by Dani Collins
Ugh. Maybe Rhys was right and she had been putting all her efforts into micromanaging in a misguided effort to take the control she instinctively desired.
She scowled at him, starting to think maybe he did know her better than she knew herself.
“Did you always believe you would get back here after you were exiled?” she asked.
“I did,” he said with simple honesty. “I had to. I couldn’t...” He squinted as though looking into the past. “I couldn’t accept that my parents’ lives had been lost for no reason. That’s why I was angry when we lived so poorly. I couldn’t believe that our parents had given their lives so we could live like that, barely surviving. Intellectually, I know life can be cruel and not every wrong is righted, but I had to believe the wrong against us would be corrected. It was the only way I could get through my grief.”
She nodded thoughtfully. “I accept that this has to happen. I do. I want to stop fighting it, but I think I’m mourning my old life. Do you ever pine for that simpler time?”
“Occasionally,” he admitted. “I miss the pleasure of listening to a live band while pouring beer behind a bar, not filtering every word through the lens of political impact. You’re the first person to make me feel like that man again, if you want the truth. As though the veneer is unnecessary. I don’t have to be anyone but myself. I can swim naked,” he summed up with an ironic smile.
But you’re you, she wanted to say. His air of confidence and control wasn’t a veneer. It was an innate part of him. She didn’t have anything like it.
Rather than protest, however, she basked in the quiet knowledge that she offered him something no one else did. What would he give her, though?
A sudden hollow sensation in her heart made her smile wobble. She longed for the things every human yearned for: passion and emotional bonds and intimacy.
“What if the sex is awful?” she asked with tentative anxiety.
The corner of his mouth dug in. “The sex will be fantastic. You’ll have to trust me on that. Until I prove it,” he added slyly.
Her inner muscles clenched in a most telling way, causing heat to flood through her. She didn’t ask about the rest, but surely if they were talking like this, and shared their bodies, the rest would manifest?
“Okay,” she murmured.
He cocked his head, arrested, gaze locking onto her while his whole body seemed to gather like a predator about to pounce. “You want to go to bed? Right now?”
“I’m starting to realize I’ll be scared either way, so yes. I think so.”
“You’re scared of me?” His head went back and his narrowed gaze flashed with something she couldn’t identify.
“I’m terrified of all of this,” she said with a wave of her hand. “Who you are. How you live. How you expect me to live. But I’m realizing that I can’t let fear hold me back. I have to confront it.”
He swore and looked to the ceiling. Started to speak. Took another moment to find words.
“I don’t want to say no to you, Sopi. I want you in my bed right now. But not as some sort of bravery challenge. I want you to want to be there. With me.”
“I do!”
“Do you?” he challenged. “Who do you want to sleep with? The prince or the man?”
“The man. The warm body. The hands that erase all the frightened thoughts from my head,” she admitted baldly.
After a long moment of consideration, he stood and held out one of those hands, palm up with invitation. “I can do that.”
She set her hand in his. Felt the squeeze in her chest when he closed his grip over her fingers and drew her to her feet.
“I have to know that this much is real, at least,” she whispered.
“It’s very real.” He skimmed a light caress around the shell of her ear and set her dangling earring to quivering. “I want the touch that empties my mind, too. I want that like water and air.”
His touch tickled beneath her jaw, inviting her to lift her mouth in offering. She loved the feel of his silken whiskers as she petted along his jaw, drawing him down.
His kiss was gentle—too gentle. She pressed into her toes, wanting the conflagration to consume her.
He was too strong and easily flexed his muscles to draw back from her. One heavy hand on her hip kept her from closing the distance. He teased her by rubbing his lips lightly against hers, and his breath wafted hotly over her mouth as he spoke.
“This is our first time, süsse. I’m not going to race you to the finish line.” He slowly eased his mouth over hers again, taking his time as he deepened the kiss.
He didn’t have to crush her mouth to inflame her, she realized as she melted under his lazy, thorough veneration of her mouth. She grew lethargic, curling her arms around his neck while she leaned her weight into him, wallowing in the sheer freedom to kiss him the way she’d been dying to since their skinny-dip.
When she had her fingers speared into his hair and his embrace was the only thing holding her up, he lifted his head.
“The world outside our bedroom is always going to be a difficult place, Sopi. Even the world inside a bedroom can be complicated. My hope is that ours will be a retreat from the chaos. Out there—” He nodded at the door to the hall. “I need the princess who is willing to play a supporting role. That’s convenient, but it’s not why I want you. In here...” He drew her to the door of his room. “I want you. Just you.”
Her heart stumbled as she crossed the threshold into the lamp-lit room.
“I always knew that sex would be a step I couldn’t take back. I think that’s why I held back from taking it.” It was another aspect of her fear of reaching too high.
“That’s why I don’t want to rush you.” He stood behind her and found a pin in her hair, gently extracting it. “If you want to slow down or stop, tell me. If I don’t have your trust with your body, I don’t have your trust at all.” His mouth nuzzled against the nape of her neck, and he inhaled, making her shiver in delight.
“I’m worried you’ll think I’m silly or dumb.”
“We frolicked like otters in a pond. We’re past silly and dumb.”
She had to chuckle at that, but when she lifted her hands to help with the pins, he growled a noise of protest.
“Let me do it. There was a comic book in my youth, one with a Valkyrie whose long hair was always hiding the most intriguing curves and shadows on her figure. I have latent fantasies I’m looking forward to indulging.”
“Good thing my fantasies run to comic book nerds, I guess.”
He barked out a laugh of enjoyment and slipped his arm across her collarbone, hugging her into his shaking frame. “I’ve been called worse.”
She was smiling, hands on the muscled forearm that held her so firmly, cheek tilted into his strong shoulder. A whimsical, wistful happiness filled her. A sense of possibility.
“This is really why I’m here, Rhys,” she confided softly. “I don’t think I could have lived with wondering where this might have gone.”
He turned her in his arms. His face was solemn as he plucked the last two pins that held her hair. He unwound the long braid and surprised her by looping it behind his own neck, leaving the tail against the front of his opposite shoulder.
“Me, either,” he admitted gravely, making her stomach lift and dip.
This time when he kissed her, it wasn’t slow and tender and gentle. It was hot. Thorough. Carnal. His beard scoured her chin, and his arms squeezed her breath from her lungs. She grabbed the tail of her own hair where it hung against his shoulder and pulled, tying them together while an aching noise throbbed in her throat.
If she thought to be the aggressor, she had sorely overestimated Rhys’s willingness to submit. He cupped her head and ravaged her mouth, raking his lips possessively across hers, delving to taste and not stopping until she was trembling.
W
hen he broke away, they were both panting, and he wore a satisfied look as he admired her through half-lidded eyes.
“My only regret about the other night is that I didn’t get to see you. Not properly.” He turned her and flipped her unraveling braid to the front of her shoulder as he unzipped her. Slowly. Inch by inch, cool air swirled into pockets of heat. Sensitive goose bumps rose on her skin.
“Rhys.” Each of her heartbeats thudded in a slow pound of anticipation that made her sway under the impact.
“I’ve been thinking constantly about it. The smoothness of your skin.” He parted her dress at her spine, fingertips tickling into the small of her back.
She arched in pleasure, spears of heat thrown like lightning bolts into her loins by his hot, proprietary touch.
“How you were so shy, then not.” He found the clasp on her strapless bra and released it. As it loosened, his caress traced where it had sat, moving forward until he took her breasts in his hot palms. “How your nipples felt against my tongue.”
They hardened so quickly, they stung. His thumbs passed over them, strumming such a fierce pleasure through her, she squirmed, pushing her backside into his hips. She immediately felt how hard he was and wriggled a little more enticingly.
“And that,” he said in a voice growing guttural. “How you give as good as you get. You made me lose my mind. I didn’t behave that wildly as a teenager.” He held her nipples in a pinch that hovered on the precipice of pain, keeping her very still as her pulse seemed to ring in each of those points, bouncing off the hard palms that cupped her.
“Losing control like that scares the hell out of me.” He scraped his teeth against her nape and thrust into the cheeks of her butt. “I still want to go there with you again.”
She covered his hands, unsure if she wanted to stop him or urge him to be more aggressive. He held her in an erotic vise, but all she did was turn her head so he could kiss her. He did, stimulating her until she ached with yearning. She dragged one of his hands down to cup where she was growing damp and distraught with need.
His strong hand stayed there as she rocked, teasing them both until she was shaking with desire.
“You’re so close, süsse.” He nipped at her ear. “What do you need?”
“I don’t know,” she sobbed. “You.”
He growled and released her, turning her and brushing the open dress down. When he nudged her backward, she thought he was helping her step out of the puddled velvet, but he took her farther, until she felt the edge of the mattress against the backs of her legs and sat.
She only wore her panties and found herself knotting her fists in the duvet as she gazed up at him uncertainly.
“Trust me?” he asked.
“I do.” She nodded, even though her heart pounded with nerves.
He smiled darkly and pressed her shoulder so she let herself fall onto her back.
“This is what it means to be mine. All of you.” He leaned over her to drop a kiss on her chin, her breastbone, little presses of silken beard and soft lips all the way down her middle. Lace abraded her thighs as he stole her underwear while trailing kisses from her navel to her hip bone.
He held her gaze very boldly as he parted her knees and dropped to the floor at the side of the bed. His effortless strength pulled her toward him. Her thighs went onto his shoulders, and she gasped as he stropped his beard on each of her inner thighs, making her shiver with anticipation.
He blew softly on her fine, damp curls, and she trembled again until the damp heat of his mouth settled with ownership against the most intimate part of her. With a small cry, she reflexively tried to close her legs against the intensity of sensation. She had known what sex was, but she hadn’t known it was surrender. Not like this. She would belong to him completely after this. She already did, because she struggled to absorb the onslaught of sensation, but she didn’t fight it.
He was in no hurry, taking his time building her tension until she ached all over. She hadn’t known that arousal had this ability to consume. She could hardly breathe. Her blood was fire in her veins. Each moment was a drawn-out agony of spearing pleasure that coiled her tighter, and then a pulse beat of eternity waiting for it to happen again.
She lost her ability to speak or form conscious thought. She couldn’t process how wickedly good this felt as he swept her with starkly intimate caresses. Arching, writhing, she let the crisis overwhelm her, too greedy for it. Too ready. In moments, she was mindlessly saying his name and shuddering under the force of a shattering orgasm.
A beautiful, floaty feeling came on the heels of it. She didn’t have the strength to pick up her head but ran her fingers into his silky hair, trying to convey how lovely he had made her feel.
He didn’t stop. He switched from soothing to a fresh, deliberate assault that sent a spear of acute desire twisting through her.
“What are you doing?” she gasped, shocked that she could go from satisfaction to craving in seconds.
“Do it again,” he commanded and went back to pleasuring her mercilessly.
“I can’t.”
His touch penetrated, and the sensations redoubled. She didn’t think she could handle it. He tossed her into a place of intense excitement, but her hand in his hair urged him to continue, and suddenly she was soaring again, higher, abandoning any restraint as she released jagged cries of ecstasy.
He soothed her again, letting her catch her breath, but he didn’t let her sink into satisfaction. He teased. Made her say his name again so the pleading of it echoed in the room.
He shifted his kisses to her inner thighs, and she could have wept with loss. Her thighs were still twitching, her skin damp and her heart unsteady.
He rose to set his fists on either side of her hips and tracked his gaze avidly over her naked, trembling form. His face was angular and fierce, his smile savage. “We both needed that.”
“Do I...do that to you now?”
“Do you want to?” He pushed to stand straight and yanked a hand down his front to tear his shirt open. “Next time,” he decided just as brutishly. “The thought of your mouth—” He squeezed himself through his trousers and hissed his breath through his teeth before he dragged at his clothes to remove them. “Still with me, süsse?”
“Yes.” She swallowed, mesmerized by the way the lamplight gilded his skin to pale bronze. She had only caught a glimpse of him at the side of the pool. Now, staring at him unabashedly, when he was so close she could touch and he was naked and fully aroused, he made her weak.
He started to reach toward the nightstand, caught himself in his fist again, and his breath hissed through his teeth. “My first time, too, süsse. Naked. I don’t know if I’m going to hang on long enough.”
He came down alongside her, his hand sweeping from her hip to her waist to her rib cage while his mouth pressed against her shoulder.
She felt dazed, not having given thought to what this really was. She flashed her gaze up to his, fearful that this was all simply an act of procreation for him, not the starkly profound union it was for her.
He was watching her, maybe tracking the myriad emotions accosting her. Nerves and desire and something new and sweet were moving through her, feelings she didn’t know how to interpret, but that made her feel incredibly vulnerable.
His eyes were glittering with feral lights of excitement, but there was a surprising gentleness in him as he caressed her now. He picked up what was left of the braid in her hair and turned his wrist to wrap it around his hand. When his grip was tucked close to her neck and she couldn’t move her head, he kissed her. The light restraint held her captive for his teasing, barely there kisses. Heat flowed into her loins, and she crooked her knee and rolled her hips into his.
He broke their kiss to glance at her knee. “The way you respond will be my undoing.” He released her hair and trailed his hand down to claim her mound. His touch
delved into slippery heat, making her jolt.
“Too sensitive?” He eased away so he was only cupping her.
“Not enough,” she complained, rolling fully into him and taking hold of the taut shape of him. “I’ve never felt so greedy in my life,” she admitted. “I want to know how it will feel, Rhys. I want you inside me.”
She found herself on her back, the agile strength of him caging her. It was intimidating, yet she didn’t feel unsafe. Not physically. Everything that made her feel secure in life had long spiraled beyond her control, but here, trapped by him, she was safer than she’d ever been.
He shifted atop her, using his strong thighs to push her legs apart. She felt the shape of him, the heat and hardness against her unprotected flesh. He nipped her chin and cupped her breast, then bent his head to take her nipple into the hot cavern of his mouth.
She groaned with abandon, twisting and scraping her hands across his shoulders. “Rhys, I can’t take this.”
He lifted his head, shifted and guided himself against her. She felt the pressure. The forging stretch of him pushing into her. She gasped. This was way more intimate than she had expected.
He paused. “Let me see your eyes.”
His were nearly black, atavistic. And yet he smiled. A wicked, satisfied smile. Perhaps even conspiratorial, as though he saw something similar in the windows to her soul that was alive in him.
In that second, she had no defenses against him at all. Not physically or emotionally. She felt intensely vulnerable as he pressed, stretching and filling her until they were locked together. Her knees reflexively bent to hug his hips, somehow making him sink even more flush against her, settling deep within her.
She hadn’t realized that sex was so raw. So deliberate. It struck her that she had met him mere days ago, but it was a startling moment of alignment. Of sharing an experience.
“Hurt?” he murmured.
She barely heard and barely comprehended. She was lost to the magnitude of the moment. She couldn’t keep her eyes open as waves of emotion washed over her. There was a sweet sense of achievement and the stinging discomfort of uncertainty. But there was also a tender yearning that closed her limbs around him, needing the reassurance of his hot body tight against hers.