Royal Pain

by Megan Mulry

  “God in heaven.”

  Max just stared at her lovely waist, and below, as he taunted her with slow back-and-forth caresses across her lower abdomen. A single finger, tantalizingly close to the top of her white sheer-lace underwear, caused the most delicious, involuntary quiver to ripple across Bronte’s skin.

  Max lowered his mouth to her navel and let his tongue dart in, then around her center. The heat between her legs was infernal; her underwear was a confining, wet bother.

  “Please. Max. Please,” she begged in a voice that was not entirely her own.

  “Please what, Bron?” he taunted, continuing to bring his tongue farther down, now nipping at the edge of her underwear wolfishly. He suddenly moved so he was kneeling on the floor next to the sofa, and Bronte had a momentary panic that he was going to leave her in this state of intense desire and she would somehow be stuck in this exquisite torture for all eternity.

  He was going to play her like a harp, he mused. He pulled her outstretched hands even farther over her head and used his other hand to run long, smooth strokes along her endless legs as he breathed hot, demanding breaths across her tiny underwear, which really did nothing to conceal the triangle of silky brown hair beneath.

  Bronte was desperate. Her fingers were flexing and unflexing with desire: to scrape her nails against his rippling back, to drag her fingertips lightly across the hair on his chest, to feel the hard evidence of his desire in her palm. The deprivation was becoming so intense she could barely tolerate it.

  “Please, Max. I am desperate to touch you.”

  He merely chuckled and let his hands loosen away from her wrists, and then used both of his hands to slowly peel off her dress and the offending scraps of bra and underwear, taking his time down her legs, then tossing the tiny panties aside carelessly. He worked his way back up her legs, kissing the sensitive skin behind her knee, rubbing her thighs more deeply, and slowly parting her legs as his head began to approach her warmth.

  “Oh, God. I can’t,” she whimpered.

  Max laughed again, low and male this time, the smell of her desire so close, nearly sending him over the edge. “Then you are in luck, because I can,” he stated matter-of-factly, then his tongue dragged a slow, languorous path.

  Bronte nearly pitched off the couch, as if she had been stuck by a cattle prod, and grabbed Max’s thick head of hair frantically with both hands. Whether it was to prevent or encourage him, she had no idea.

  “Easy, Bron,” he cooed, giving her another incendiary lick and then another, until he was moaning his own pleasure as he brought her precipitously close to her release.

  “I can’t… I just can’t do it this way… it’s too intimate…”

  He was relentless. Demonically, gloriously, perversely, fantastically relentless. One stroke of his tongue was inside her, the next a tender tease, then his teeth grazed her and she screamed a dry, raspy cry.

  “Max,” she begged feebly.

  Then he slowly put his thumb with exquisite pressure right below her entrance, as his tongue penetrated in and out, over and over, until she couldn’t stop, she couldn’t… her head was flailing from side to side, her hands had a death grip on his skull, he did something miraculous with his lips and then she exploded, with a kaleidoscope of color and fragments of sound and light breaking all around her.

  It was pure: unlike anything she had ever experienced before. She thought she might have been idiotically calling out, “Max I can’t” at the very moment he manifestly proved she could.

  When she started to come back to herself, she raised her head slightly and opened one eye to see Max’s head in the same general location but turned sideways, with his cheek resting against the tender skin just above her thatch of hair, looking up expectantly, waiting adoringly for her to return to earth. Her frenzied attack on his hair had left it boyishly disheveled, a few brown locks dangling into one eye.

  He smiled, unwilling to break the wonderful silence with a silly quip or retort. She met his gaze for a few long seconds, then let her head flop back against the sofa cushion with one arm cast limply across her eyes.

  “Fucking. A. Where have I been all my life?” Bronte sighed.

  “With the wrong guys.”

  “Very funny.”

  “I didn’t mean it as a joke.”

  When he spoke, his voice vibrated through her womb, mirroring the reverberation of her orgasm.

  The physical sensation was stellar, but the gravity in his tone shook Bronte from her stupor. “I’m not laughing. Come here.” She pulled on his hands and urged him back onto the couch and along the length of her naked body. He nuzzled his head into the crook of her neck in a heartbreakingly tender motion, then he gripped her hair fiercely, propping his elbows on either side of her and forcing her to look directly into his eyes.

  “Okay, so this is how this is going to go,” Bronte began, trying to assume a tone of authority, despite his position over her and the aftermath of her pleasure still pulsing through her.

  Max smiled a wide, toothy grin.

  “What? Why are you smiling at me?”

  “Because I—” He caught himself, then clearing his throat he began again. “Because I think it is adorable how you think you can manage everything… anything…”

  “That makes it sound like I am a controlling bitch, when in reality I’m just trying to let you off easy. Establish a few ground rules. Lay of the land and all that. Just that we should keep it casual. You know. No strings attached.” She tried to accelerate her speech so it wouldn’t be so obvious that she had never talked so carelessly to any man.

  Despite her cavalier talk with April and Carol about TMs and sex with Mr. Texas, in actual fact, she had only slept with three men (soon to be four, she conceded) in her entire life. And one of them was that bastard from Cal who had never called her again, so that barely counted. But something about Max trusting that she was sexually liberated and breezy and uncomplicated made her want to really be that way.

  “In case you haven’t noticed, I have what might well be the hardest cock of my life pressed up against you, so I’ll pretty much agree to anything you say. But I’d much rather quit the jawing.”

  “So much for my worries about being too forward,” Bronte replied dryly, moving her hips against his.

  “Since it is brutal honesty you are after, Bron, I shall feel quite within the bounds of your… constraints”—he tightened his hold on her hair momentarily for effect—“to speak plainly for the duration of our… what? …arrangement?” he asked with one raised eyebrow.

  “Yes!” she agreed, then, as if just remembering something, she added, “I’ll be right back!”

  Bronte wriggled out from under him, trotted into the bathroom, and then returned a few seconds later with an unopened box of one hundred condoms and a very naked Max waiting for her on her bed.

  “What the hell is that?” Max asked through a laugh as Bronte hopped onto the bed and sat up on her knees next to him.

  “So here’s the deal. I have always been a sort of belts-and-suspenders kind of gal about birth control. I’ve been on the pill for years—”

  Max looked momentarily taken aback at the vision that conjured of Bronte sleeping with every unprotected male in her path.

  She laughed and continued. “Not like that! It wasn’t to do with sex—I mean, it’s kind of useless as a prophylactic, really—well, whatever, for girl reasons.” She looked flustered and rolled her eyes. “Moving on! So anyway, I am in Costco, like four months ago, and I just stood there staring at this, er, product, and thought, ‘I wonder if I will ever have sex again. Ever.’ And then I thought, ‘Fuck that. Not only will I have sex again, I will have it hundreds of times. I will use every condom in this goddamned box.’ I am an optimist for chrissake. This, my new sexy friend Max, is the symbol of the human spirit. This is Hope.”

  “Yes! I like the way you think, Bron. Better yet, why don’t we make it our goal, our mutual endeavor, to dispense with the entire content
s of that Box of Hope by the time we part ways in July?”

  “Now you’re talking!” Bronte said.

  But something dreadful clanged against her chest when Max managed to say “part ways” with a smile on his face, even though she had to admit to herself that she was the one who had thrown down that gauntlet. And she wasn’t about to mess with a good thing now.

  Everything always went pear-shaped after eight weeks anyway, right? This way, she would get all the hot, new, you-are-the-best-thing-since-sliced-bread sex she could stand, long before it turned into that’s-not-how-I-like-my-bread-sliced.

  Max grabbed the cellophane-covered box out of Bronte’s hand and tore it open.

  “A hundred condoms in fifty-six days… I’m liking the odds.”

  He pulled one out, tore the edge of the wrapper, and had it on in seconds. Bronte squirmed with delight, giggling like a schoolgirl as his strong arms tossed her down on her back then rested firmly on either side of her head as he was poised to enter her. “Any last words, m’lady?”

  “Speechless, m’lo—”

  He drove into her then with one powerful thrust before she could finish her sentence, her head flying back in a paroxysm of sheer delight. Max marveled at the sinuous beauty of her neck and let the rising surge of his own desire crowd out the already-looming menace that was July 15.

  If she was somehow attached to the pretense that they were only indulging in a short-term dalliance, he would humor her for the time being. Come July, Max vowed to himself, she’d be disabused of that notion entirely.

  ***

  By the following weekend, it was looking like they were going to burn through the Costco jumbo pack long before the designated eight weeks were up. Bronte felt like a rabbit on goddamned Animal Planet. And whatever great sex she thought she had been having with those other guys was nothing more than some weak approximation of the real thing: namely, Great Sex with Max.

  The other odd novelty was that all of this fucking did not seem to be distracting her from the rest of her life. In fact, she felt more focused at work, more inclined to cook a good meal, more likely to return the long overdue phone call to her mother. Just more adept at life in general.

  She was downright competent.

  Unlike the other times in her life when she had been consumed by the first blush of romance (when she had lost sleep, pined, swooned, missed deadlines at school or at work), this time around, she felt perfectly grounded.

  Things were looking up. Maybe there was something to this casual sex after all.

  By the third week, they were practically an old married couple. They weren’t living together, per se, but the fact that Max never spent the night at his own apartment anymore started to register somewhere in the back of Bronte’s mind. Too much too soon? she wondered, only to dismiss the thought with the bittersweet reality that he was on his way home in five short weeks. It was partially devastating and wholly liberating. Not that Bronte wanted him to go—but as far as Transitional Men went, he was the cream of the crop.

  Jump-started me sexually? Check.

  Reminds me constantly that I am smart, funny, and luscious? Check.

  No pesky emotional hangover? Check, check, check.

  By the end of week seven, Bronte was not feeling quite so jaunty about the entire arrangement. That said, she certainly was not moving to England, not that he was asking. And he certainly wasn’t staying in the United States, not that Bronte was asking. Who was she to ask that? Or vice versa?

  And so it went, with all that glorious fucking and (she hated to admit) loving that Max and Bronte found themselves in the middle of week eight like two angry wolves on a windy hilltop.

  Well, to be fair, he was being his normal, sweet self, while she was the one spoiling for a fight. Bronte had convinced herself that getting into some stupid breakup argument a few days before he left would be a hell of a lot easier than finding herself clutched on to his leg and being peeled off by airport security as he tried to board his plane at O’Hare.

  He had just gotten home (uh, to Bronte’s apartment) after a long day of packing up and/or throwing away the bits and pieces of crap that had accumulated over the past five years in his modest apartment. Max had defended his dissertation two days before, and his mind was still a cluttered mass of fragmented phrases like “total endogeneity” and “aggregate risk,” and all he wanted to do was toss Bronte into bed and keep her there for the remaining six days until he was, quite reluctantly, going back to England. He had decided to tell her the truth about his family at some point that last week, but she’d turned so churlish these past few days, he kept putting it off. He needed her to be more understanding, not less, when he tried to explain why he had purposely not told her what was obviously going to be something of paramount importance to both of them.

  Max had convinced himself it was probably too soon to propose marriage to Bronte before he left—the royal info was bad enough; he didn’t want to frighten her off altogether—but he wanted them to be moving toward that eventuality, one way or another. He could probably squeeze out a year or two more in the States before his parents flatly demanded he return to England, but more than that was highly unlikely. Eventually, Bronte would need to agree to move to the UK. He wanted to begin laying the groundwork gradually and then propose, but first things first: he couldn’t very well propose much of anything until Bronte knew what he was really proposing. Namely, a life as a duchess.

  “Don’t do it, Bron, please,” he whispered in her ear as he came up behind her and began kissing her neck, nuzzling his way past all that delicious, long, brown hair and working his hands under her T-shirt and leisurely across her smooth abdomen.

  “Don’t do what?” she simpered with false sweetness as she tilted her neck a bit and continued to stir the homemade sauce of fennel sausage and broccoli rabe she was making for the pasta.

  “Don’t pick a fight so you can say this was all going to hell anyway.” More kisses on the nape of her neck. “Don’t do it. Don’t pretend this”—more kisses along her collarbone—“whatever we have going on here, is some eight-week fling that we can ignore after next week.” Hands now gliding effortlessly along the bottom of her bra, her breasts tightening, almost painfully, in anticipation. “That line of thinking, as you would say, has been a crock of shit,” whispered between kisses,“since sometime in the middle of week one.”

  Bronte decided to turn down the stove and avoid further discussion right at the moment. What was the point of spoiling a festive romp with nay-saying and bitching about pesky concepts like reality and the future for chrissake? She turned to face him, pressing her chest against his, feeling the consoling power of how hard he was against her and the instantaneous warmth that triggered in her.

  She had to confess, to herself at least, that all of this everything-will-have-run-its-course business was turning out to be quite the—what was his phrase?—crock of shit. Shoving that thought aside, Bronte gave herself up to the rapidly overpowering desire that was coursing through her.

  By the time she realized what was happening, they were on the floor of the living room, with Max having taken off Bronte’s shirt and bra. He was caressing her breasts and stomach while she lay there like a goddamned odalisque. He never seemed to tire of these small journeys across her body: just now he was trailing a finger along one rib and up toward the breast he was sucking, alternating the near-painful force with little conciliatory licks, which only made her want more of the near-pain, and so on.

  She arched her back and flung her arms above her head, then collected herself, as much as possible given the circumstances, and brought her hands back down to his shoulders and maneuvered him onto his back, straddling him on all fours. She wanted to take him in every way imaginable.

  She wanted to be so completely full, so done. There must be an end to the joy, mustn’t there? If she simply gorged herself on him for the next week, surely she must tire of him, mustn’t she?

  It wasn’t even a coherent thought,
but the joy the idea brought her must have shone in her eyes, and Max smiled up at her from the floor, as he fidgeted carelessly with her nipples. She swatted him away playfully, then stood for a moment to get her pants and underwear off, and pulled his pants off while she was up. He rid himself of his More Cowbell T-shirt.

  Staring down at his fabulously long, lean, hard body was, well, breathtaking. He had his hands clasped behind his head with a what-me-worry? expression that categorically erased any other thoughts from her mind. It was a simple moment. No psychological man-at-my-feet bullshit—just the opposite, really. She was about to make him a very happy man. She swung her long hair in front of one bare shoulder in a gesture she knew he adored and slowly prepared to take him.

  He was so hard and ready she could not resist slowly kneeling down between his legs and looking up under hooded lids with a wicked smile. He rolled his eyes in a mute thank-you-Jesus and reached his hands down to push his strong fingers into her scalp. Massaging, stroking, guiding, fingers tracing the nape of her neck as her lips and tongue began savoring, always as if for the first time, she thought, the delectable joy of him in her mouth.

  Those Catholic-girl hang-ups had died a very happy death in the past eight weeks. For some reason (okay, for many reasons), she had always steered clear of the Big Bad Blow Job. She had been amazed in college by how many women—intelligent friends of hers, no less—were more than happy to go down on a guy without thinking twice. Laughter rang through the corridors of Berkeley at Bronte’s expense when she confessed with drunken conviction she would much rather screw a guy than give him a blow job.

  Much rather.

  So it was all really an unexpected and very happy turn of events for everyone concerned when Max began to chip away at Bronte’s aversion. He had started by simply being naked all the time, or at least as much of the time as possible, because, as he rightly suspected, much of her reluctance stemmed from a girlish avoidance of “down there” that had naturally evolved into “I’m just not good at it.”