by Lucy Lennox
“I thought they were kidnapping you,” Felix admitted. “So, yeah. You could say it freaked me out.”
I kissed his hair and forehead before tucking his face back into my neck. “I’m sorry.”
“You don’t need to keep apologizing, Lio. I told you I understand.”
“You shouldn’t have to,” I muttered. “It’s fucked-up. I hate it.”
“I can’t imagine.”
Silence descended for a moment before I remembered my sister was on the sofa next to us. I glanced at her and noticed her shocked expression and wide eyes.
“What?” I asked.
“You… you like him.” Her voice was reverent, and the tone of it caused Felix to lift his head up to look at her before turning to look at me.
I felt my face heat up.
“Well, yes. Of course I like him. What’s not to like? Look at him,” I babbled. “He’s beautiful. Plus, he’s smart and sweet and—”
As I spoke, Felix’s eyes widened comically until Hen laughed.
“I’m not sure he knew that, brother,” she teased. “Maybe you should tell him instead of me.”
Despite my burning face, I forced myself to meet Felix’s eyes. “I do. I like you,” I said stupidly before clearing my throat. “In case that was somehow unclear.”
“I like you too,” he whispered. “But…”
And there it was. But.
Of course there was a but. There could be nothing but a but.
But the press. But the fact that the king couldn’t be gay. But Felix lived in Texas and I lived in Monte Carlo. But we only just met. But… but…
“Yeah,” I murmured, running my hand through his hair before tucking his head back down on my shoulder. “But.”
Hen’s forehead creased in worry as she caught my eye over Felix’s head. She mouthed the word sorry, and I shook my head to dismiss her. It wasn’t her fault things were the way they were.
They just were.
Two hours later, the security team gave us the all clear and we were able to move up to the kitchen. It was still very early morning, but there was no way anyone was falling back to sleep so soon after the flurry of activity that had awoken us.
Mari and Bert had most likely been secured in a different antechamber and made their way to the kitchen shortly after we did.
“Merry Christmas, Lior!” Mari’s face was bright with holiday cheer, and I was happy to see the security protocol hadn’t diminished her good mood. “Henriette, dear, how did you sleep? Wait, where is young Felix?” She craned her neck to look around the large space.
“He’s changing his clothes in the other room,” I said. “He’ll be here shortly. And, ah, he knows about me now. Obviously.” I tilted my head toward the handful of uniformed guards helping themselves to the coffee machine.
Mari’s face fell. “Oh dear. Is he upset?”
Before I had a chance to answer, Felix wandered in and beat me to the punch.
“Yes,” he said with a wink toward me. “Upset he let me feel guilty about sneaking around the royal wing of the castle last night.”
I could tell despite his attempts to be congenial about everything, the news was bothering him.
Mari turned to me with a glare. “You didn’t.”
“Oh, come on. Isn’t it more fun to sneak around a place than to feel like you own the damned thing?” I was kidding, of course, just trying to make the conversation light to keep from ruining the morning. But I could see the moment the words sunk in with Felix.
“You own the damned thing,” he repeated faintly before glancing up at me. “You own Gadleigh Castle… This is—” He swallowed. “This is your house. One of them. One of your houses. A royal castle is… is one of your houses.”
I approached him slowly, the fear of scaring him off a very real thing tightening in my chest.
“Felix,” I began.
“No. Oh, no. It’s fine. I mean, yeah. It’s a little crazy, right?” His eyes were bright with burgeoning panic. “But it’s cool. Totally fine. No big deal.”
His breathing quickened and his eyes darted around the large kitchen space, landing on the royal guards, the giant medieval fireplace, and the rich tapestry hanging above with the Grimaldi coat of arms on it—a majestic lion surrounded by the royal crest.
“Oh god,” he croaked.
“Felix,” I repeated.
“I need to go back to my room,” he said before swallowing and turning to go. “I’m sorry.”
“Fuck,” Hen said quietly from behind me. “Don’t let him go, Lio. He’s freaking out again.”
But my feet were frozen in place. There wasn’t a damned thing I could say to halt his panic. And considering we weren’t really more than an extended, albeit fantastic, one-night stand to each other, I wasn’t sure it was my place to try and reassure him. What exactly did Hen expect me to say? That I was there for him? That I cared about him and didn’t want him upset?
Well, that last part was for damned sure true, so maybe it was worth trying to at least be there for him right now. Even if there was no such thing as long-term potential between us. I couldn’t bear to see him confused and hurting.
I moved quickly toward where he’d disappeared out the side door. Jon noticed and followed me as I bolted across the gravel pathways toward the carriage house.
Once I was inside, I slowed my pace on the stairs to his apartment, racking my brain to try and come up with something to say. I knocked softly on the door before trying the handle. It turned easily and allowed me to crack the door open.
“Felix?”
I heard his muffled voice come from the direction of the bedroom where we’d been curled up together only a few hours before. Part of me wished we could go back in time, even if just for a minute so I could enjoy the final moment of peace between us. But then again, knowing it was the end of our peace together wouldn’t have felt that great either.
“It’s okay, Lio,” he said. “I’m fine.”
He sounded anything but fine.
“I’m coming in,” I warned him before making my way through the doorway and locking the door behind me. Through the opening to the bedroom, I could see him sitting on the edge of the bed with his face in his hands. He raised his eyes up to look at me.
“I’m fine. You didn’t have to check up on me,” Felix repeated.
“I wanted to. You may be fine, but I’m not fine.” I sat down next to him and reached for one of his hands. I noticed it was shaking, so I clasped it between my own in an effort to stop it. “I’m sorry about all of this. I didn’t want you to find out this way.”
His eyes lifted to mine, and I saw a myriad of emotion in them. Confusion, sadness, determination, and longing. The mix of feelings in those deep brown eyes made my chest tighten.
“How did you want me to find out?” Felix asked with a small smile. “I keep picturing what it would have been like to go home after this trip and run across your photo on the cover of a magazine at the grocery store. I’m not sure that would have been any better, Lio.”
I couldn’t help but smile at the mental image of his jaw dropping at the checkout line.
“I guess not.”
Silence descended as I peered down at our joined hands. One of my hands clasped his while the fingers of the other brushed lightly across the smooth skin of his knuckles. After a moment, I pulled his hand up to press a kiss onto it.
My thoughts tumbled around in my head like knotted rope, and I searched frantically for one end of it so I could begin to untangle the situation.
I cleared my throat before speaking. “I didn’t… I didn’t really intend to do more than sleep with you, Felix.”
His entire face crumpled as I realized how my words had sounded.
“Oh god, no. Wait,” I said quickly.
Felix tried to pull his hand from mine as he began stammering apologies again. I held on tightly with one hand and grabbed his chin gently but firmly with the other.
“Stop. Stop, Felix, and le
t me finish what I did such a piss-poor job of starting.” I watched as his eyes lowered to his lap. I hated seeing him so unsure of himself. It made me fucking crazy. “Baby, please look at me for a minute. I didn’t realize I’d start to have feelings for you, Felix. At first I thought it was just sex. But now… now I… fuck. Now I care. Do you understand? I care about you, and I want… I want…”
I took a deep breath and felt my back teeth clench together.
“I want you.” There, I finally got the truth out. I’d said it out loud. But it wasn’t the whole truth. The whole truth made my stomach churn with acid and made me fantasize about being born into any other family besides my own.
“I want you, Felix. But I can’t have you.”
Chapter 18
Felix
It was the emotional equivalent of seesawing with a psychopath. One minute I was flying high and the next I was smacking the ground with a teeth-rattling crash.
“Oh.” The word was out of my mouth before I could stop it. And then the words just kept spewing forth as if from a broken fire hydrant. “Right. Of course. I understand. It makes sense. Of course you can’t do… that. I mean, I assume it’s the… well. A prince can hardly be gay, really, so you can’t… I mean, you and I can’t… nothing could come of—”
Before I could make even more of a fool of myself, Lio’s fingers tightened on my chin, and his mouth sealed firmly over my own. Thank god for nonsense-stopping kisses.
I whimpered into his mouth as the familiar taste of him assaulted my senses. God, how was it possible his mouth felt like home to me? How was it possible I felt most alive when I was touching him?
Lio’s lips were soft and full, nibbling and sipping mine as tenderly as if I was daydreaming it. His large sure hands slid into my hair and moved my head gently to one side as his lips trailed from my mouth down my jaw to my throat.
“Lio,” I breathed. “We…” I’d meant to say we shouldn’t, but I couldn’t bring myself to do or say anything to stop his delicious attentions. I moaned and arched into him as his hands began roving down my back to the waistband of my sweater and under it to the bare skin just above the waistband of my jeans. “Yes, please,” I whispered. “Please, Lio.”
I couldn’t think when his hands were on my skin. In the back of my head, alarm bells were trying their hardest to clang, to remind me that Lio wasn’t really available to me, that we needed to talk about stuff, but I honestly didn’t give a shit. All I cared about in that moment was feeling Lio’s warm hands on me and smelling the familiar scent of his body next to mine.
My cock throbbed, begging to rut against Lio for release. The sexy fucker pressed me back onto the bed and shifted me until I was lying in the middle of the mattress, completely at his mercy.
When he climbed over my body to lock eyes with me, I saw a range of feelings in his glittering eyes. “What?” I asked.
“I don’t just want you for sex, Felix.”
His voice was low and certain, almost as intense as his gaze on me.
“I believe you,” I breathed.
Lio’s face softened into a relieved smile, and he lowered his face to kiss me on the lips. “Good. Because I don’t ever want you to think that you’re not the complete package, Felix Wilde.” His words were spoken between soft kisses dropped across my face. Every move of his mouth and word he spoke raised the hair on my neck and the pace of my heart. “You are smart, and talented. Sweet and adorable. Hot, passionate, responsive…”
I brought my legs around his back and pulled him in closer with them until he let his weight drop on me. “Stop talking and start taking my clothes off,” I suggested with a grin. “You can respect me later.”
Lio laughed and began undressing me, still sneaking soft kisses onto every body part of mine he uncovered. Eventually, I was completely naked beneath him and he was still fully dressed. Something about that made me even hornier.
My hips bucked up into his in search of more. I felt the rough fabric of his fly against the sensitive skin of my dick and thought about how much better it would feel to be skin against skin instead.
“P-pants off,” I stammered as his tongue did crazy things to the side of my neck. I felt his answering smile against my skin before his hand moved down to work on his button and zipper while his mouth stayed on me.
“Oh god,” I pleaded. “Hurry.”
Lio’s hand moved to stroke my cock, and I heard the sharp intake of breath when he felt the precum I’d been leaking all over my stomach.
“Jesus, Felix,” he murmured, stroking me up and down as he pulled back to look at his hand jacking me. “I want to make you feel incredible.” His eyes flicked back up to mine, and the dark intensity of them made my stomach flip. “What can I do to you to make you feel incredible?”
My heart thundered in my throat. Had I ever been the focus of such intimate attention? Did I have the guts to tell him what I really wanted?
I want your mouth on my ass. I want you to rim the hell out of me again.
“Anything,” I said instead. “Everything. I don’t know.”
He must have seen something flick across my face because he smirked at me. “Nuh-uh, baby. Fortunately for me, you’re a terrible liar. You want something specific. What is it? What dirty thoughts are in your head right now, beautiful?”
As he spoke, his hand stroked my cock and moved down to tug at my balls. There was no blood flow left in my brain at all.
“Mouth on me,” I gasped just as one of his fingertips brushed my hole. “Mouth on me there.”
Lio’s entire face lit up like he’d tortured state secrets from his prisoner.
“Hands and knees, Felix.”
I was so far gone, I didn’t remember much after that.
Chapter 19
Lio
After rimming Felix and then fucking him into a stupor, I fell asleep wrapped around his sated body. We’d been woken up so early that morning, both of us clearly needed a few more hours’ sleep.
When I came awake a little while later, I heard the tapping of a cell phone keypad and realized Felix was sending an email or text. My body was still spooned around his, so I was able to open my eyes and peer over his shoulder.
With his fingers flying angrily over the keypad, the only word I could make out on the screen was the name of the contact he was texting. Jackie.
His mom. At least I assumed so. But why would he have her listed as “Jackie” instead of “Mom”?
I tilted my head down behind him until I couldn’t see it anymore. There was a tiny, delicate mole on the sharp edge of his left shoulder blade. I traced it softly with a finger, eliciting a wave of goose bumps breaking out on the skin of his back. He was so damned responsive, it drove me crazy in the very best way. I felt my lips curve into a grin before I dropped a kiss on his shoulder.
“Proud of yourself?” he asked in a sleep-roughened voice. “Maybe I’m just cold.”
“Mm-hm. That’s probably it.” I continued pressing gentle kisses along his shoulder to his neck and into the back of his hair. “Everything okay back home?”
He harrumphed and shifted to set the phone back on the bedside table. In the process, his ass pressed back into my groin, and I couldn’t help but grab his hip and return the gesture.
“Fuck,” I groaned. My cock was already wide-awake from waking up nestled against Felix’s bare ass, but feeling him press against it made me even harder. Felix turned to face me with a grin of mischief.
“Before we do any of that again, you need to feed me.”
His face was creased on one side where he’d slept on a fold of his pillow. Warm brown eyes peered at me expectantly from under bed-rumpled hair, and I had a moment’s clarity that I was really quite gay. I’d spent much of my time since puberty self-identifying as bisexual, but in that moment, I couldn’t imagine a single woman on earth who could ever come close to being as attractive and enticing to me as the man in front of me.
But then again, there couldn’t be another
man that beautiful either. Perhaps I was Felix-sexual.
A furrow formed between his eyebrows. “Why are you staring at me? Aren’t you hungry too?”
I nodded. “Yes, yes, of course. Late breakfast is just the thing. Surely Mari left something out for us.” Without lingering further, I turned to exit the bed and find my clothes.
It wasn’t until much later in the day, after a big Christmas meal Mari and my sister insisted on serving to the rest of us in the castle, that I found myself alone with Felix again. I’d invited him into the hidden treasury room, and we were kicking back in front of the fireplace with full bellies and Irish coffee.
Felix’s shoes were off, and he stretched out his legs toward the fire. He wore red-and-green-striped socks which, for some reason, made me think he was even more adorable than I already knew him to be. What the hell was wrong with me? I’d never been so attracted to another person in my life.
Was this some kind of last-minute panic? Like a manifestation of my unwillingness to give up my life for the crown? Maybe I was clinging on to a man in hopes of not having to face my real life. As long as I was seeing a guy, I couldn’t take the throne.
I was so much in my head that I didn’t hear what Felix asked me until he nudged my leg with his toes.
“You okay, Lio? You’ve been super quiet all afternoon. I think Hen is worried about you.”
There had been at least twelve of us for the meal, including three to four royal guards. I’d noticed Henriette talking Felix’s ears off from her spot between him and Jon. She’d told him about growing up in the palace with nannies and tutors until we were old enough to go off to boarding school and have a somewhat more “normal” childhood. Not that it was ever normal by any stretch of the imagination. Arthur had piped in several times and left Felix in stitches telling “teenage Lio” stories.
My eyes moved from the golden glow of the fire to Felix’s worried gaze. I’d intended to give him a smile of reassurance, but he continued speaking before I had a chance.
“Is it me? It’s okay. I should probably give you some space anyway. I feel like I’ve been monopolizing—”