“Erica—” he groans again, “Erica—”
“Do it,” I grit out and lock my teeth around his earlobe.
As much as I want this to keep going, I can’t bear to pull back even a little from him. I can’t stand to delay the pleasure I know is coming.
And he does. One more thrust—hard, gasping, intense—his arms now threaded under mine and his hands locked on top of my shoulders so he can pull me down and into him harder.
I feel like a rag doll in his arms. Waves of pleasure surge through me, and my head falls back onto the pillow, but I’m barely here at all anymore because my body is coming apart and Alex is the only real thing in the universe, the only thing I know is true—
When I return to myself, I’m gasping, nearly crying from the intensity of it. I bury my head against his chest and wait for my heart to stop pounding. I can hear his heart matching mine beat for beat, hammering away, unable to recover.
“Wow, Erica,” he says finally. “You’re really something.”
I close my eyes, basking in the warm glow of his approval, reveling in his pleasure and in my own.
Slowly, delicately, sleep comes to carry me away, but I stay curled in the warmth of Alex’s arms as I go.
Chapter 6
I drift slowly between dreams, aware, always, that I’m dreaming. It’s strange. Usually, I’m not so certain about that fact. But now I’m completely grounded by Alex’s hand on my hip while I sleep. His touch is the only thing that’s real.
But how can he be real? Once or twice I question it. He must be the dream.
I dream I’m on set, that the filming of season three is beginning and someone has decided that the king’s heirs should compete in a battle for the throne. There’s a rush of pride. I’m a good fighter already. The others will have to train, but I’m ready.
Behind me, Alex breathes softly, contentedly, his face pressed into the crook of my neck, and no, no matter what the world around me reveals, I know I’m asleep, the battle is only a dream.
Alex. Alex is what’s real.
I can’t possibly be getting a good night’s sleep. I must be riding the edge of waking, given how attuned I am to every move Alex makes and every sound he utters. Would I ever get used to this? Would I ever be able to sleep properly in his arms, or would the mere fact of him always be enough to keep me alert?
All this wondering has me more in my conscious mind than in my dream, and it pulls me gently back to full wakefulness. Alex’s hand is on my hip, exactly where I’ve been aware of it resting all night, but now I feel other things. His breath, soft and even, on the back of my neck. His feet, nested beneath mine.
I remember how animalistic I felt last night, how desperate I was for this man, and I wait for embarrassment to come, but to my surprise, it doesn’t. We’re lying here in bed together, fully naked, having been absolutely wanton just a few hours ago, and I’m as comfortable as I’ve ever been in my life.
The hand on my hip moves, suddenly, slipping down so his arm encircles my waist and pulling me back into him. Sometime in the last minute or so, he’s woken up, and maybe I’m not the only one who was aware of our closeness all night, because he’s already hard, lifting his hips into me and making me gasp.
“Morning,” he whispers, directly into my ear.
“H-hi.”
How quickly I become unglued in his arms! How little it takes for me to lose myself completely. I’m not the kind of woman who turns into a mess around a man, but this is something else altogether. I’ve never experienced anything like it in my life.
He hums a little. “Did you sleep well?” he asks.
“Not very,” I admit, surprising myself by telling the truth. I don’t know what makes me do it. Maybe it’s just the fact that I feel so close to him right now. It’s as though any deception would be putting up a wall between us.
“I didn’t wear you out enough?” he asks, a laugh in his voice, pulling me closer. “Do we need to try it again? I hate to leave you disappointed.”
“I wasn’t disappointed—” I break off in another gasp as his hand slides up my stomach and cups my breast.
I know what he’s doing. I know this is banter. Ordinarily, I’d enjoy it, wordplay back and forth like this, but my head is too scattered to play along.
“What should we do today?” Alex muses. “Should we go out to brunch? Is there a good place near here? I could really go for some bagels and lox. My treat, of course…”
“Bagels?” I practically whimper.
He’s not seriously talking about bagels at a time like this, is he? The very idea of putting clothes on and sitting across from him in a diner booth seems impossible. How can he be thinking of breakfast when we’re right here, when we’re this close to each other and that beautiful bliss we created together last night? We’re already naked. It’s just a matter of making the right moves at this point.
I press back into him, trying to make it plain that bagels are not what I want right now.
He huffs out a little breath of air, and my heart sings.
“Well,” he says huskily, “maybe brunch will have to wait.”
Relief floods me. I roll over in his arms and press my lips to his. His hand cups the back of my head, holding me close.
We can stay here all day, I think to myself, molding my body to his. Forget brunch. We can just stay here and do this. It’s hiatus, so I don’t have to be on set, and he’s on vacation and probably doesn’t have anywhere to be. There’s no reason to leave this bed for the next twelve hours.
Then a phone rings.
It’s like a bucket of ice water has been thrown over me, bringing me crashing down from my high. At first I think it’s my phone, and that I’m somehow about to be called to set after all, but then it rings again, and Alex mutters a curse under his breath. I recognize that the chimes are different from the pattern of the chimes on my own phone. The call is not for me.
“You can get that if you need to,” I say.
He shakes his head and kisses me again, more urgently, as if the force and fire of our passion could make the phone disappear.
But it rings again, and I pull back.
“Really, it’s fine. I’ll be right here.” I push him away from me gently, even though every fiber of me is screaming to pull him closer instead. “Find out what they want.”
He gets to his feet reluctantly.
“Stay,” he says, holding a hand out to me, as if I might possibly decide to go anywhere else knowing that he’s coming back.
He steps into his boxers and pants, immediately disrupting my view, and scoops his phone out of his pocket.
“Hello?” he says easily.
I wait, hoping whoever’s on the other end of this call can be gotten rid of quickly.
He frowns. “I told you my itinerary—”
Then the frown deepens. He glances at me and holds up a finger, indicating that he’ll be a minute.
I nod in what I hope is an agreeable way. I want to make things easy on him. I don’t want to be the girl who demands constant attention, even when other things are going on in his life.
After all, this was just a one-night stand.
Right?
Of course, the night is over now, but he’s still here. We still want each other in the light of day. That doesn’t have the feeling of a one-night stand. That feels like…well, it feels like something with the potential to be more. Is it possible that this could be, not the end of something, but the beginning? Is it possible that Alex and I could have a future together?
No. That’s crazy. He’s royalty.
But he sees me as royalty, too. He said so himself. Celebrities are America’s royalty.
That’s ridiculous, though. He meant that we seem that way to the public. He meant that we’re treated with over-the-top amounts of adoration, and we get the royal treatment from businesses. Things like that.
Being royalty is more than just being worshipped by fans. I know enough to know that. He has respons
ibilities I don’t have in life. He can’t feel that we’re peers just because I’m famous.
And I’m barely famous. I mean, one TV show, two seasons—yes, it’s been successful, but at the end of the day, it’s one role. Without Royal Blue I’d still just be Erica from Ohio, going on auditions for TV commercials.
The sound of my balcony door sliding open brings me back into the present. Alex is stepping outside. He slides the door closed behind him but leaves it cracked, and a few words float back to me. “Urgent” and “parliament” and “make sure you inform.” It’s somber, serious, and nothing like the Alex I’ve gotten to know over the past twelve hours.
Something has changed in him. What is it?
He’s pacing back and forth, as if he’s stressed to the breaking point. Once, he stops and grips the railing on the balcony’s edge, his shoulders hunched and leaning forward. I feel a desperate yearning to throw off the blankets and go to him, wrap my arms around him, and ease his suffering. But I can’t. He went outside because he wanted to have a private conversation, and I know it would be invasive and inappropriate for me to following him out there.
The only thing I can do is to sit here and wait, and hope I’ll be able to do something when he comes back in.
When finally he returns, however, the vibe coming off him is so stressed that I know at once our day in bed together is no longer an option.
Sure enough, before I can say anything, before I can ask him who was on the phone or what it was about, he’s reaching for his sweater and pulling it over his head. I grab an extra-large T-shirt from my dresser that I usually sleep in, pull it over my head, and clamber out of bed.
“What’s going on, Alex?”
“Nothing,” he says.
I’m stunned by the distance, the coolness, in his tone. It’s not impolite, not exactly, but he’s talking to me as if we’re strangers instead of people who spent the night together. All the closeness that was between us, all his attentiveness to me, seems to have evaporated in the time he spent out on the balcony.
How could it all have just gone away so quickly?
I’m not the kind of person who’s prone to overly romanticizing things. It’s not like me to make more of something than was actually there. And last night with Alex was absolutely the most amazing connection with a man I’ve ever had. Both mentally and physically, it seemed like we were in exactly the same place. And now it’s just gone? It doesn’t make sense.
He goes into the living room and sits down on the couch to pull on his shoes. I follow.
“Are you leaving?” I ask, feeling pathetic.
“I have to,” he says.
“I thought we were going to get brunch.”
I feel like the saddest girl in the world. I didn’t even want to get brunch with him. I wanted to spend the day in bed. But now it feels like everything is slipping through my fingers and I’m grasping to hold on to anything I can. It’s humiliating.
Alex shakes his head. “No time. I’m sorry. I need to get to the airport right away.”
“To the airport?” Now I’m confused. “I thought you were here on vacation. Didn’t you say you were staying for a while?”
I try to think back over our conversation last night. I could have sworn he told me he’d be in California for a few weeks. Did I just imagine that because it’s what I wanted to hear?
“I have to cut my trip short,” Alex says. “I need to get back to the palace. It was a mistake to think I could stay here for any real length of time. I should know better, really.”
“Alex, who was that on the phone?”
But he just shakes his head again. He’s patting his pockets now in a way that’s all too familiar to me. I’ve seen men do this dozens of times, always right before they walk out the door. He’s making sure he has everything.
“Please, Alex,” I try one more time. “Can’t we just get breakfast before you go? Maybe talk about this?”
We’re never going to see each other again if you leave this way, I think, but don’t say aloud. I guess I do have a scrap of dignity left.
“I can’t,” he says firmly. “I need to catch a plane.”
“There are planes leaving all the time,” I protest. “What difference is an hour going to make?”
And for the two of us, it could make all the difference in the world. We could make a plan, arrange to see each other in the future, at least discuss the possibility of keeping in contact…
“Listen, Erica,” Alex says. “This was fun. I had a really nice time.”
I feel humiliated tears welling up behind my eyes and swallow hard to choke them down. So it was only a one-night stand. How foolish I was to imagine something more.
“I think,” Alex continues, “that it would be best if we ended things now. On a positive note. Any kind of future for the two of us…it’s just too impractical, isn’t it? You need to be here so you can film your show, and I need to be back in Avaran taking care of royal business.”
“Is that what that call was?” I ask, and to my surprise, I manage to keep all bitterness out of my tone.
A few tears spill over, and with them, my embarrassment and feelings of being pathetic seem to dry up. It’s okay that I’m sad about this, I realize. The connection between Alex and me—that was real. I didn’t imagine it.
“I can’t really talk about that call,” he says, and for the first time, I’m acutely aware of the status of the person standing in my home. The difference between celebrities and royalty has never seemed so stark. I don’t have secrets the way he does. I don’t have anything I couldn’t tell him.
“So this is it,” I say quietly.
It’s not really a question. He’s been telling me since he got off the phone, and I understand him well enough. He has to leave now, and we have to end whatever this is before it starts.
Maybe he can see how sad I am about that, because something in his face softens.
“I really did have a wonderful night,” he says, and for a moment I’m caught all over again in the warmth of his eyes. “I wish it didn’t have to be this way. Really I do.”
“I know,” I say regretfully. “I know you’re right, Alex.”
“We’ll always have last night,” he says. “One perfect night. I know I’ll always remember it that way. I wish it could have been more, but I’m glad we got to have what we did.”
I nod. “Thank you,” I say. “For everything.”
He crosses the room in two strides, sweeps me into his arms, and kisses me, long and hard. It feels like he’s pouring the entire future we’ll never have into that kiss, and everything that might have been is being explored and celebrated between us right now.
The kiss goes on and on, and for just a moment I start to believe that he might have changed his mind. Maybe he isn’t in such a hurry to leave. If I can just get him back to bed…
He pulls away. “It was wonderful meeting you, Erica,” he says.
And then he turns and disappears, the door closing behind him, and it’s as if he was never here at all.
I press my fingers to my lips, which are still sore, reassuring myself that I didn’t imagine him. He was really here. I had a prince—the sexiest man I’ve ever met—in my house just a minute ago.
And now I’ve lost him. He’s out of my life for good.
I know he’s right. There’s too much in the way of our pursuing any kind of future. How could we have a relationship when he lives in Avaran and I live in California, practically on opposite sides of the globe? How could we even be friends when he’s busy all the time with whatever royalty does and I’m working eighty-hour weeks on film sets?
Yes, he’s definitely right to end things now.
I’m glad. I’m glad he had the strength to do it.
It would have dragged on, rotted, turned from beautiful and magical to stale and painful as we struggled to make a complex long-distance relationship work.
And in the end, of course, it would have ended, and it would have been
a horrible, very public breakup because there’s no way we could keep Princess Aeryn Redfall dating the real-life prince of Avaran out of the tabloids. Everyone would have known, and everyone would have had an opinion, and there would have been articles on the internet from people who knew nothing about either of us about which of us had done the other wrong.
He’s right, so why do I feel like my heart is breaking?
I collapse onto my sofa, exhausted, overwhelmed by how quickly my plans for the day have changed. I’m not going back to Ohio for another week. Alex is gone. All my friends are people from the show, and they’ve already started to scatter for the hiatus. And if anyone is left in town, I’d be too embarrassed to face them after ditching the party the way I did last night.
I pull a pillow over my face and let myself imagine I’m back with Alex, that his hands are roaming over me again the way they were last night. The chemistry between us, the connection, was truly unlike anything I’ve ever experienced, and I doubt I’ll ever find anything like it again.
No sooner had I found it, it was gone.
Chapter 7
Six Weeks Later
Today, I tell myself firmly as I get dressed, I am not going to think about Alex.
The only problem is that I’ve been making this promise to myself every morning, and never once have I succeeded in keeping it. And I know that part of the problem is the fact that I’m pledging not to think about him—trying not to think about something or someone almost guarantees that you will think about it. Them. Him.
Alex.
I wish I’d had the presence of mind during our short time together to take a photo of him. I wish I had some kind of evidence of our time together. But, of course, if I did have a photo, I’m sure I’d spend all my time staring at it and never get anything done.
God. This was supposed to be a one-night stand. I shouldn’t be this hung up on it—on him.
I grab my keys and head out the door, fully aware that, contrary to my pledge, I’ve done almost nothing but think about Alex so far this morning.
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