Free American Royals by Katharine McGee

daughter was a close friend of Samantha’s. And now fast-food heiress Stephanie Warner was rustling over to pose with Daphne for the photographers, making certain to stand on Daphne’s right, so that her name would appear first in the photo captions.
    “How’s your friend Himari?” Stephanie asked when the bulbs had stopped flashing. The question caught Daphne off guard.
    “Himari is still in the hospital,” she replied, with perhaps the first genuine emotion she’d shown that day.
    Stephanie pursed her lips into a moue of sympathy. She was wearing a dark shade of lipstick that wasn’t right for her pale complexion. It made her look garish, like some kind of vampire bride from the crypt. “She’s been in there a while, hasn’t she.”
    “Since June.” Daphne said a quick goodbye and moved along the room. She couldn’t let herself think about Himari, and what had happened to her the night of Jefferson’s graduation. Once she did, the memory would grab hold of her mind and refuse to let go.
    This was the greatest game in the world, the only game that truly mattered: the game of influence at court. So Daphne glanced around at her smiling enemies and smiled right back at them.
    Looking slender and shadowy in her dusky silk gown, she started at last toward the prince. Her heels made emphatic little clicks on the hardwood surface of the ballroom. She’d worn her hair down tonight, its fiery layers framing the perfect oval of her face. She’d even managed to borrow a pair of emerald droplets that brought out the vicious green of her eyes.
    When she reached him, Jefferson made a show of looking up as if startled, though he’d probably been watching her from across the ballroom. After all these years, he was just as attuned to her presence as she was to his.
    Daphne dropped into a curtsy: straight down like a bucket, like a ballerina at the barre. The fabric of her skirts pooled architecturally around her. She kept her head lifted the whole time, her eyes on his. They both knew there was no reason for her to greet him like this, except to give him a good view down the front of her dress. A bit desperate, but then, so was she.
    After a moment, Jefferson reached to pull her out of the curtsy. She looked up at him wistfully, as if to say, Here we are again, after all, and was relieved by Jefferson’s answering grin.
    “Hey there, Jefferson.” The familiar syllables of his name rolled in her mouth like candy.
    “Hey, Daph.”
    “Dance with me?” She flashed her most beguiling smile, the one Jefferson had never been able to resist. Sure enough, he nodded.
    As they stepped onto the dance floor, he twined a hand in hers, resting the other on her waist, the way he had so many times before. God, he was so gorgeous, so achingly familiar. All the old tenderness and warmth was bubbling back up, and the hurt, too, as she remembered what he’d done to her—what she’d done to him —
    “Did you have fun in Asia?” she asked, to cover her momentary confusion.
    “It was incredible. There’s nothing like sitting at the top of Angkor Wat and watching the sun rise to really put things in perspective.” Jefferson gave a lazy smile. “How’s senior year treating you? I heard you got prefect, by the way. Congratulations.”
    She wondered how he knew that—whether someone had told him or whether he’d read it himself, in the news blurb she’d pressured Natasha to publish. Either way, it was nice to know that Jefferson was still keeping tabs on her.
    “The real benefit of being prefect is that Sister Agatha no longer chases me down for hallway passes when I’m out of class.”
    “As if you ever cut class.” Jefferson spun her in an expert twirl, causing the folds of her gown to flutter and settle around her with a pleasant whisper.
    “I cut class that time we went to the World Series.”
    “Was that when Nicholas got so drunk that he bartered away his shoes for a hot dog?”
    “His shoes and his phone.”
    They