by Lucy Monroe
"I didn't. I looked it up." She found herself scooting closer to Rajvinder, powerfully drawn to his masculine sensuality. "The wedding night made me nervous."
He flashed her an irresistible smile. "So, like any good scientist, you looked for answers."
"I did. I learned I didn't have to find him sexually stimulating to have comfortable sex, but I would probably need some kind of lubricant as my body wouldn't naturally prepare for him like…"
"Like it will for me." He leaned forward, his mouth a breath from her own. "You're probably already wet."
"Don't be crass." But after a full day of his subtle seductions. He was right.
"Not crass. Honest." He kissed her. Just a soft press of his lips against hers, but it left her breathless.
He leaned back, his gaze searching her own. "You could have had boyfriends."
He wanted to talk? After kissing her? She made herself focus on what he'd said and replied, "I didn't want them."
"Why?"
She licked her lips, tasting him, wanting more. "You read my mind so well, you tell me."
He looked at her for a few seconds and then nodded, like he'd worked it out. "You already told me." He brushed his thumb along her lower lip, leaving sparks of pleasure in its wake. "You didn't want to care about anyone, but that still doesn't explain agreeing to marry a man who held no attraction for you. A man who wasn't saving himself for marriage."
There was that disgust again, and now she knew who it was for. Dev.
"I always suspected he had a girlfriend." Dev had spent a lot of unexplained time away from the palace. She'd heard him and his father arguing once too.
About discretion. About dignity. Not about fidelity.
"But you never asked."
She just shook her head. She hadn't wanted to know. She already felt badly for Dev, someone capable of feeling, someone who she thought probably wanted to love, but who had been as trapped by duty as Eliza.
"How did that make you feel?" he asked before leaning forward to place another soft, but nothing like chaste, kiss against her lips.
"Sad."
He reared back, apparently shocked again. "Why sad? Why not angry?"
"Dev was such as good guy," Eliza tried to explain. "He deserved love and I knew I would never give him even passion, but he was as trapped by duty as I was."
"And that made you sad? For him? Not for yourself."
"Yes."
"Because you didn't want to risk loving him."
She shrugged. Rajvinder knew her truths. She'd told him fears she'd never shared with anyone. And Rajvinder had never downplayed them.
Still, he looked unconvinced. "How were either of you trapped? You were both adults in the twenty-first century, not the nineteenth."
"The year we live in is not as important as the culture we are born to. You know that. Dev was raised to live by duty above all else. And to a lesser extent, so was I." Her parents' expectation that she would allow them a large say in who she married had been part of her family knowledge, even at age ten when she lost them.
It had been natural to her to allow her guardians the same privilege, as much because she hadn't wanted emotional entanglements as because the idea they would play such a role was normal to her.
"Archaic. Even the English royal family managed to marry for love this generation." Rajvinder's voice was thick with mockery.
But he couldn't dismiss Dev's heritage, or Rajvinder's own for that matter, so easily. "You say that, but the Mahapatras family is a dynasty."
"And that dynasty raised yet another generation to put duty to the title, to the station, above duty to their children."
"Dev didn't have children."
"And if he had, with the girlfriend you didn't want to know about?"
"He wouldn't," Eliza said with passionate certainty. "Dev wasn't like that."
He might not have had the strongest character, but Dev wouldn't have fathered a child he couldn't raise.
A strange look passed through Rajvinder's dark eyes. It almost looked like fury, but it was banked so quickly, she couldn't be sure.
"How was it your duty to marry him?" Rajvinder asked mildly for the tension she could feel emanating off him.
She looked away from him and admitted her guilt, her reason for seeing doing her duty as the one thing she could give the family that had taken her in. "I couldn't let them into my heart. I couldn't love them."
Tabish auntie had called Eliza her daughter, but Eliza had never felt like the woman was her mother. She couldn't give that loyalty and love away.
Rajvinder gently brought Eliza's head around so their eyes met again, his gaze filled with unexpected understanding and no judgment at all. "Of course you couldn't. You'd lost everyone who had ever mattered to your child's heart."
"How do you understand these things so well?" she asked at a loss. "You're not a touchy-feely guy."
His smile was gentle, but a tinge of the predator she knew him to be lurked in his espresso gaze. "If I didn't understand human nature, I would not be nearly as successful in business as I am."
She remembered him saying something like that before but hadn't realized how deep his intuitive genius ran. It was kind of scary.
She wasn't sure she wanted to be known or understood that deeply. "I guess that's true."
"So, because you couldn't give Adhip and Tabish love, you gave them obedience."
"Yes."
"And because Dev had no more backbone than his uncle, he was going to make the same kind of marriage."
"I'm pretty sure uncle and auntie had more chemistry than Dev and I ever did," she admitted, realizing only recently that her idea of marrying her best friend who she was not attracted to at all might have been more a recipe for disaster than the easy relationship she'd thought it would be.
"Perhaps. Perhaps not. But for myself, I am glad you are not grieving a lover."
She didn't know what to say to that, so Eliza said nothing.
Rajvinder, tugged her into his lap, his mouth hovering just above hers. "We have all the chemistry necessary to have a very satisfying marriage."
"Marriage isn't all about sex." But the more time she spent with him, the more she wanted Rajvinder, and the less convinced Eliza became in her certainty that good sex didn't matter to a good marriage.
His kiss forestalled anything she might have said. And she didn't mind. Not one little bit.
CHAPTER TEN
Her entire body jolted from the electric connection between their lips.
His kiss was masterful and questing at the same time. She could feel him holding back and her inexperienced sensuality was relieved.
They kissed until she was melted against him, his jacket gone, her top rucked up and her body zinging with every caress along skin no one else had ever touched.
Then, Rajvinder did the unthinkable. He pulled away, tugging her top down as he did so. "We have dinner reservations. We need to get ready if we are going to make them."
"I'd rather stay here," she said with more honesty than she would have ever given Dev.
Rajvinder's smile was devastating. "You are due for some spoiling."
"Dinner is spoiling me?"
"It is not about eating out at a five-star restaurant. It is about giving time."
"Which you don't have a lot of."
"I have made time for you."
And he had. This busy executive who routinely put in sixty-plus hour work weeks and used his weekends to wheel and deal, had taken time off to come and make sure Eliza was doing all right. To give her time.
"You're kind of perfect, you know?"
"I am far from perfect, but I saw the way Jamison treated my mother. She always said it wasn't the diamonds, or the elite vacations, but the fact he took time from his schedule for her."
And even though Eliza and Rajvinder were marrying for reasons of convenience rather than affection, he was committed to making that marriage work.
Feeling both elated and terrified by t
he feelings that thoughtfulness evoked, Eliza jumped to her feet. "Dinner it is."
She could use the breather.
Because if she wasn't careful, he was going to own her pieced-together heart.
***
Dinner was amazing, and Eliza had loved having all of Rajvinder's attention.
He might have said it wasn't about the five-star venue, but that's where he took her. The ambiance was elegant, the service fantastic and the food superb. Their table for two located in a private spot created by a decorative screen and greenery, made Eliza feel like they were in their own little world.
And he'd made all this happen.
Rajvinder's attention to detail was astonishing. And a little intimidating.
She was kind of glad he wasn't taking a bigger role planning the wedding. With him as the driving force, as unlikely as she would have said it was, she now was sure that even their royal wedding could be bigger and more ostentatious.
"I feel like we're having the honeymoon before the wedding," she offered as they entered the suite later, making no effort to hide the approval she felt in her tone.
He kicked his shoes off like he'd done earlier, and she realized it was a habit.
Something warm unfurled inside her at the knowledge she knew this tiny idiosyncrasy.
He indicated the long white sofa they'd been sitting on during their make out session earlier. "I promise, I will not be sleeping on the couch during our honeymoon."
She made no attempt to flirt with him, or give him a come hither look. She wouldn't know what one was.
What she had given him was blatant honesty. "You don't have to sleep on it now."
He didn't ask if she was sure, didn't question if she knew her own mind. His eyes going dark with the passion that had simmered between them all day, Rajvinder guided her into the bedroom.
She didn't wait for him to kiss her. She'd wanted his lips all through dinner and now she could have them.
Sliding her hands up his chest, she pressed close and pulled his head down so their lips met. And it was every bit as good as every kiss between them had been.
Her fear of the wedding night and what came after the kissing was nonexistent in that moment. She wanted to touch him, to be touched by him.
***
Vin groaned as Eliza's hands mapped his upper torso, showing she wanted sexual intimacy as much as he did.
He'd been craving her all day, for the two weeks they'd been apart, if he were honest. The kisses they'd shared earlier only fed his hunger for her. Breaking off to go to dinner had been nearly impossible.
But it had been necessary.
He was done keeping his hands to himself now, though, and from her actions it was clear, so was the woman he would be married to in a matter of days.
He skimmed his hands down her elegant back and cupped her bottom pulling her up and closer for the kiss.
Eliza locked her legs around him, like it was the most natural thing in the world.
He moved to the bed, his own knees unsteady under the overriding lust racing through him.
Vin took his time undressing her and Eliza showed no reticence about sharing her nudity with him, though he knew he was the only man who had ever seen her this way.
And what that knowledge did to him.
Damn.
Knowing that not even Dev had ever seen her naked body, have ever touched not just her breasts and feminine sex, but her stomach, or her back, her bottom, her thighs.
Eliza's body was Vin's playground just as his would be for her.
She would only ever be his and he would be hers from now until death, the wedding vows a mere formality they had yet to get through.
Even amidst his lust, there was a tiny niggle of doubt about how she would respond to his plans for after their marriage, but he'd sounded her out. He'd made sure he knew what was important to her and that was not having her child become his heir.
Vin had made sure Eliza's future was set.
So was that of the Mahapatras dynasty, just not the way the Singh family expected.
And none of that was as important right now as the desire raging between him and the woman that would soon be his wife.
Once they were both naked, Vin stood for a long moment, just looking at her. Eliza's nipples were hard and berry red, her pert breasts not overly full, but he wanted to taste them like he'd never wanted to taste another woman, wanted to feel every millimeter of her satiny skin.
Vin would give her pleasure she didn't know she was capable of feeling and take the same from her body.
She didn't wax down below, like other lovers he'd had, Eliza's blond curls glistening enticingly with proof that he wasn't the only one turned on.
Not that her trembling limbs and panting breaths weren't a dead giveaway.
"You want this." He didn't make it a question because he didn't have any doubt.
"I do," she affirmed regardless, her voice breathy and low. "I never knew I could."
"You thought you were sexless?" he asked in a teasing tone, because his little scientist might be an introvert, but she was by no means lacking in feminine sensuality. "You excite me like no other woman ever has."
And didn't she look pleased by that fact?
He wasn't going to try to deny it, though. Vin might have a lot more experience than his virgin scientist did in the bedroom department, but none of his other encounters had affected him like a single kiss from Eliza's sweet lips.
"Then it's mutual." That admission didn't seem to make her quite as pleased.
Fear would be a better description of the look on her face.
"That's a good thing, sonii. Mutual passion should not frighten you. Even if it leads to emotions neither of us expects to feel." Vin had come to accept that even if they had met under entirely different circumstances, he would want to make this woman his.
"I don't want to love you," she told him baldly even as her hands reached for him.
"Don't think about that right now." He brushed his hand down her torso, loving the way her body undulated under the caress. "Think about how good this feels."
Love? Not something he let himself worry about. Mutual passion? That was something else and coupled with shared interests and beliefs, a damn good basis for marriage, in his estimation.
"I'm not on birth control," she told him, her voice soft and breathless, turning him on even further.
But her words gave him pause. "You said you were not ready for children."
"I'm not, but that was not the deal." Her tone said she was just starting to realize that maybe she should have worried more about what she wanted than what the family expected from her.
This marriage deal might have been Eliza's idea, but she had put herself entirely at the Singh family's disposal, with all their dynastic dreams.
However, Vin would protect her in this, as in other things. As her future husband and partner in life, that was his job.
"You having a child right away, or even at all, is not part of our deal," he assured her. "And what is between us, is all that matters."
"I don't think Dadaji would agree."
"Ask me if I care."
"You must care a little, or you wouldn't be going through with this."
"Trust me, this…" He trailed his hand down the inside of her thigh. "Has nothing to do with Trisanu Singh."
She bit her lip, something passing through her gaze he could not define. "But it does."
"No." Then he moved over her, capturing her lips in a kiss meant to convey just how little anyone else had to do with what happened between Vin and Eliza.
She responded with the passion that had quickly become necessary to him, opening her mouth to his questing tongue, moving her legs restlessly against him.
He did what he'd been craving all day and mapped her satin smooth skin from collar bone to ankles, reveling in the way she responded to his touch. Loving every gasped breath, every moan, every jerky movement of her body, as she sought more and more sensation
.
And she had believed she was sexless?
She was living fire and he was happy to be bathe in her heat.
"Rajvinder!"
He lifted his head and met her beautiful blue eyes. "What do you want, sonii?"
"More."
He smiled. "Then I will give you more."
He started by following the path with his mouth that he had already taken with his hands.
He licked her ankle, mouthing the skin of her leg until he'd reached the apex of her thighs. He pushed her legs wider and pressed his tongue right against her swollen clitoris.
Crying out, she arched against him and he inhaled the sweet scent of her arousal as he tasted the very essence of her.
"Rajvinder, that's…don't stop…please, don't stop."
No chance. He was bringing her the ultimate pleasure and turning himself on past the point the reason at the same time.
He brushed his fingertips up her body until he found both of her breasts. Cupping them, he played over her nipples with his thumbs. Brushing back and forth, back and forth, until she was writhing on the bed, her most intimate flesh slick with her desire, incoherent mutterings spilling as a litany from her lips.
She climaxed with a scream, her entire body going rigid as he drew forth every bit of pleasure he could before she grew too sensitive. He wiped his mouth on the sheet and then moved up her body, loving how bonelessly she lay against the pristine white Egyptian cotton.
She looked hazily at him. "That was amazing."
"It was. You are."
"Are we going to…" She let her voice trail off, clearly uncomfortable naming the act.
His sex was so hard, it ached, but he shook his head. They would discuss birth control tomorrow, but until then, there would be no penetration.
"But…"
"Do you want to touch me?" he asked her.
Her eyes opened wider, her body going from boneless to alert in a breath. "Oh, yes."
He laid back, indicating his nakedness. "Then by all means."
Her gaze skittered to his turgid sex, but moved on to the rest of his body and he knew he wasn't in for a quick hand job.
He was right. She took her time, learning his body, touching him and tasting with untutored enthusiasm that was more exciting than the most experienced and adventurous lovers from his past.