (I’d have to light the candles later, so much for my big reveal, I didn’t have the time) and stopped dead when I heard Algernon’s voice.

“I apologize for calling you out at this hour but with her performance today…” he paused, “Well, as you know, the men are talking. She’s not herself. So not herself, it’s strange.”

And Tor’s answer made my entire body lock.

“She says she’s from a different world.”

Uh…

What?

I said I was from a different world?

He didn’t believe me?

I thought he’d come to believe me.

I heard Algernon’s sharp bark of surprised laughter before he asked, “A different world?”

“Yes. A different world,” Tor replied. “Gods, it’s unbelievable. She lives it and breathes it. She’s even created words to go with it. She tells me extraordinary stories of the make-believe architecture and fantastical gadgets they have in her world.” He paused and my dazed brain imagined him shaking his handsome head in disgust at the same time it hazily recalled the many nights over dinner or when we were in bed when I’d tell him stories of my world and all the things in it when he went on, “I must admit, it’s stunning how clever she is, how sharp her mind. She’s astonishingly imaginative and she never forgets a word of it. She has to be making it up as she goes along but every lie she tells, she remembers and uses it again.”

Every lie I tell?

“How bizarre,” Algernon muttered.

“It’s remarkable,” Tor said with what, if I wasn’t about to melt into a puddle of steaming heartbreak, I would have noted was clear respect.

“So she’s playing you?

“Indeed,” Tor answered. “I gave her permission to do so and clearly she took me up on the offer.”

I stepped away from the door in order to lean against the wall beside it so my shaking knees wouldn’t fail me.

He thought I was playing him.

He thought I was playing him!

Weeks of it! Nearly two months of it!

He thought I was playing him!

“You gave her permission?” Algernon sounded shocked.

“Certainly. It’s living a lie but living Cora’s lie is better by far than living with the old Cora.”

“It doesn’t make you angry?” Algernon asked.

“Gods no,” Tor replied. “It comes with her sweet body, that charming mouth of hers, her skillful tongue and the possibility that she’s already carrying my heir.”