by Tara Pammi
He bent over her and kissed her damp skin, whispering endearments that sent a rush of tears to her eyes.
No, she didn’t want tenderness from him. As if she were some fragile, breakable thing that he could not use the way he wanted. She wanted to be woman enough for him.
Slowly, she wriggled her hips back and forth, side to side, getting used to his thick invasion. And with every movement, spirals of need swirled out from her sex. His breath slowed, deepened as she repeated the movements of her hips, and then pushed back in an inexperienced movement.
“Like that?” she said into the velvety dark depth of the night.
With a guttural curse, his fingers crawled up her back over her spine and into her hair. He held her so tightly that pain and pleasure infused together. Nik pulled out almost all the way, and then thrust back in so hard that Mia would have skidded across the bed if he wasn’t holding her.
Pleasure so intense and so profound that she thought she might pass out radiated down her spine and speared her lower belly.
If not for tonight, if not for Nikandros, she’d have died never knowing that it could be like this. That pleasure could be so exquisite that one’s soul could be remade from it. Her moans rose in pitch as Nikandros pounded into her, her name a guttural incantation on his lips, over and over. Mia didn’t know how it was possible but her body was greedily racing toward another peak.
As if he knew her body better than she did, Nik pulled her close, fingers bruisingly tight on her hips. His thrusts became short and tight while one hand moved between her legs. “Come for me, Mia,” he commanded, and then he gave her no choice but to follow him by tweaking her swollen clitoris between his fingers. Counterpoint to his hard thrusts.
Mia broke apart again with a soul-shattering cry.
Pleasure surrounded her in sharp, staccato bursts. He groaned as his thrusts lost the rhythm and finesse he had employed before and descended into purely animalistic movements.
This was what Mia wanted, what she needed. For this man, this gorgeous, powerful man who had given her a small part of herself back, for him to lose himself inside her. She wanted to steal away a part of him, even a tiny part, as he was doing to her.
The roar of his climax fell over her skin like some powerful magic returning and remaking her.
Tears coursing down her cheeks, Mia fell onto the bed and hid her face in the sheets. Every muscle in her body trembled. A sob fought to rise through her and she bit her lip to contain it. Limbs like rubber, she went willingly when he pulled her into the cradle of his arms. Words of gratitude, words of desperation rushed to her lips.
Her vision blurred, she looked down at them.
Moonlight played shadows over their twined naked limbs, damp, glistening skin and the rumpled sheets. Greedy even now, her gaze moved up one hair-roughened calf to the long, hard muscle of his thigh, the jut of his narrow hip bone. Carnal hunger and something else rang like a bell inside of her.
In gentle movements, he pushed back a lock of hair sticking to her damp forehead and pressed a tender kiss to her shoulder. “You’re well?”
She could only nod. There was a glitter in his eyes, as if he too was shaken by the intensity of what they had shared. As if he too was...
No!
This was the Prince, a man who was so good in bed that women over the world chased him for one night... She couldn’t make this moment any more than it was.
Her throat closed over words she couldn’t say, a sudden weight on her chest. For the first time in months, grief and fury washed away, leaving a strange awareness of herself.
When he gathered her to him and breathed against her temple, she gave herself over to the beckoning hand of sleep that was taking over her mind, body and soul.
Nikandros Drakos was a fantasy come true, and in her case, he’d given her something immeasurable, indefinable.
But that’s all he would ever be.
CHAPTER THREE
Six weeks later
“YOU’RE PREGNANT, MIA.”
Her ob-gyn’s soft declaration had kept ringing around in Mia’s head all day as she set the high school soccer team through its drills as their new assistant coach.
Sheila, who had also known Mia since their mothers had dropped them off at the same elementary school, had held Mia’s hand. “After everything you’ve been through this year, I... Mia, say something. This news could be a shock in itself but—”
“It’s a shock, yes, but, oh...” Mia didn’t know where the words had come from. She’d been alone for so long, but all she felt was overwhelming joy, a profound sense of anticipation in her chest. That night had been the beginning of a new chapter of her life and a child was the result. “I want this baby, Sheila. I...will love this baby.”
That night back at the two-bedroom apartment she’d been allotted at the campus, Mia still couldn’t stop smiling nor looking at her stomach in the mirror. Nor had her mind wavered even a little bit. But then, she’d always known her mind.
Accepting her new job, moving out of the apartment that Brian and she had shared—it had been the right move. Standing on the sidelines, watching young, ambitious players give their soul to soccer, it was fulfilling, yes, but life stretched ahead of her, a chasm of loneliness.
A baby would change everything, fill her days and nights. A baby she would love without conditions.
Even though there had been curiosity in her eyes, Sheila hadn’t pressed Mia for details about who the father was.
The father. Mia fell back onto the couch in her living room with a soft plop.
Nikandros... Cold sweat gathered on her forehead.
This baby belonged to Nikandros too.
Not a day had gone by in six weeks that Mia hadn’t thought about that night or him.
How could she escape it when every news channel was bleating on and on about the tiny principality of Drakon, the Mediterranean’s Jewel, and the decline of its King Theos into madness, a fact that had been hidden from the media and its people for a long time? When every social media site covered the smallest movement of its Princes?
With a greed she couldn’t curb, Mia had followed the news of the royal family. The media had been lambasting Nikandros yet again, for dereliction of duty and apparently not caring enough about the country.
Only Mia knew how much returning to Drakon had affected Nikandros, but even she found it easy to forget in the face of his merrymaking.
Not once had he answered the media’s questions—would he stay in Drakon now and shoulder the responsibility of its people? Would he share his brother Crown Prince Andreas’s burden?
Only deep silence from Nikandros. The pap had already caught him partying at a friend’s nightclub, racing a dangerous curve in Drakon in a hell-on-wheels red Ferrari. The media then pronounced that the reckless Daredevil Prince Nikandros had reverted to form three days after the public announcement of his father’s madness.
It was clear that the Daredevil Prince was not going to change his spots and settle down into responsibility. He had seemed so serious, so full of an unnamed pain to Mia, but now this, in front of his entire nation.
Had it all been just an act? Would he even acknowledge a child who had accidentally been conceived after a one-night stand as his?
Swallowing away the ache in her throat, the urge to share the news with him, Mia decided to wait to inform him.
At least, until she was strong enough to face Nikandros without weakening again. Until she was strong enough to face his reaction to their unborn child.
* * *
Nikandros stood on the ramparts of the King’s Palace and stared out at the panoramic views offered of Drakon and the harbor. The smallish hill on which the eight-hundred-year-old palace stood had provided a strategic defense location from the numerous attacks through the centuries, from various regional and global powers who had always wanted to assimilate the small Mediterranean gem for their own.
But the House of Drakos—his ancestors, with this palace as the
ir stronghold—had clung on, despite the attacks and defended the little jewel.
As a kid, stuck in the palace hospice during hot summers and mild, wet winters alike, Nikandros had loved the history of Drakon.
A dragon and its treasures and one band of fierce warriors, the stories had sustained him through a wretched, ill childhood. He’d inhaled the old volumes in the vast library, breathed in every arch, wall and wing that had been added to the King’s Palace by each generation, making it impregnable. With no children to play with, he had weaved elaborate dreams picturing Andreas and himself as modern princes who would deliver Drakon from its various nemeses.
Crown Prince Andreas, his older brother, would command him, and Nikandros, his loyal knight, would jump to do his bidding.
“Why won’t he visit me, Maman?” He’d relentlessly plagued his mother with the same question every time they had seen Andreas on TV, standing proudly by their father.
“You’ll join him when you’re feeling better, ma cherie,” his maman would say.
But Andreas had never had time for the attention-craving, mostly ill Nikandros. Nor had King Theos ever shown any interest in him beyond inquiring of the doctors if his spare was going to make it.
Not until Nikandros had turned nineteen and finally, against all medical predictions, seemed to have cast off the sickness that had plagued him all his life. And then, only then, had Theos entered Nikandros’s life.
“I should have sent the guards to this terrace to look for you,” came the deep voice of his brother, Crown Prince Andreas. A small smile flitted over Andreas’s lips, as if this was one of those sweet memories that siblings shared. That is, if the siblings had come from a normal family and were not the much-adored son and heir of a little mad, power-obsessed King and the spare he had barely tolerated and known even less.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Nik drawled in a careless voice, forcing himself to relax his tight grip on the stone wall.
“The nurses used to run over the palace looking for you, only to find you here amongst these ramparts, waving that rubber sword around with barely a stitch over your body. This was your favorite place,” finished Andreas, coming to stand by Nik.
“How the hell would you know?” When you barely ever saw me, he didn’t say.
“The study in my wing has a window that provides a perfect view of this very terrace. I would watch you brandish that rubber thing, fighting off imaginary enemies. If not the ramparts, it would be stables. Third choice, the kitchens.” The wistfulness in his brother’s voice cut Nikandros.
Thick silence descended over the terrace. Nik stared at the gaunt hollows of his brother’s face shadowed in the waning light of the sun.
Theos was slipping, had descended into the final stage of the dementia that had claimed him for the past few years. The sight of his once-proud and overbearing father with that crazed look in his eyes, and fragments of gibberish falling from his lips—it had shaken him deeply.
And yet it was the look in Andreas’s eyes that rooted him to the spot.
Andreas had been dealing with his father’s madness for years now, and the country’s declining morale, and the power-hungry Crown Council.
Guilt twisted deep and low in Nik’s gut. He’d known what was happening but had refused to come. “It is a little late to pretend we share a brotherly bond, Andreas.”
The infuriatingly amenable expression did not budge from his brother’s inscrutable eyes. He wished Andreas would throw a punch at him. Or call his actions despicable. But of course, his brother would never oblige.
He hadn’t back then, when Nik had told Andreas what he had done with his precious fiancée, and he wouldn’t now.
“Why did you return then, Nik? Did you finally feel pity for me? Or dare I hope that you have grown a sense of duty to your country?”
Damn Andreas for always knowing the right question to ask. Nik himself didn’t know the answer to that question.
Had he done it because the sense of history, the heritage of Drakon that he had always yearned to be a part of when he had been a little boy, had sunk its claws into him again?
Or had he done it because leaving Drakon would mean facing that all the little things that had previously given him such pleasure still paled when he thought of one ex-soccer player?
“I promised Maman I would stick around for your coronation.”
Andreas’s mouth flattened. “The coronation is postponed.”
Nik frowned. He knew that these past few years, behind the curtains, Andreas had run the show. So why was his brother, who’d been born and bred into the role of King, now postponing the coronation? “With Theos frothing at the mouth, Drakon needs you at the helm.”
“So you do think about Drakon then.”
“Why did you ask me to return? And the truth, Andreas.”
Nik folded his hands, his stance clearly belligerent. But Andreas would never take the bait. He would never do something as emotional as get into a fight with his brother.
“I need you, Nikandros.”
It was, apparently, a time for shocks. First Brian, then Mia, then his father and now Andreas.
Andreas sighed. “The Council has been getting more and more disturbed about my lack of marriage. With father’s final decline fast approaching, it is now a matter of public and political concern owing to legal and international consequences. If I should die tomorrow suddenly, our treaty with our powerful neighbor becomes void and we could be annexed.
“The economy is on a nosedive and financial analyses do not show it recovering anytime soon.”
“Then why didn’t you marry that...woman and produce heirs by now?” Nik interrupted, bile rising even at the thought of her and what he’d done.
“If you had bothered to visit once or inquired after us, you’d have learned that I broke that engagement with Isabella as soon as you left.”
“I’ve not heard a whisper of it.”
Andreas shrugged. “Because it worked well for me and Isabella to let the world believe I was engaged to her for a long while. Her brother wanted it said that she’d walked away from the alliance. Rejected the Crown Prince of Drakon.
“I agreed.”
“Father must have hated that.”
“Father and I have learned to understand each other better,” Andreas said cryptically.
“What I did then was—”
“I don’t want to dwell in the past, Nikandros. It would not show either of us well, ne? The point is I need your help, in a hundred ways. And I believe you possess a far more giving nature than I do.
“I need father declared incompetent, to build Drakon’s economy back up again and its morale, to stop the Crown Council from dictating my life.”
Nikandros had heard from numerous sources of his own the unrest among the populace, the slow exodus of businesses to their competitive neighbor, of deals falling through and investors pulling out because Andreas would not announce the date of his engagement, much less the wedding.
Because Andreas would not bow to the Crown Council’s demands, and he, Nikandros, had turned his back long ago on Drakon.
Which was why he’d stayed longer than he’d planned to, the challenge it presented to his business sense engaging his interest despite himself. The economy of Drakon was ripe for the taking. Tourism could be boosted, some of the old ways let go of... Much as he wanted to deny the knowledge, Nikandros understood perfectly what Andreas wanted and Drakon needed—fresh blood. “Then marry, Andreas.”
“I will not rush into any alliance before weighing the long-term needs of Drakon. I have to appoint you the Hereditary Heir, Nik.”
Nikandros had walked out on his family years ago, publicly declaring that he was renouncing his status as second in line to the throne.
But Andreas’s words began to tug at a powerful desire he’d denied for so long. Christos, once he’d loved his homeland with everything he had. Walking away from it had almost destroyed him. It had also been his salva
tion because only away from his father’s and Andreas’s shadows had Nikandros come into his own.
Discovered himself.
“Once I produce heirs, you will be bypassed for the throne, if that’s what worries you. But I need your business sense, Nikandros, your networking skills. Drakon needs you.
“I have some things to take care of,” continued Andreas, staying calm as always. “An expedition to the North Pole, for example.”
Nik laughed, this sound rolling out of him like an avalanche. “I do not believe that you want to go off on some expedition to the ends of the world. You don’t have a drop of adventurous blood in you. Or a vein of fun either.”
His words fell into the silence like harsh stones being pelted against a smooth marble floor. If there had ever been that zest for something more than duty in Andreas, their father had eradicated it. Snuffed it out. For more than twenty years, Theos had closeted his heir in the palace, training him to take over the principality, cutting off Andreas from kids of his age, any other pursuits, from Nikandros and Eleni, maybe from life itself.
“But that is exactly what I’m doing, Nik. Trying to lessen my burden without disastrous consequences.”
“So you would have me be the prop that Theos wanted me to be?” taunted Nik.
“His reign is over, Nik. You and I are the future.”
Nik had never come so close to being persuaded into the belief that he too had a part in his country’s politics. But something inside him balked at trusting Andreas. At being amidst these walls where he’d always been the weakling, the runt. “I wish I could help, but no.”
Frustration uncoiled in his brother’s edgy movements. “Have you ever thought that maybe I do need you, Nikandros? That Camille and Eleni need you? That the populace of Drakon that gave you this privilege need you?”
“Maman chose you, her stepson, over me,” he threw back at Andreas, shivering with that impotent rage. His mother had divorced Theos the minute Nikandros hadn’t needed her anymore. And yet, she chose to live in Drakon, at one of Andreas’s estates.