The Mad King (The Dark Kings #1)(76)

Alice crossed her ankles and shook her head. “What if I’m not ready? Huh? What if I don’t want to?” A part of her totally did, but another part, the rational side of her, was afraid. She had a life back home. She couldn’t be expected to stay here forever. Could he come back with her? Did she want him to?

Danika alighted on the end of her bed. “He’s dying, dear.” The fairy’s words echoed with anguish so thick Alice’s throat tightened.

“Dying?” she whispered.

The fairy looked around the room with a sad smile, and as she did, the walls literally seemed to vanish into mist, revealing the outside beauty of nature surrounding his home. “He is Wonderland. This beautiful madness? It’s all a product of his deliriously wicked mind. It’s lovely chaos, and it’s consuming him. Surely you’ve noticed his preoccupation with riddles and gibberish?”

Alice bit her bottom lip, rocking backward. Dying? The Hatter? The beautiful, sexy man who made her want to scream and throw herself on him? “You’re lying,” she hissed, her lungs heaving for oxygen as the images conjured made her want to weep.

Alice might be upset with him, might even want to hurl sticky buns at his head every once in a while, but she couldn’t imagine a world in which he didn’t exist.

“I wish that I were.” Danika’s lip quivered.

Alice swallowed hard. “But how can I save him?”

“Love.” Danika smiled. “True love. He must find his mate, his perfect match and equal. She is the only one who can pull him from the ever-increasing insanity of his mind.”

The enormity of that burden was daunting. How could she do that? He didn’t even like her. “What if I’m not the one? What if you’re wrong again?”

Even saying it hurt. Did she want to be? She’d never been so angry, or so aroused, by anyone else. For years Hatter had been her constant thought. What if he could never get past her looks? She couldn’t help who she was, and she’d never be content in a relationship if he wasn’t as wildly in love with her as she was with him. Especially if he only considered her a replacement for the one he’d really wanted.

“You are. I know it,” Danika said, cutting into her thoughts.

“Oh yeah, how? He thought he was in love before—you said that yourself.” She lifted a challenging brow. “He might still be in love with my great-grandmother.”

Danika pressed her lips together. “Wonderland did not accept her, and Wonderland is not just a place in a book, Alice. Wonderland is an extension of the man himself. Wonderland will open like a flower to the sun, the land will roll, and the wind will hum when the true Alice is found.”

Her heart sank like a rock. “Well there you go,” she muttered. “It hasn’t done that. Obviously, it’s not me.”

Danika shook her finger. “Your time is not yet up. You’ve only just met; it takes longer than a mere night for true love to bloom.”

Alice rolled her eyes. “Well, if that’s what you’re basing it off, it sure as hell takes longer than three days.”

“Not so, dear. True soul mates know. They always do.”

Alice couldn’t stop the nagging thought that she had known. Even at thirteen, she’d fallen in love. As much in love as a child could be. But he didn’t remember her. That much was clear, because he’d made no mention of that earlier meeting.

In all her years, she’d never once heard her great-grandmother speak of the Hatter. Alice would have guessed the woman hadn’t even known of his existence. And yet she did, and when Alice had spoken of Hatter in her hospital room, her great-grandmother had been there. It’d been her great-grandmother who’d insisted her mother take Alice to an asylum. That spiteful wench! Alice ground her molars as fire burned in her gut.

How could he ever see beyond that?

It hurt thinking he didn’t remember her. Didn’t see her. She saw him—all of him. It’d taken years to excise Hatter from her heart.

At twenty-four, she was okay with that and was ready to move on. To find real love and a real man. To get married and have kids.

To live in the real world and not in the book.

And now this evil little fairy came and told her, He needs you. He doesn’t know it yet, but he needs you, Alice, and she wanted to cry. Because a part of her had always needed him. Hatter was her white knight, he was the hero of her every fantasy. When she’d dated at home, she’d always sought some aspect of him with guys and had found every last one of them wanting, because in the end, they weren’t him.

Only Hatter had those soulful eyes that made her melt, the full bottom lip that made her desperate for a taste. The shoulders, so strong, firm, offering reassurance when she’d fallen into total blackness. The Hatter she’d always pictured within the pages of her beloved book. Not the slapstick caricature of the cartoons, but a hero. A savior to a frightened little girl lying in a hospital bed.

How she’d tenderly rubbed her fingers over pages with any mention of him, her small heart swelling with an impossible feeling of love, tenderness, and a yearning for something she hadn’t been able to comprehend then.

In her way, she’d always loved Hatter. With a madness that had consumed her. A madness she wanted more than anything to embrace now.

But she knew if she took this plunge, if she chose to believe it was true again, that this was real, she’d never be able to forget. Never be able to pretend again. She’d be ruined for anyone else. She licked dry lips, pulse beating so hard she felt the echo of it in her head. But wasn’t she ruined already? She’d never been able to date a man for longer than two months before she found excuses to dump him.