by Maisey Yates
“It’s better than fighting, don’t you think?”
But not very honest. Not when she felt all jumbled up. “Okay.” She extended her hand and wrapped her fingers around his, shaking it slowly. This was silly, but it meant she was able to stop and collect herself. Shore up her defenses. It meant neither of them had to be particularly honest.
She was quite comfortable with that.
“Good,” he said, releasing his hold on her. “Now, let’s go. I think we both agree that a day at the beach has been had and there’s no need to go any further.”
No need for him to pass the site of his mother’s accident. No need for them to confront what had passed between them. No need for them to talk about why he felt so dirty. Why he’d felt the need to walk into the ocean to get clean.
“Yes,” she said. “I think I’m quite ready to go back.”
He smiled, and she knew that he knew, as well as she did, what they were both doing.
Hiding.
“Excellent.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
XANDER COULDN’T GET his tie right. And who the hell cared? He hated all of this. Hated that he had to dress for dinner because Stavros had invited heads of state and all other manner of dignitaries Xander could care less about.
Not when he was highly concerned with his feelings for his fiancée. Or rather, how his fiancée had felt when she’d been naked underneath him. Being with her yesterday had been a revelation. He swore succinctly and tossed his tie down onto the bed.
She had been... There were no words for the blinding flash of perfect oblivion and clarity he’d found when he’d pushed inside her body.
And wasn’t that a damned funny thing? He’d always known sex had power. It had the power to wipe his worries from his mind. The power to make him feel. To bring his life, the emptiness of it, into sharp perspective the moment the buzz from his orgasm faded.
But this was different. He hadn’t felt alone when he’d been with her.
Maybe it was because they were both so very much the same, though he doubted she would ever admit to that.
He looked down at the tie and frowned. Then picked it up.
He could call a servant, but he hated that nonsense. He probably needed a valet or some such, no doubt his father had one.
But that wouldn’t serve his purposes for the moment. Sure, it would get his tie on straight, but it wouldn’t serve his purposes.
He flung his bedroom door open and stalked down the corridor. The servants were very good at ignoring him and his moods. But then, he supposed that was part of earning their salary.
He opened the door to Layna’s room without knocking, hoping he might find her there. He was not disappointed.
“I need help,” he said, his tone as stern as the walk he’d used to bring him here.
Layna frowned from her position on the bed. “You have a very bad habit of barging into my room.”
“Since when does a fiancé need permission? And I have now seen all of your body, so let’s not even pretend that your modesty is offended.”
“Just because you’ve seen it once doesn’t mean you have ongoing permission to see it whenever you like,” she said.
“Of course it does.” He sat down in a chair by the bed, one leg out straight, his arms on the rests. “I am to be king. I will see what I like when I like to see it.”
She arched her brows. “Has being in your childhood home caused this regression or do you just always behave like a recalcitrant boy?”
“I need help putting my tie on,” he growled. He was not going to dignify her question with a response.
“Then why didn’t you call someone?”
“What the hell is the point of a wife who doesn’t want me to see her naked and who won’t tie my damned tie for me?”
“I’m not really sure, actually. Maybe it’s the time for you to rethink your proposal.”
“I won’t.” He stood up and walked toward her, draping his tie over his shoulders. “Fix this.”
She let out a long, exasperated breath and gripped both ends of the tie. “It’s been about a million years since I’ve done this. I did it for my father a couple of times. He felt it would be a good skill to know.”
“For such a time as this, I should think.”
“Clearly, yes, the idea was for me to be able to serve the every whim of my crabby husband. But you are not my husband yet, don’t forget it.”
“I made you mine in every way that counted today.”
“Indeed,” she said, her tone frosty.
“You don’t agree?”
“Does every woman you have sex with belong to you? If so, we should start partitioning off a wing for the royal harem.”
He pulled away from her and started working on the tie on his own again. “You need to dress for dinner.”
“And the subject has changed.”
“It bloody well has.”
“Are you always such a horror after sex?”
“No, but I am always such a horror when I have to put on a tie and perform at some...state dinner I have no desire to partake in.”
“So I should expect a lot of this then?”
He sat down again, his hands folded, his chin braced on his knuckles. “I have to get over it, don’t I?”
“What?”
“The fact that I don’t like this. Or want it. That I don’t know how to do it anymore.”
“How is it that you managed to lose all of what you were raised for? How did you lose so much of who you were born to be?”
Xander shifted in his seat. And he wondered if it was time she knew. “Because it’s not who I was born to be.”
It was too late to take it back now. There was no pulling back from a statement like that. She would never let him off the hook now.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
It didn’t mean he wouldn’t make her drag it out of him since just saying it seemed too hard.
“The way the system works here in Kyonos, it’s almost as if our bloodline gives us some divine ruling powers. I mean, Stavros’s children can’t be in line for the throne because they’re adopted, because they don’t descend from our great and noble lineage. Are there magic powers in it, I wonder? I’ve always wondered that, even when I was a boy. Wondered how I’d been so fortunate to be born with such blood and the divine right to rule that came with it.”
“No wonder you were so insufferable.”
“Yes, it’s no wonder at all when you’re born believing that the simple act of your birth puts you above the common folks.” He took a breath and looked out the window, at the slice of blue sky just barely visible. Not for the first time, he thought he would rather sail into the horizon than deal with all of this. But he’d made a promise.
He’d made a promise to Layna.
He wouldn’t run again.
“But I found out...that I was not born with that right at all. I have no royal blood, Layna. I am not my father’s son.”
“What?” He had succeeded in shocking her. Her eyes flew wide, one eyebrow raised, the other, paralyzed by scar tissue, still managing to convey her surprise.
“That was what my mother and I were fighting about. She told me, on our trip to the beach that day that I was not of royal blood, but the product of an affair she had with her bodyguard. Ironic, considering Eva’s marriage. But my sister had the courage to walk away from her arranged marriage when she decided Mak was the one she wanted. My mother made a different choice. She went ahead with the marriage to my father, knowing she was pregnant.”
“What? How...”
“She seduced him quickly, is my understanding, and it was no hardship to convince him I was born just a few weeks early.”
“But she’s certain?”
“And the bodyguard?”
“Sent away with a grand payoff. She never took a test of any kind, and that was, in the end, why she told me.”
“What do you mean?”
“She’d been getting increasingly paranoid, with the way technology was progressing. She was starting to fear that someday my DNA might be used against me. And so she begged me not to ever undergo any sort of analysis of my blood. Or to ever let my children undergo such a test, when you and I were married.”
“But why would she...?”
“I think it was long-held guilt, starting to eat at her, making her see shadows where there were none. But the thing was, the economy had been having issues already and with the state of political unrest she was concerned for me.”
“But if... Why couldn’t Stavros rule then?”
“My father didn’t know. She didn’t want him to know. She loved him by then, you see? She hadn’t loved him when they’d first married. So lying to him hadn’t seemed so bad. But later...she wanted to keep it a secret. For her. For him. And for me. In her mind, I was her firstborn son and I deserved the honor. I think in some ways, I was her favorite son because of my real father. Because he was her first love. Because she had gone to such great lengths to protect me and ensure I was the heir.”
He shrugged.
“I’ve had fifteen years to think this over. And I have. High, drunk, sober, alone and in the arms of a woman, I’ve thought about this. About what it meant. About what my responsibilities were. She did so much to ensure I could be named the heir. But the fact remains that I’m not.”
“And that’s why you left?”
“That. And the fact that I do blame myself for her death. I was so angry, Layna. I could hardly see straight and I was yelling, I just drove faster and...”
“You made a mistake. You didn’t do it on purpose.”
He shook his head. “I didn’t. But it was a hell of a mistake. There are mistakes you can come back from, but then there are mistakes you make that someone doesn’t walk away from, and those are the hardest ones to deal with. The hardest ones to seek forgiveness for. From yourself or anyone else.”
“Tell me about the day you left,” she said, sinking to the floor in front of him. “Tell me about what happened, now that I know everything.”
“My father had called me into his office. Stavros was there, too.” He could picture them both—his father ashen, angry and grieving. His brother, so young and sullen. A teenage boy still. “And then he proceeded to tell me that he found me responsible for the death of his wife. And how he had no idea how I could possibly be his son, when he would never have behaved in such a manner. And I had no argument. For I felt he spoke the truth. And I had just learned I was not his son. So there was no lie in what he said.”
“And Stavros?”
Xander cleared his throat. He hated that the memory had this much power over him, even now.
“He looked at me and said he would always hold me responsible for the loss of his mother. His mother, as though she were no longer mine because I had taken her from the world. And remembering the words I’d yelled at her before the car hit the rocks? Where I had said she was no longer a mother to me? I couldn’t argue with that statement, either.”
“And you had nothing,” she said, her voice a whisper.
“In one moment, I lost all my family. And I knew I had no real claim on the throne. I saw no reason to stay.”
She rose up, planting her hands on his thighs, and kissed him on the mouth, the touch sweet, sincere. He raised his hands and gripped the back of her head, his fingers sinking deep into her hair, holding her tight to his mouth. He needed this. He needed her. He needed her so badly he was shaking with it already and it had been less than twenty-four hours since he’d last been inside her body.
He tugged gently on her hair, tilting her head back, exposing her tender throat, then he lowered his head and kissed her, slowly. She moaned, encouraging him, spurring him on. He bared his teeth, scraped her delicate skin and reveled in the raw sound she made in response.
She liked this. His little innocent. She liked him unrestrained. She liked to be at his mercy. Which naturally put him at hers. To have a woman on her knees before him, allowing him this kind of sensual feast? He might have the physical power, but she was holding the leash.
Keeping his hand in her hair, he reached down to his belt and undid the buckle, freeing himself from the confines of his pants.
She looked up at him, angelic eyes wide, her lips in a shocked O. There was something about that face that turned him on even more, and it shouldn’t. He knew it shouldn’t.
“You know what I want from you?” he asked, his voice strangled.
She nodded slowly and he tightened his hold on her hair. He watched the color in her cheeks rise, from arousal, not embarrassment. The flush spread down to her neck, her chest.
“Suck me,” he said, his voice rough.
She leaned forward, guided by his hand, the tip of her tongue touching his rigid length.
“More,” he said, tugging gently.
But she didn’t comply. Instead, she just ran her tongue along his shaft. And he could do nothing but sit helplessly, let her have her way. She shifted then, taking all of him into her mouth, and he leaned back in the chair, a harsh breath hissing out through his teeth.
He swore, short and to the point, but it only seemed to encourage her. She wasn’t shy. She seemed to have no qualms about tasting him, touching him, boldly changing the rhythm or stopping altogether, squeezing the base of him with her hand, pushing him to the brink.
“Careful,” he groaned, when her tongue brushed the sensitive skin just beneath the head of his erection. “I don’t want it like this. I don’t want it over too soon.”
The look she gave him was wicked, reminding him of Layna Xenakos as she had been. Confident. A minx. A flirt. A woman who had a sensual air about her, and an innocence, too. It had all called to him even then.
She had always called to him.
She lowered her head again and he tugged her hair. “No,” he said, his voice sharp. “I want to be inside you.”
She stood then, lifting her dress and tugging her panties off. He reached for her, hooked his arm around her waist and tugged her onto his lap, bunching her dress up around her hips, squeezing her bare butt before giving her an open-handed slap. Nothing too hard. Just enough to draw one of those sweet sounds from her lips.
Then he gripped her hips tight and positioned her over his body, testing her with the blunt head of him, finding her wet and ready. He starting to pull her down, sliding into her by inches. Her head fell back and he couldn’t resist another nip on her throat.
When he was inside her all the way, she rested her head against his chest, her hands on his shoulders. “Yes, Xander,” she said, and he knew she was still with him.
A relief, because he’d been so lost in his own need it would have been easy to forget her. To forget that she might not be ready for this. But she was. She was right there with him.
“My dress,” she said, panting, “would you—?”
He tugged it up higher, pulling it over her head and throwing it to the floor, then undoing her bra with unmatched speed, exposing her breasts. “My pleasure,” he said, lowering his head and sucking one rosy bud between his lips.
She arched against him, her internal muscles flexing around him. It was too much for him. But he’d already taken too much from this and she needed hers. He needed to watch her face as she came for him.
He reached between them, sliding his thumb over her clitoris as he thrust up into her.
Her fingernails dug into his back and for a moment she lost herself. But he didn’t lose her. He
held her the whole time. Watched as her lips parted, her eyes closed, her forehead creased. The way the scar tissue by the corner of her mouth folded, and how one brow never did match up with the other.
It was all her. No one else could have made this moment. No one else could have coaxed his darkest secret from him and then taken him to heaven on its wings.
She squeezed him tight, and the world exploded, his blood turning to fire and swallowing him whole while his orgasm burned through him, clearing out all the pain, all the regret, all of who he was and who he’d been, leaving him desolate in its wake.
And when he came back to himself, he was in her arms. And he wasn’t sure who he was. Or why he’d cared so much about a tie only a few minutes ago.
“When is dinner?” she asked, her voice sleepy.
“Eight,” he said.
“So we have five hours,” she said.
He nodded and somehow, in spite of the fact that his legs felt like jelly, he managed to lift them both from the chair and carry her to the bed. He pulled back the covers and laid her down, then got in beside her, pulling her body up against his. He buried his face in her hair and took a deep breath, the air filling his lungs seeming all the fresher because it was infused with her scent.
“I should have done this after the first time,” he said.
“What?”
“Taken you to bed. Held you close. You’re so soft.” He let his hand drift over her curves. Her hip, her thigh. “You are beautiful, Layna. I saw it just now. With that look on your face as you came. The most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”
“You don’t have to say those kinds of things.”
“I know. But it’s true. And you asked me only last week if I could say you were beautiful, and I said no. But I was wrong then. I know so much more now.”
“A week to obtain wisdom. I wish I had that gift.”
“Not wisdom in all things. But wisdom in how magical it is to watch you lose yourself in pleasure. To see the light catch your hair and pick up the hidden gold strands that always remind me of the past. Only the good parts of the past,” he said, laughing. “And I don’t know quite how I missed just what an incredible thing your smile is. Because you still have it. Because life has been cruel to you and you still smile.”