And he didn’t even know her name.
He stood gaping like a fool, his speech forgotten. He could do nothing but stare at her delectable curves, her hair like embers, her sparkling eyes. Who was she? She didn’t look Brandusan, and surely she was too young to be a diplomat. A diplomat’s daughter?
A discreet cough from Raluca brought him back to his senses. He finished his speech on autopilot, then stepped down from the platform. Luckily, it was the custom to mingle with the crowd, so he didn’t have to make a special excuse to talk to his mate. He strode through the crowd, smiling and bowing and exchanging greetings and good-wishes, his heart as light as if borne aloft on dragon wings.
Then he stood before her. The crowd faded away. All he could see was her. She was even more beautiful up-close, with a charming spray of freckles across her nose and cheeks. Her luscious breasts swelled up from her corset like living pearls. He took a deep breath, and caught a hint of her scent: dried roses and clean linen, and something warm and womanly beneath it. It made his head swim.
So this was his mate. He wanted to learn everything about her. He wanted to catch her up in his arms and feel the softness of her rosy lips.
He couldn’t believe how lucky he’d been to have found her.
And he had no idea what to say.
“Welcome,” he finally managed. “I am Lucas.”
“I know,” she said with a smile. Her accent was unmistakably American. She gave him a surprisingly graceful curtsy; she must have spent some time in Brandusa. “I’m Journey Jacobson.”
“What a marvelous name. Did your parents give it to you or did you choose it for yourself?”
She cocked her head, sending her glinting curls tumbling over her shoulders. “You know, I always expect people to ask that, but they hardly ever do. Jacobson is my family name, but I chose Journey myself.”
“How did you come to choose it?”
“I grew up in a little town called Lummox, North Dakota. There was basically nothing there but canola fields and cows.”
“Canola?”
“It’s a plant,” Journey explained. “You squeeze oil out of the seed pods. It has yellow flowers and it’s pretty in the spring, but there’s only so long you can look at fields of yellow flowers. And that’s about all there is to do in Lummox: look at the canola, and tip cows.”
“Tip cows?” Lucas repeated, fascinated.
“They sleep standing up. If you push them hard, they fall over. Then they jump up and charge you, and you have to run. It’s kind of mean. I never did it myself.
But if your only alternative is watching the canola...”
Lucas couldn’t help laughing. “I can see why you wished to journey.”
She laughed with him. Her laughter wasn’t like Raluca’s, like crystal bells; it was full-throated and unselfconscious, and made him want to laugh too. “Oh, and also we had a library. A very tiny, dusty library, that no one ever went in but me and the librarian. It had three shelves full of ancient National Geographics. I read them over and over, and I decided that as soon as I was old enough, I’d get out of Lummox and see the world. But the thing was, a lot of people had dreams in Lummox. Had. Mostly, they’d given them up. So I decided to name myself for my dream, so I’d never forget it.”
Journey had begun her story in laughter, but when she got to the part about people giving up their dreams, he saw her eyes glisten with held-back tears. Who had she known who’d given up their dreams? Her parents, perhaps?
Lucas didn’t want to press her. How cruel he would be, to make her cry at a ball! Instead, he spoke the other thought that was in his heart. “How brave and clever of you to take your dream as your name. How old were you?”
“Thirteen.” She smiled, her sorrow fading. “Everyone thought I was crazy. You don’t change your first name in Lummox, North Dakota. You especially don’t change it to something that isn’t even a real name. I caught hell for it for the next five years. It took me an entire year to even get people to stop calling me Ashley.”
“How did you manage it?”
She shrugged. “I answered when they called me Journey, and I didn’t answer when they called me Ashley. For about six months, no one called me anything at all. Then they gave in.”
“You have a will of steel.”
That same sad look shadowed her face. “Maybe I did then.”
Lucas was puzzled. “Always, surely. You succeeded, did you not? Here you are, journeying far from... Lummox.”
Journey’s sorrow melted into amusement. “I love the way you say it. It’s like you can’t quite believe it’s a real town.”
“Oh, no,” Lucas assured her. “I believe in it. We have such towns in Brandusa. They contain nothing but fields of barley and herds of bored, mischief-making goats.”