pressure change inside the cabin.
By the time they’d landed and disembarked to the limo he’d had waiting, the imaginary pins holding up his smile had seemed to pierce his flesh. He’d had to relinquish the expression, as well as any attempt at communication.
He’d been relieved when she’d withdrawn into herself, too. For about fifteen minutes. Then restlessness had started to claw its way to the surface. How was it possible to miss her when she was within arm’s reach?
He wasn’t about to reinitiate dialogue. He couldn’t. He had nothing to say—nothing he could put into words. But he needed to reconnect with her. Just…feel her. He reached for her hand.
She surrendered it to him with a squeeze that transmitted directly to his heart, and a smile that lodged there, too, before she resumed watching the scenery rushing by her window.
He dragged his eyes away from her, forced himself to look through his own window. He cursed himself for the reluctance, the trepidation that gripped his guts. It was just an island, just another beautiful country with magnificent nature and blessed weather. Looking at the scenery wouldn’t hurt him.
But it did. He felt things splintering inside him. The once-severed and reattached tethers of his heart snapped under the strain, one after the other with each mile deeper onto Castaldinian soil. For eight years, he’d lived with the certainty—the hopelessness—that he’d never see this land again.
He hadn’t imagined he could feel this way. He’d thought he’d long ago moved beyond such frailties as homesickness and nostalgia, that this land and all it represented had no more hold on him.
He might not have known, but Phoebe clearly had. She knew. Everything that was roiling inside him. He now understood what she was doing. She was trying to turn off her aura, her presence. She was trying to give him privacy. To sort through the chaos that returning to his homeland had kicked up inside him.
He felt something too warm for comfort swell inside his rib cage. Something achingly sweet. Gratitude. That she understood, gauged his needs and gave him the spiritual space and silent empathy that would soothe him, ameliorate his turmoil. And he just knew she’d also sense when he’d dealt with the first shockwave of response, would come back to him then.
He shook his head in self-deprecation as he succumbed, let storm through him the emotions he’d believed he’d never feel again—for the land that had exiled him, and the woman who’d deserted him.
Yes. A fool. In so many incurable ways.
Phoebe kept her eyes on the rushing by Jawara.
As capitals went, it was probably the only one in the twenty-first century that didn’t have one building built later than the eighteenth. Its mixture of Gothic, Moorish andbaroque architecture was considered the best-preserved in the world. Or it used to be. There’d been cuts in the restoration programs over the last twenty years, channeling of funds into venues of a more pressing nature. To her—someone who hadn’t seen Castaldini before those times—the kingdom looked magnificent anyway, even with the disrepair. But Castaldinians said the decline had been noticeable. And though she hadn’t been at her most observant of the outside world these past years, she’d noticed the deterioration deepening.
Jawara did still feel like a jewel, as its Moorish name proclaimed it to be, sparkling under perpetual sunlight, nestling between the banks of the Boriana River and the Montalbo mountains before giving way to rolling plains to the north and south. But it did look like a cracked jewel the closer you looked. Now it needed the help of its closest peak, the 2,010-meter Odesilia only a few kilometers from the city center, to augment the majestic feel that it was losing. And as they entered the oldest part of the city, which was dominated by the massive royal palace overlooking it on a hill between two smaller mountains, she drew the parallel
By the time they’d landed and disembarked to the limo he’d had waiting, the imaginary pins holding up his smile had seemed to pierce his flesh. He’d had to relinquish the expression, as well as any attempt at communication.
He’d been relieved when she’d withdrawn into herself, too. For about fifteen minutes. Then restlessness had started to claw its way to the surface. How was it possible to miss her when she was within arm’s reach?
He wasn’t about to reinitiate dialogue. He couldn’t. He had nothing to say—nothing he could put into words. But he needed to reconnect with her. Just…feel her. He reached for her hand.
She surrendered it to him with a squeeze that transmitted directly to his heart, and a smile that lodged there, too, before she resumed watching the scenery rushing by her window.
He dragged his eyes away from her, forced himself to look through his own window. He cursed himself for the reluctance, the trepidation that gripped his guts. It was just an island, just another beautiful country with magnificent nature and blessed weather. Looking at the scenery wouldn’t hurt him.
But it did. He felt things splintering inside him. The once-severed and reattached tethers of his heart snapped under the strain, one after the other with each mile deeper onto Castaldinian soil. For eight years, he’d lived with the certainty—the hopelessness—that he’d never see this land again.
He hadn’t imagined he could feel this way. He’d thought he’d long ago moved beyond such frailties as homesickness and nostalgia, that this land and all it represented had no more hold on him.
He might not have known, but Phoebe clearly had. She knew. Everything that was roiling inside him. He now understood what she was doing. She was trying to turn off her aura, her presence. She was trying to give him privacy. To sort through the chaos that returning to his homeland had kicked up inside him.
He felt something too warm for comfort swell inside his rib cage. Something achingly sweet. Gratitude. That she understood, gauged his needs and gave him the spiritual space and silent empathy that would soothe him, ameliorate his turmoil. And he just knew she’d also sense when he’d dealt with the first shockwave of response, would come back to him then.
He shook his head in self-deprecation as he succumbed, let storm through him the emotions he’d believed he’d never feel again—for the land that had exiled him, and the woman who’d deserted him.
Yes. A fool. In so many incurable ways.
Phoebe kept her eyes on the rushing by Jawara.
As capitals went, it was probably the only one in the twenty-first century that didn’t have one building built later than the eighteenth. Its mixture of Gothic, Moorish andbaroque architecture was considered the best-preserved in the world. Or it used to be. There’d been cuts in the restoration programs over the last twenty years, channeling of funds into venues of a more pressing nature. To her—someone who hadn’t seen Castaldini before those times—the kingdom looked magnificent anyway, even with the disrepair. But Castaldinians said the decline had been noticeable. And though she hadn’t been at her most observant of the outside world these past years, she’d noticed the deterioration deepening.
Jawara did still feel like a jewel, as its Moorish name proclaimed it to be, sparkling under perpetual sunlight, nestling between the banks of the Boriana River and the Montalbo mountains before giving way to rolling plains to the north and south. But it did look like a cracked jewel the closer you looked. Now it needed the help of its closest peak, the 2,010-meter Odesilia only a few kilometers from the city center, to augment the majestic feel that it was losing. And as they entered the oldest part of the city, which was dominated by the massive royal palace overlooking it on a hill between two smaller mountains, she drew the parallel
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