“Your Highness!”
“Prince Apollo!”
“I love you!” people shouted as if they couldn’t help themselves.
Apollo looked less refined than he had last night. He’d forsaken his crown, and he didn’t even wear a doublet. Tonight, he was dressed like a hunter in rugged boots, wood-brown breeches, an open-collared shirt, and a fur vest decorated with crisscrossing leather straps, which held a golden bow and a quiver of arrows against his straight back.
He could have been the Archer from Evangeline’s favorite Northern tale, The Ballad of the Archer and the Fox. As he searched the ballroom, his eyes burned with the same level of intensity they’d had when he’d watched her leave the balcony last night.
“I think he wants to find you!” LaLa threaded her arm through Evangeline’s, tugging her close as she squealed, “You must be his Fox.”
“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” Evangeline murmured. “I still don’t know how that story ends.”
“No one can remember how that story ends, but it doesn’t matter. He’s not trying to re-create the tale. He’s making a romantic gesture!”
Evangeline was at a loss for words. Apollo must have been truly affected by last night’s kiss.
She was tempted to look for the Prince of Hearts again, to see what he was thinking of this. But she couldn’t take her eyes off the prince of the Magnificent North as his golden steed slowed its steps and stopped in the center of the ballroom.
“Good evening,” Apollo announced, his deep voice quieting the sound of his subjects. “I know I’m supposed to ask five ladies to dance, but I can’t hold up this full tradition tonight.” He paused, looking briefly torn. “This evening, I only wish to dance with one girl.” His dark eyes finally locked onto Evangeline’s. And they were ravenous.
Her legs turned to custard.
Ladies all over the ballroom swooned.
“I knew it,” LaLa crowed.
“You’re right beside me. He could be looking at you,” Evangeline whispered.
“We both know he’s not.”
More swooning followed.
Apollo dismounted his horse, and then he was striding her way with unabashed confidence, the way only someone who’d never been rejected could move.
Evangeline unlinked her arm from LaLa’s and stepped forward to curtsy.
But Apollo stopped a few feet away and reached his arm out for another girl, a very pretty girl in a champagne gown with a shining curtain of straight black hair, topped off with a slender golden circlet.
Evangeline could have turned back into stone.
LaLa quickly took her arm once again and drew Evangeline back into the crowd, but it wasn’t before several laughs and snickers reached her ears.
“Did you see her?”
“She thought the prince was coming for her.”
“Ignore them,” LaLa said. “I thought he was going to ask you, too.”
“I suppose I’ve learned my lesson about listening to what they say in the gossip pages,” Evangeline tried to joke, hoping to staunch any embarrassed tears.
LaLa was kind enough to laugh, but the sound of it was quickly drowned out by all the other voices. The pretty girl Apollo had chosen was the favored Princess Serendipity Skystead, and it seemed everyone else had expected it.
“I knew it.”
“She’s so sophisticated—and she speaks twenty-seven languages.”
“Her family has such good blood. There really was no other choice.”
With every comment, Evangeline felt herself grow smaller, shrinking inside the crowd as she tried to drown the voices and quell her growing humiliation.
It was silly. She didn’t even know him. She shouldn’t have felt so rejected, but it was hard to believe that this was how her adventure in the North would end, before it had even truly begun. And a part of her really had thought that their kiss had left an impression, but maybe it had just left an imprint on her.
Evangeline extracted herself from LaLa’s arm. “I think I’m going to go get some punch.” Maybe enough to drown in.
Self-pity doesn’t look good on you, Little Fox.
Evangeline froze.
The low voice in her head sounded a lot like Jacks’s. She had never heard his voice like this. She wasn’t even certain it was really Jacks—it could have been her imagination—but it did remind her of Marisol and that Evangeline still needed to rescue her.
Evangeline scanned the ball for her stepsister and Jacks. But she didn’t find them. The crowd had grown too dense.