To Wed a Wicked Prince

by Jane Feather

  Alex sighed. “So it is.” He frowned over his options. They appeared rather limited. “Well, looking ahead to the consequences of my last move, I see only mate in three in my future.”

  Livia chuckled. “That’s what I see too.” She was sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the table, now wrapped in her favorite dressing gown of rich tawny velvet, her bare feet peeping beneath the hem. Her hair was loose on her shoulders. “Will you resign, sir? Or play it out?”

  Alex, who was also sitting on the floor, leaned forward and toppled his king with a forefinger. Then he leaned back against the chair behind him and regarded her with a smile. “The next move, I believe, madam, is yours.”

  She nodded slowly. “Ah, yes, so it is. I have won a slave for the night.” She closed her eyes in thought. Then she opened them with a groan of frustration. “The trouble is I can’t think of anything I want you to do that you don’t already do,” she wailed.

  Alex threw back his head and laughed. “What a failure of imagination, my love. Most unusual for you.” He uncurled himself from the floor and stood up. “Perhaps my task should be to stimulate that imagination.”

  Bending, he caught her under the arms and lifted her to her feet, pushing up her chin with his palm before kissing her. He moved his lips to the tip of her nose and then to her eyelids, a kiss that was a mere whisper over the paper-thin lids. He nibbled her earlobes and then grasped her face firmly between both hands and kissed her ear, his tongue snaking around the exquisitely sensitive, shell-like whorls. She squirmed in laughing protest at a caress that he knew full well would send her into paroxysms of pleasure even as she struggled to resist.

  At last he released her face, his hands moving instead to the tie of her robe. “I can perform my task better if we get rid of this.” He pushed it off her shoulders and bent to kiss the pulse at the base of her throat, his hands globing her breasts, running down her rib cage, thumbs pressing into the points of her hipbones. He straightened, still holding her hips, and regarded her flushed countenance with a tiny smile.

  “Will you allow me to perform my task in my own way, mistress mine? Or do you have any specific instructions?”

  “No,” she said, catching her bottom lip between her teeth. “No, I don’t. I believe you’re more than able to fashion your own.”

  He nodded slowly, his eyes narrowing, the tiny smile still playing over his lips. “I am yours to command.” He tossed his own robe aside. Naked, he looked at her with a little frown of concentration. Then he nodded and smiled as if coming to some satisfactory decision.

  “Wait there.” He went into his adjoining bedchamber and returned twisting a length of silk between his hands.

  Livia was on fire with anticipation, her loins melting, her body thrumming. She had no idea what he was going to do. He came up behind her and tied the strip of silk over her eyes.

  “There now,” he murmured. “Trust me and I promise you, you will experience everything twice as intensely.”

  Livia swallowed, her vision a mere red mist behind the soft blindfold. Her bare skin prickled, expecting something, anything…she didn’t know what. He lifted her and carried her to the bed, setting her down in the middle. She lay still, gazing up into the blindfold, hearing him move around the room, open a drawer.

  And then she felt him come back to the bed. The feather mattress took his weight, and he whispered, “This game we play without words, sweeting.” And then something soft brushed her cheek, traced the curve of her mouth. It tickled a little but in a manner she found only delightful. It flickered across her ear, tracing the shape of it, and she gave a tiny gasp at the sweetness of the pleasure. And then the sensation shifted to her throat, the soft flicker against the fast-beating pulse, before the soft brush slid slowly down to her breasts. A light, tantalizing stroke outlined her nipples, bringing them to burning peaks of awareness, and the familiar languorous delight began to build deep in her belly.

  She felt the brushing strokes across her abdomen, dipping into her navel, moving lower over the white, rippling skin of her belly. She felt his hand part her thighs, gently inexorable, and her breath stopped in her throat. Anticipation of the next touch, of where and when it would come, was now so intense as to be almost painful.

  The feathery touch trailed upwards over the smooth skin of her inner thighs and she shuddered with pleasure. It inscribed circles, smaller and smaller on the tender flesh of her thighs, moving ever upwards, closer and closer to the center of joy. And then it stopped, and, as the waiting seemed to stretch into infinity, tears of anticipatory delight dampened the silk of her blindfold and the deepest recesses of her body throbbed with expectation.

  And then, when she had begun to fear it would never happen, when she had almost ceased to expect it, she felt it again, a light, brushing caress on her sex, and she thrummed like a plucked lute. His fingers opened her, parting her center for the soft and most intimate caress with this strange instrument of pleasure that he wielded with such exquisite and knowing artistry. And she was lost, mindless and sensate, a body that existed only for this explosion of pleasure in this blind and silent world.

  Alex covered her mouth with his, gathering her against him as he slid into her tender opened body with the pulsing throb of his own arousal. She tightened her inner muscles around him and he stifled his moan of pleasure against her mouth. She held him tight within her as her body began to climb again up to the peak of joy, and the instant she hovered on its brink he drew her legs up onto his shoulders, so that he could penetrate deep to her very core, and this time he didn’t muffle his exultant cry as the world shattered into silver shards of delight, and Livia cried out with him.

  He stayed within her for long moments as the fragments of themselves came together again, and when at last he felt her stir beneath him, he loosened the silk over her eyes and drew it away.

  She gazed up at him, blinking in the sudden light, feeling strange and disoriented after the pleasure-filled, self-enclosed darkness. He kissed the corner of her mouth and the tip of her nose, then gently disengaged, rolling onto the bed beside her.

  “What were you using?” she murmured, her voice sounding strange after such a long silence.

  He smiled and showed her the little badger’s hairbrush that she used to apply powdered rouge on the rare occasions she thought her complexion needed a little assistance.

  “Oh,” was all she could think to say.

  “Rest a while,” he said, propping himself on one elbow, his other hand tracing the curve of her flank. “The night is barely begun.”

  Livia thought, particularly after the last hour, that she had experienced all there was to experience in the business of lovemaking, or at least everything that was possible outside of the more esoteric poses illustrated in Sophia’s books. She now learned that she had not. Thus far in their union Alex had merely shown her the tip of the iceberg when it came to his knowledge of the world of sensual delight. As the hours passed, he withheld his own release, concentrating only on bringing her again and again to the crest. His mouth and tongue found every nook and cranny of her body in a dance of arousal, and she was lost in a turmoil of sensation. Again and again he held her on the edge of dissolution until she could bear it no longer, and only then would he touch her, a flick of his tongue, a nuzzle of his lips, a stroke of a finger, and she would once more fall into the void, where all sense of herself as distinct from pure sensation did not exist.

  The candles were guttering, the fire a glow of embers when at last Alex allowed himself to climax for the second time. He held her tightly against him as his climax shuddered within her and he felt the velvety sheath of her body pulse around him in one last orgasmic convulsion.

  Livia’s legs fell from around his waist, her arms fell onto the bed, and she was aware of nothing. Alex moved slowly to disengage, easing himself onto the bed beside her. Her eyelids fluttered and she smiled weakly. “I went somewhere.”

  “La petite morte,” he said softly, too exhausted
to kiss her but managing a flutter of a hand against her thigh. “It happens occasionally, when a climax has been particularly intense.”

  Livia closed her eyes again. When she next opened them, Alex was no longer beside her. She struggled onto an elbow and saw that the fire had been fed and was now blazing. Fresh candles were in the candlesticks, although none were close enough to the bed to disturb her sleep. The door to Alex’s chamber stood ajar.

  “Where are you?” she called.

  “Here.” He appeared in the doorway, smiling as he retied the girdle of his robe. “Are you hungry? We’ve had no dinner.”

  “Oh, no, so we haven’t.” She struggled up against the pillows, acutely aware of her body. Of the stickiness between her legs, a slight soreness there, a faint, deep ache in her muscles, muscles she hadn’t known she had. And she was famished.

  “The house will be asleep.”

  Alex shook his head. “This particular slave is wide awake. I will go and forage, madam.”

  “I would really like some hot water,” Livia said. “But I think you’ve played your part for one night, so I’ll come and fetch it myself.”

  He shook his head. “No, you won’t. You’ll stay right here and I’ll be back soon.” He left the room and Livia fell back on the bed, not at all sure that she was even capable of doing something so energetic as fetching water.

  Alex returned in a few moments with a steaming jug. He poured water into the basin and beckoned to her. “My last task.”

  Livia climbed off the bed and crossed to him on slightly wobbly legs. “Don’t start anything, Alex,” she pleaded, trying to take the washcloth from him. “I cannot endure any more tonight.”

  “I’m not sure I can either,” he said. “Be still now.” He passed the washcloth over her body, leaving not an inch of skin untouched, but with a swift efficiency that would have been appropriate for a nursemaid. He handed her a towel and bent to pick up her discarded robe. “Put this on and I’ll go down for our supper.”

  Livia did as he said and then slumped into a chair by the fire, smiling to herself at the chessboard that was still set up in the endgame. It wasn’t possible for a man to be such a wonderfully inventive and unselfish lover and also a deceiver.

  Alex returned with a laden tray that he set on the dresser. “Hot food was beyond my capabilities at three in the morning, but there’s a cold chicken, vegetables in aspic, one of Ada’s game pies, a little salmon mousse, and that amazing pudding that Mavis makes with the crispy meringue. Carve the chicken while I fetch the wine.” He disappeared again.

  Livia had carved the chicken and served up a little of everything else onto the two plates when Alex returned with a bottle of burgundy and two glasses.

  She cleared away the chessboard and sat down on the floor again as he brought the glasses over and set them on the low table. “I didn’t know how hungry I was.”

  “It’s hungry work, lovemaking,” he observed. “Thirsty too.” He drank deeply of his wine and forked a piece of chicken. “By the way, I’d like us to host a dinner in the next couple of weeks.”

  It was such a non sequitur, such an extraordinary change of subject and mood after their play that Livia took a minute to absorb the statement. “Of course. When?” she responded, trying to hide her surprise and slight dismay that he could so easily move from the glories of the bed to such a mundane topic. It was the first time such an initiative had come from Alex. He always seemed more than happy to go along with whatever hospitality she arranged, or invitation she had accepted for them both, but otherwise, except when they spent time alone together like tonight, he had his own social circle as she had hers. Society would have looked askance at anything else.

  “How soon can it be done?” He took a bite of a piece of game pie.

  “Not for several weeks,” she said. “Even if the invitations went out tomorrow, we have to accept that people have prior engagements. How many guests are you thinking of?”

  “Not many…six couples only.” He leaned back against the chair with a sigh of repletion.

  “Close friends?” She sipped her wine, wondering if at last she was going to become properly acquainted with his Russian associates.

  “Not really…let’s just say that they’re people I’d like to know better.”

  So much for that hope. “Who are they?”

  “I’ve made a list.” Alex got up from the floor and went into the adjoining bedchamber, reemerging with a sheet of paper. He let it flutter into Livia’s lap before settling on the floor again and attacking the meringue.

  Livia read the list of names. She was barely acquainted with most of them but she knew they were all on the fringes of the government. The only one who was really familiar made her wrinkle her nose. “I loathe Eversham, Alex,” she said. “He’s a pompous, bullying ass and his poor little mouse of a wife puts a damper on any dinner table.”

  “Nevertheless, I would like you to invite them,” he said.

  His tone was perfectly warm and pleasant but still Livia heard the hint of steel, and despite the evening’s play, all her earlier misgivings arose in full flood. “Why?” she ventured.

  He raised his eyes from his plate and it was there just for a second…that diamond-bright flint. “Sweeting, I have an interest in Lord Eversham’s opinions.”

  “But he’s a politician…I thought you said you weren’t interested in politics?”

  “If you recall, I said I wasn’t interested in the process, but I did enjoy stimulating discussions.”

  “And these others…they will provide stimulating discussion?” She flicked almost derisively at the sheet of names.

  “I hope so,” he responded easily.

  “More stimulating than Harry…or Nick…or David?”

  “Harry I grant you, but Petersham and Foster are more interested in the gaming tables than the political arena,” he said. “Although I enjoy their company on the right occasion. But there’s a time and a place for everything, my sweet. So will you oblige me in this?”

  “Yes, of course,” she said swiftly. It was a simple enough request, it just seemed an odd time for him to be making it. “But I’d like to invite a few other couples just to dilute the brew.”

  “No.” He shook his head. “Just these. That’s all I need you to do.”

  Livia looked at him in frowning silence for a moment. The only reason anyone would want to invite such a group would be to further some political ambition, but Alex couldn’t possibly have such an ambition. Maybe in his own country, but hardly in this one.

  Oh, well. She gave a mental shrug. She could endure one boring evening with good grace if it would please her husband. He certainly went out of his way to please her. The reflection brought a dancing smile to her eyes.

  “Then so be it. The only problem I can see is how to divide the menu between your cook and the twins.” She tapped the sheet again. “These people will enjoy the twins’ rather more familiar culinary skills, and probably be a little suspicious of your cook.”

  “Boris will see to all the arrangements once you’ve issued the invitations. The twins will have no part in this dinner,” he stated. “Come, let’s to bed.” He held out his hand to her over the table and pulled her to her feet. “My bed, I think. Yours is rather tumbled.”

  Livia slept the sleep of exhaustion, but when she awoke in the morning it was with a renewed sense of unease that at first she couldn’t put a name to. The curtains were drawn securely around the bed and she could hear Alex talking to Boris in the room beyond her enclosed space. They were not talking in English. She had a sudden memory from their first meeting when he’d told her he was fluent in many languages except Russian. He spoke to the dogs in Russian on occasion but she’d somehow assumed he only had a few phrases. She’d never heard him use it as fluently as he was now. And if it wasn’t Russian he was speaking now, what was it? Certainly not French. Why weren’t they speaking English anyway? Boris was fluent in the language.

  They didn’t want her
to understand them. It was the only explanation that came to mind. But what possible conversation could Alex be having with his majordomo that she shouldn’t hear? Perhaps it was something of personal concern to Boris, she decided. It was reasonable that he shouldn’t want her to know his personal business. It wasn’t as if they were exactly bosom friends.

  She lay back and closed her eyes, letting the sounds wash over her, but even so there was something disturbing about the alien words, and she didn’t like the feeling of deliberate exclusion. And now she realized that it was by no means the first time she’d felt it since her marriage.

  When Alex drew back the curtains with a vigorous rattle, her eyes shot open. “Has Boris gone?”

  “Yes, it’s all clear.” He came to the bed and bent to kiss her. “Good morning, my love. You slept well.”

  “Yes, like the dead,” she agreed. “Was that Russian you were speaking? I thought you didn’t speak it.”

  “I don’t speak it very often,” he said casually. “And rarely through choice.”

  “Why did you choose to speak it just then?” She tried to make the question sound merely casual.

  “What an inquisitive creature you are this morning. Why would you wish to know?” He was smiling, but there was a speculative look in his penetrating blue gaze.

  “No reason. I’m sure your conversations with Boris are no business of mine,” Livia said.

  “Boris would certainly agree with you,” he said smoothly. “Are you getting up now?”

  That seemed to be the end of that little discussion. “Yes.” She pushed aside the covers. “What are your plans this morning?” She stood up and stretched, the air cool on her naked body.

  Alex looked at her appreciatively, then he shook his head and reached for her discarded dressing gown. “Put this on, for pity’s sake. You’re too tempting and I’m too busy to yield to temptation this morning.”