While she was pondering the unfortunate ramifications of this conclusion, a gentle knock sounded at the door of her chamber.
Annie stopped moving, stopped thinking, stopped breathing.
There was another rap, this one even softer than the first, and then, incredibly, the door opened and Rafael was there. He had shed his coat and tie, but still wore the fitted trousers and pleated white shirt he’d had on at the ball. The shirt was unbuttoned to the middle of his chest, and Annie was mesmerized by the swirls of dark hair she saw there.
The prince had the good grace—or perhaps it was just the opposite—to step over the threshold and close the door behind him.
He watched her for a long moment, his eyes glittering like fine sterling, one corner of his mouth turned upward in the merest suggestion of a smile. “Have you changed your mind, Annie Trevarren?” he asked quietly. “Or will you share my bed tonight, as you promised?”
CHAPTER 11
Have you changed your mind, Annie Trevarren? Or will you share my bed tonight, as you promised?
Annie could only stare at Rafael in joyous shock. The room was dark, except for the muted glow of a small lamp on the bedside table and the soft and silvery shimmer of the moon, and she was profoundly aware of the warm and rumpled bed looming behind her.
Rafael merely folded his arms and waited; the decision, Annie knew, was hers to make. Rash as it seemed, given the far-reaching effects a night of illicit passion might have upon both their lives, she knew this singular communion with Rafael was as much a part of her destiny as her next heartbeat. And for all that, there was nothing involuntary about the choice.
“I haven’t changed my mind,” she said, once she’d found her voice.
Rafael held out one hand to Annie then, and she went to him, her fingers interlocking with his, her face upturned and trusting.
Rafael lifted Annie’s hand to his lips and kissed it gently. He closed his eyes and said her name.
Annie rested her forehead against his shoulder, drinking in the scent and feel of him, filled with an overwhelming sweetness, a profound awareness that every moment was precious. “My dearest love,” she murmured, her soft voice muffled further by the cloth of his shirt and the solid warmth of the flesh beneath.
Rafael traced her lips with the tip of his index finger, and even that simple touch sent fire surging through her veins. He bent his head and lightly kissed her, then lifted her into his arms, his eyes smiling into hers.
“What a delectable creature you are,” he marveled. “It grieves me to know that you’ll come to despise me for what is about to happen between us.”
Annie stiffened in his embrace, about to say that she could never despise him, but he silenced her with another light, soul-searing kiss.
“Yes, love,” he insisted, afterward. “One day—perhaps as soon as tomorrow—you’ll curse my name. And you’ll be right to do so.”
Tears brimmed in Annie’s eyes. “Never,” she vowed.
Rafael sighed and touched his lips to her forehead. Then he carried her to the bed and laid her gently upon the linen sheet. He stood over her in silence for a few moments, admiring her as though she were the work of some master painter, come to life, then crossed the room to lock the door. That done, he returned to Annie’s bedside and turned down the lamp wick, extinguishing the light.
His features were in shadow—she could not see his eyes—and yet Annie felt her flesh turning molten under his gaze. She raised her arms to him in silent invitation.
Rafael muttered something, caught her wrists in his hands and gently pressed them back to her sides. “Not yet,” he said, his voice a tattered whisper. He released her and began unbuttoning his shirt.
Annie barely kept herself from reaching for him again, and she was too stricken by the beauty of this man cloaked in darkness and moonlight to speak.
He pulled the tails of his shirt from the waistband of his trousers, shrugged out of the garment and tossed it aside. Then, with the utmost grace and tenderness, he grasped the hem of Annie’s nightgown and smoothed it upward, over her knees and thighs.
She gasped softly as the gown reached her waist and her femininity was revealed. “Hurry, Rafael,” she whispered.
The prince chuckled, and the sound itself was a caress. “Oh, no,” he said, pausing to stroke the thatch of moist, silky curls he’d uncovered, “there will be no hurrying tonight. Lovemaking is a very slow process, when it’s done properly. It might well be morning before I have you.”
Annie moaned and moved her legs a little farther apart as Rafael brushed the sensitive skin on her inner thighs with the tips of his fingers. “M-morning?” she whimpered. “What if someone—hears us?”
Rafael bent, slowly, and kissed the bare, quivering skin of her belly. “You’ll make plenty of noise before the night’s over,” he said, before making a wet, fiery circle around her navel with the tip of his tongue. “But rest assured, my darling, the walls of this old palace are thick. No one will hear.”
He tormented her a little longer, with featherlight kisses that made Annie arch her back and groan in frustration, before pushing the nightgown up far enough to reveal her full breasts. Her nipples felt hard, and they ached to be taken, teased and suckled.
Rafael gave a long, sensual sigh as he admired her bounty and curved his skilled fingers around one breast, weighing it in his hand, stroking the peak with the pad of his thumb. “Annie, Annie. What a beautiful creature you are.”
As he fondled her, Annie raised both arms above her head in an unconscious gesture of surrender. Rafael immediately caught her wrists together and held them.
A delicious tremor moved through Annie’s supple body like an intangible wave. “Rafael,” she said, and the name was at once a vow and a plea.
“Like fruit,” Rafael murmured, his breath warm on the breast he’d chosen, and soft as a tropical breeze, making the already-taut nipple ache with readiness and wanting. “Sweet and warm and ready—so ready.”
Annie was ready; in fact, she was frantic. “Oh, God, Rafael—please—please!”
He deigned to appease her, at least a little, by taking her straining nipple into his mouth, lashing it lightly with the tip of his tongue while beginning a slow suckling motion.
The pleasure seemed to consume Annie like fire. She writhed, her wrists still pleasantly manacled by Rafael’s fingers, and a sheen of perspiration broke out on her stomach and her upper lip, between her shoulder blades and behind her knees.
Rafael drew greedily on one breast, and then the other. “Only the beginning, Annie my love,” he warned, before returning to the first nipple and starting the whole process all over again.
Annie began to sob, ever so softly, but her weeping was from joy, and not sorrow. Nothing existed beyond Rafael, and the lovely things he was doing to her.
“Please,” she said again, while he feasted at her breast.
Still holding her a willing prisoner, still suckling with a ferocious hunger that inflamed Annie’s soul, Rafael slid one hand down over her abdomen and burrowed through the silken curls to find, with two fingers, the small swell of flesh hidden there. Slowly, and so lightly that it seemed he was barely touching her, Rafael began to roll the nubbin back and forth, up and down—gently. So gently.
Annie’s plea for satisfaction was answered with the creation of a need so deep, so violent and primitive, that she feared her very being would dissolve in its heat. She remembered what Rafael had done to appease her that day in the cottage behind St. James Keep and wanted that again.
Rafael pushed her further and further, plunging his fingers deep inside her while continuing to stroke her with his thumb. Each time she neared the peak of ecstasy, however, he somehow sensed that she was approaching the summit, and slowed his pace, easing a sweat-soaked, whimpering Annie back down into a hellish heaven of wanting.
She hardly noticed when he finally removed her nightgown and tossed it aside, and she was like a wild creature when he stripped off the rest
of his clothes and stretched out on the bed beside her.
Now, she thought, in glorious despair, now at last—at last.
But once again, Annie was made to wait. Rafael took her into his arms, holding her close against his hardness and his heat, and his lips brushed her ear as he whispered to her.
“Be patient, little one,” he said. “It takes time.”
She was hardly coherent, and being held that way only increased her desire and heightened her desperation. “You want to make me suffer,” she accused.
Rafael smiled against her temple. “No,” he told her. “I want to please you, my love—please you so thoroughly that you’ll forgive me, someday.”
Annie remembered the most scandalous of the pictures in the book of erotic drawings she and her schoolmates had exclaimed over back at St. Aspasia’s. Boldly, she reached down and took Rafael’s manhood in a firm grasp.
A delicious sense of power swelled her pounding heart and quickened her breath when he cried out in surprised pleasure, and she felt him burgeoning against her palm. She moved her thumb in a leisurely circle around the tip of his masculinity, and it seemed he grew even larger and harder.
“Annie,” he gasped.
She leaned over Rafael, kissing his chest, finding the flat male nipples hidden in whorls of dark hair and sampling them, one by one, with the tip of her tongue.
He said her name again, this time in warning, but he didn’t try to push her away.
Annie grew more and more brazen with her kisses, moving lower and lower, until she’d reached his abdomen, and felt his member against her cheek. Just when she would have turned her head, and taken him as boldly as he had once taken her, he grasped her by the shoulders and thrust her onto her back in a motion so quick and forceful that it took her breath away.
Rafael held her wrists, pressing them into the pillow on either side of her head, and gazed into her eyes. His breathing, like Annie’s, was quick and shallow, and although she saw the muscle leaping in his jaw, she was no more afraid of him than a tigress would be of its mate.
“I want you,” she said.
“You’ll do considerably more wanting,” Rafael immediately replied, “before you’re satisfied.”
He was as good as his word; the deflowering of Annie Trevarren was a long, thorough and exacting process. Rafael teased her for what seemed like hours, kissing her, stroking and suckling, whispering the glorious details of what he meant to do into her ear. At last, he poised himself over her, and interlocked his fingers with hers, again pressing her hands into the pillow, while she felt him between her legs and strained to take him inside her.
By then, Annie was drenched in perspiration and half out of her mind with need, and whether it brought pleasure or pain, she wanted only one thing—utter union, of form and of spirit, with Rafael.
He mounted her and gave her just enough of himself to make her want more, and that stripped away the last vestige of her control. Annie went wild beneath Rafael, freeing her hands, clawing at him, urging him, finally clasping his muscled buttocks and driving him into her.
There was an explosion of pain when her maidenhead was breached, but before Annie had fully registered that, the sensation changed to a pleasure beyond anything she’d ever imagined. The rapture was intensified by the knowledge that Rafael had finally lost control as well.
At first, he moved slowly, deliberately. But when Annie raised her hips high, and forced him back into her depths with her hands, he gave a hoarse cry and began to flex and delve with a powerful, frantic rhythm.
Finally, when Annie knew for certain that she could bear no more waiting, there was a blinding shattering of all that held her within herself. Their souls, as well as their bodies, seemed to collide and then merge into one fiery entity.
Annie was lost, transported, her body convulsing in response long after Rafael’s fierce thrusts had ceased, long after he had collapsed against her, his face buried in her neck. He made no move to pull away, and she was grateful, for being held was as pleasant as the lovemaking had been.
She could not have said whether an hour or a year had passed when Rafael finally raised his head to look into her face. Although the room was dark, she saw bewilderment etched in his features, and something deeper that she couldn’t recognize. He didn’t speak, and neither did she, for there was no need. Their communion had been complete.
Presently, when the first pinkish gold hint of dawn glowed at the windows, Rafael left Annie’s bed. He pulled on his clothes, not bothering to button his shirt, and carried his boots in one hand. He bent to kiss her on the mouth, but the contact was brief, and somehow final.
He started to speak, but Annie touched her fingers to his lips.
“Don’t,” she pleaded softly. “Don’t say you’re sorry, Rafael. It would hurt too much to bear.”
Rafael’s eyes seemed to shimmer for a moment. He reached out to caress Annie’s cheek, and his reply was gruff. “By all rights, I should be sorry, but I’m not.”
Annie could hardly breathe, and though her body was still humming with the euphoria she’d known in Rafael’s arms, her heart was breaking. “And now?”
He sighed. “And now we must forget; I because there can be nothing else between us, and you because there will be another, better man to claim you, one day soon.”
She didn’t bother to deny that she would ever love another, although she knew she wouldn’t. She closed her eyes and nodded, for it had been the bargain from the first, that they would part. She had sold her soul for one night with the man she loved, and she didn’t regret it.
Rafael went out, closing the door gently behind him, and Annie lay alone in the darkness, weeping even as she savored and cherished the memory of an almost inconceivable joy.
She awakened late the next morning to find Kathleen in her room, humming and rattling dishes.
“Good morning, miss,” she said, when Annie sat up in bed. Her eyes felt swollen and itchy, her heart was in pieces and, conversely, her traitorous body was jubilant, fairly pulsing with well-being.
“Good morning,” Annie grumbled. She had been forever changed by the events of the previous night, and felt certain that such profound differences must show, but Kathleen didn’t seem to notice anything.
In fact, she simply crossed the room and set a tray across Annie’s lap.
“Cook says you’ll be going back to St. James Keep today,” the maid commented. “Now that the ball is over, there’s no reason to stay, is there? And besides, it’s so dangerous here.”
Annie lifted the lid off a plate and found eggs and sausage and toasted bread beneath. She immediately discovered that, while her heart might be broken, her appetite was still intact. She picked up her fork and tried to speak casually.
“Have you seen the prince this morning?”
Kathleen moved to the vanity table and straightened Annie’s comb, brush and hand mirror. “Yes, miss—he left the palace early, with Mr. Barrett. They went to the Parliament building to see about Miss Covington’s brother.”
Annie’s hunger vanished, and she put down her fork. She watched in silence as Kathleen opened the door of the armoire and gazed thoughtfully at the array of dresses inside.
“Would you like to wear blue today, miss? It looks so nice with your eyes.”
Annie felt a surge of impatience and quelled it. “I’ll choose my own dress, Kathleen,” she said moderately. “Will you please take this tray away and have hot water sent up for a bath? And find out, if you would, if Miss Covington is all right.”
Kathleen nodded and collected the tray. “Yes, miss,” she said, and went out.
Soon, warm water was brought to Annie’s room, along with a small copper tub. She ached from last night’s lovemaking, and the bath soothed her body, if not her troubled soul. Annie knew she would never regret giving herself to Rafael. Still, having visited paradise, it was doubly difficult to know she was barred from its gates. She thought she knew how Eve must have felt, being driven from the Gard
en.
Presently, Annie dried herself and dressed, putting on the cornflower blue dress Kathleen had suggested earlier. She had tamed her wild hair and wound it into a single thick braid when the maid returned, with two helpers, who immediately removed the tub. Kathleen lingered to strip the sheets from Annie’s bed and replace them with clean ones.
Annie said nothing, but her cheeks were hot as she swept out of the chamber and went in search of Phaedra. Kathleen would know exactly what had happened to her charge the night before, if she hadn’t guessed already, when she got a good look at those linens.
There was no sign of the princess in her chambers, the dining room, the main parlor or the gardens.
Annie’s wanderings eventually brought her to the other side of the palace where six different sets of French doors, all standing open to the morning air, offered admittance to the ballroom.
The grand chamber was still bustling with activity, although the servants had long since cleared away champagne glasses, punch bowls, flowers and paper decorations left from the ball. By that time, they were polishing the marble floors and the mirrors that lined three walls.
Annie lingered a few moments, remembering how it had been to whirl round and round in Rafael’s arms, her heart soaring in a waltz of its own. When she turned from the doorway, she was restless, and wanted to spend what was left of the morning exploring the palace grounds and her own hopelessly confused thoughts.
Felicia was standing directly behind Annie. She was pale and subdued, and the shadows under her eyes were like bruises. Tears welled along her dark lashes and she started to speak, then stopped herself.
Annie’s heart went out to Felicia, but she didn’t know what to say. While she regretted the woman’s pain, she felt no remorse for identifying Jeremy Covington as the leader of the men who had raided the marketplace and murdered the young dissenter.
Princess Annie Page 17