10
Dinner was a pained affair that night. Aella and her father were barely speaking, and Lia couldn’t keep her thoughts off Kem. After Aella had left earlier, Kem had come out of the wardrobe, fully dressed, to Lia’s dismay. He’d told her that he needed to go and freshen up so that he could come and talk to her father properly, and she had to admit that it was probably better that he did; arriving in last night’s clearly rumbled suit to claim his daughter wasn’t likely to go down well. Even so, she was nervous, and completely unsure about how her father would take the news. While he’d been willing to marry Aella off, his feelings seemed to be more protective towards Lia, possibly something to do with the fact that their mother had died when she was still a baby, and she doubted that he’d
