The Princess

by Jones, Lisa Renee

  “And I don’t want you to hide this part of you. What do you need from me right now?”

  He shuts his eyes, a turbulent, tormented look on his face, his grip almost too hard, but somehow, I wish he’d hold on tighter. “Eric,” I whisper.

  He opens his eyes and looks at me. “Go to the living room and undress. Wait for me there.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  Harper

  “Go to the living room and undress. Wait for me there.”

  Eric watches me with this command between us. His command to me.

  But this isn’t about control. I know that instantly. It’s about trust and for reasons that stretch beyond the Kingston family, but certainly rooted in their very existence. So yes, his order is daunting, but it’s not one that I will refuse him. I don’t believe he would ever hurt me. In fact, he’s proven that he’ll protect me. That he’ll include me in his life, down to making the decision to spare his father, the man who he blames for his mother’s death. With these things in mind, I don’t let him wonder what I would do if I walked into the living room, where I could still back out.

  I stand right there in the kitchen and shed every last inch of what I’m wearing down to my socks. Once I’m naked, vulnerable with this man beyond the fact that I’m wearing nothing and he’s still dressed, vulnerable in how much I’ve fallen for him, my chin lifts with a realization. “I don’t hesitate with you, Eric,” I say. “One day, I hope you won’t with me either.” And he does hesitate with me. He does automatically package me into a box that he labels “Kingston,” which translates to pain. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t have left me over the baby news. He would have come to me. I press my hand to his chest. “I know you hold back. I know you do, and it’s okay. I know what this family has done to you. Just as I know the real love of a family, and I want to be yours.”

  He stares down at me, his eyes shadowed, hooded, and he doesn’t move. He’s more stone than man, more muscle than heart. With another realization, I let my hand fall away. He wanted me to go to the living room because he needed a moment to compose himself and step outside whatever savant-related episode he’s battling. I might want him to do that with me, I might want to understand this part of him more fully, but he still needs space. I have to understand that.

  I step away from him, oblivious now to my naked body. I’m thinking about him. I’m thinking about his walls. I’m thinking about the space between us that this family creates, and while they are why we met, they may well be why we’re divided. I make it all of two steps and suddenly he’s caught my arm and pulled me back to him. In an inhaled breath, I’m pressed close to him, one of his hands splayed between my shoulder blades, molding my naked chest to his while he tangles the fingers of his free hand into my hair, wrapping the strands tightly, roughly.

  “What are you doing to me, woman?”

  “What are you doing to me?”

  “I was going to push you. Push you so fucking hard, I probably would have pushed you away.”

  “Do it. Try. Push me. If that’s what you need, if you need to push my limits, and your own, to deal with whatever is going on inside you, then push. I’ll push with you. I can handle it.”

  “Can you?”

  “I can handle it. Try me. Push me.”

  “What if I turn you over my knee? What if I spank you and fuck you and spank you again? What if I take everything that isn’t right here with me and destroy it until there is nothing left?”

  His words shock but they don’t horrify. He’s testing me and I understand all the ways he needs to test me. I understand all the reasons he doubts me. I won’t fail. “Do it,” I challenge and he growls low in his throat.

  His phone rings and he grimaces, his mouth coming down on mine, hard, demanding, the taste of anger on his lips all over again. He’s angry. He’s so very angry and I still don’t know why. I sink into the kiss, welcoming the anger, the pain that’s hidden deep in the depths of it. The torment I believe he lets me taste. That’s his naked truth. That’s his path to me and mine to him.

  I reach for his T-shirt, and he drags it over his head, tossing it, the logoed cotton that reads “Kingston Motors” somehow appropriately hitting the ground. “Don’t wear that shirt again,” I order. “It doesn’t fit you. And I’m not talking size, and we both know it.”

  “And it does you?” he demands, his fingers tightening around my hair.

  “No. No, it never did, but you do.”

  I barely finish those words and he’s kissing me again, a deep intensity to the stroke of his tongue that is somehow both wild and controlled. I’m wild but not in control. I have this insane feeling I’m about to lose him if I don’t get close enough to him, if I don’t feel him deep enough. If I don’t let him know how much I hunger for him. My hands are all over his body, caressing the taut flesh beneath my palms, that beautiful ink that tells his story, drawing me in, making me hunger for more. I need more. And he touches me and kisses me like he wants all of me, but he already has me.

  Somehow I end up on top of the island and Eric’s low, rough declaration of, “I need inside you now,” has me fumbling with his pants even as he manages to drag them down.

  And then he’s there, between my legs, thick and hard and pulsing, pressing into the slick wet heat of my body, driving into me, stretching me. He thrusts deep, settling in that deepest spot inside me and for a moment he’s staring down at me, studying me like he means to see my soul. “I will push you. I will take more than you want me to take and push you harder than you want to be pushed.”

  “You can try,” I challenge. “But it still won’t drive me away.”

  He cups my face and tilts my mouth to his. “Remember you said that.” And then he’s kissing me again, taking me in that kiss, and in a thrust of his cock that rockets sensations through me. Taking and taking, but I am, too. I arch into him, lifting my hips, and soon he’s cupping my backside, arched over me, forcing my hands to the counter behind me. I’m not oblivious to the control this gives him. I’m not naïve to him needing this, but I want him to have what he needs. I want to heal the hundreds of cuts that bleed from his soul, and I will do anything to make that happen. The way he almost gave everything when he risked his life to save mine in that warehouse.

  That is my last coherent thought as sensations rock my body, and his hand cups my breast and pinches my nipple. I arch again, lifting into his thrust and we shatter together, our bodies quaking, trembling and then finally collapsing. We come back to the present with a pounding on the door, and somehow, it feels as if the devil himself is our visitor. Somehow, I just know, maybe because of the fierceness of the pounding, that whatever is on the other side of that door is a problem and not a small one.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  Harper

  I’m still naked on the island, with Eric leaning over me, when yet another pounding sounds on the door. “Is everything okay in there?”

  At the sound of Savage’s voice, Eric scowls. “Yes,” he calls out. “Wait.”

  “It must be because you didn’t answer your phone,” I suggest.

  “Probably,” Eric says, lifting me and setting me on the floor. “Or Savage being Savage and over the top about everything.”

  I laugh. “There’s that, too.”

  He cups my face. “Sometime soon I’m going to get you alone and keep you naked for an entire weekend but right now, we need to get dressed.” He kisses me and when he would release me, I catch his hand.

  “Are you okay?”

  He cuts his gaze sharply but then he’s back, and I’m staring into his clear blue eyes. “With you I am,” he says.

  It’s a reply every woman would welcome from this man, and I do. Of course, I do, but it’s not quite a direct answer. It’s avoidance I want to poke holes in but I’m naked and Savage is at the door, so I let it go. And for now, only now, I let Eric go, too. He scoops up my clothes and sets them on a barstool. I start dressing as he adjusts
his pants, and then grabs his T-shirt. It’s then that my gaze catches his tattoos, rows and rows of letters and numbers inking his arms and chest to total completion. Ink that tells his story and that’s a story that I don’t fully understand yet. Just like the row of letters and numbers on the back of that business card tells a story. One I’m now reminded that Eric understands in some way that I don’t. And now, Savage is here to distract us, which isn’t well timed. Not when I’m certain that Eric isn’t going to share the details he now knows with Savage. He doesn’t even want to tell me.

  I finish dressing and pull on my socks and shoes to find Eric watching me. “We need to go shopping so you have some things of your own.”

  I swallow hard, thinking about my home in Denver. Will I go back? Will he stay here? I cut my gaze and Eric is suddenly in front of me. “I don’t want you to go back.” He pauses as if for effect. “Ever.”

  This is what I want to hear from him, maybe even needed to hear from him, I realize. I don’t want to go back to Denver; I just don’t want to leave my mother behind, but as I study this handsome, brilliant man, I set that aside for now. I’m focused on him and the undertone to his words. I’m focused on a hint of trepidation in him, the uncertainty I think I see in his eyes. Does he really think I’d leave him? Does he really think I’m anything but one hundred percent here with him? Yes, I decide. He thinks I’m going to leave, if not now, one day. He thinks I’m somehow too good for him and this tells me that my man, my beautiful man, is so very damaged by this damn family.

  There’s another knock on the door. “Maybe it’s urgent,” I say, starting to get concerned. “He knows we’re safe now and he’s still being pushy.”

  “Or he’s just a pain in my ass,” Eric says, already walking toward the door.

  I hug myself and step deeper into the kitchen to watch him close the space between us and the entryway, all long-legged grace and confidence, but there’s a sharpness to his spine, a tension in his shoulders. The connection between us got him out of his own head, but it was short-lived and we never dealt with whatever set him off.

  There’s nothing I can do about it now though. Eric’s already opening the door and Savage steps inside, and just the brute size of the man is a force when entering a room. “Grayson’s in a hired car that just pulled up downstairs,” Savage announces, shutting the door. “I tried to call and warn you. We couldn’t stop him from coming. He said it’s critical that he talk with you.”

  Eric grimaces, his hands settling on his hips. “I thought you were taking him home?”

  “We did,” Savage confirms. “He made it all the way into his apartment and then he figured out that you weren’t joining him and he wasn’t having it. He said he needs to talk to you in private, one on one.”

  I hug myself a little tighter now and digest this news. Grayson was worried. I know that. He had reason to be worried but this feels over the top. Or is it? Would I let Eric get away with shutting me down if I was worried? No. I wouldn’t. Well, outside of sex on the kitchen island, which distracted me, but that wasn’t meant to replace conversation. And yet it has. I can’t talk to him now.

  Eric runs a hand through his hair, an act of utter frustration that he rarely displays. He’s a man of control and between myself and Grayson, we’re practically wrestling it from his grip. That can’t sit well. “Bring him up when he gets here.”

  Savage’s phone buzzes with a text message and he glances at it and then Eric. “That would be now.”

  Eric’s lips thin. “Of course it is. Is Mia with him?”

  “No. Grayson made her stay with one of our men and,” he glances at me and then Eric again, “he seems to really want to talk to you alone.”

  Eric turns away from Savage and just leaves him standing there. He walks right by me, through the living, to the bar area just beside his patio door. Shutting us out, claiming an empty space that I believe he lives inside far too often. Eager to fill that space, I cross to join him, watching as he pours himself a drink.

  “Talk to me,” I whisper, aware of Savage nearby, and wishing he’d just step back into the hallway.

  “Not now,” he says softly, and he still doesn’t look at me. “Later.”

  The doorbell rings and he downs his drink, setting the glass on the bar before he turns to me, his hand cupping my neck as he drags his mouth to mine. “There’s much unsaid and undone between us, too much, but not for long.” He kisses me, a deep, drugging kiss that is over too soon. Suddenly, he’s set me aside, and he’s gone, his long legs eating away the space between him and the door again.

  Something in his words, in his manner, guts me, cuts me, burns me but I can do nothing but feel his pain. I can’t stop it. Not now, and part of me wonders if I’ll ever be able to. I pour myself a drink and down it, another type of burn—the whiskey-induced kind—following, settling in my belly. I might regret that decision later, but right now I need to come down. I turn as Grayson and Eric enter the living room. “Harper,” Grayson greets.

  “Hey, Grayson,” I say and without further preamble, I add, “I know you two need to talk. I’ll go upstairs.”

  “We’ll step into my office,” Eric replies. “You stay here if you like. We won’t be long.”

  They won’t be long. Eric doesn’t want to talk to Grayson anymore than he does me. I nod and the two men cross the living room and enter the office, the same office where Eric had cursed out Smith for leaving the door unguarded. I wonder who is at the door now. I wonder what it would be like to live without this kind of drama, without the Kingston imprint on our lives. I watch Eric and Grayson disappear into the room and shut themselves away. Once I’m fully alone, I pour a splash more of whiskey into my glass and down it, choking with the burn that slides along my throat.

  Once I arrive at Eric’s bedroom, I pause at the doorway to stare at the massive bed, his bed. The bed he wants me to share with him again tonight. I’m so deeply entrenched in this man’s life and he in mine, that there’s no turning back. Whatever comes next, no matter how good or bad, it’s in motion. I inhale with the odd sense of foreboding that follows, rejecting it entirely. I’m here with Eric. He’s got men protecting my mother. We’re okay. We will stay okay.

  Entering the room, I sit down on the chair in front of the window, staring forward without really seeing what’s beyond the glass. Eric’s voice lifts through the vent on the floor by the wall. “The bearded man gave her this,” I hear him say, and I assume that Eric’s now handing Grayson the card. “We received a similar message in Denver.”

  “From who?” Grayson asks. “The bearded man? He was there, too?”

  “A different man. He parked in front of her house. When I approached him, he drove away and threw a message out of his window.”

  “Numbers and letters,” Grayson says. “It reads like a message to you but this message seemed to target her. Was the other one the same?”

  “Same format, different letters and numbers.”

  I stand up. I shouldn’t be listening. I need to just leave the room, but then Grayson says, “What do they mean?” And that question plants my feet.

  “Yes,” I whisper. “What do they mean to you, Eric?”

  “I haven’t figured out the first one,” Eric replies to Grayson. “But this one, the one Harper was handed at the hospital. This one is personal.”

  “Explain,” Grayson presses and I hold my breath, waiting for what comes next, my stomach in knots.

  “It translates to a saying we had in the SEALs. If you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying. It means to win, you have to break the rules.”

  Grayson’s silent for several beats and I imagine him studying Eric, before he says, “And you think that means someone knows what rules you were going to break with Kingston.”

  “Don’t you?” Eric challenges. “It’s a fucking threat. They want me to do something for them, pay them off in some way, or they’ll tell Harper.”

  “Then you tell Harper.
That’s why I came here. You have to tell her.”

  “Tell her I betrayed her? Tell her I lied to her? Hell no. That’s not happening.”

  “We both know it’s not that simple. Explain it to her but tell her. Before someone else tells her.”

  Not because he loves me, I think. Not because he trusts me. Because someone else might tell me. Because someone else knows. This reasoning guts me more than the secret, the lie, that is obviously between me and Eric.

  “She’ll walk away,” Eric bites out, his voice low, rough, guttural, “and I can’t, I cannot, let her walk away.”

  And I can’t breathe.

  I can’t breathe and my heart is beating so fast that I feel like I’m going to pass out. The voices go silent, or my heartbeat blasts over them, I don’t know which. I don’t even remember the moment that I exit the bedroom. I don’t remember the walk down the stairs. I’m just standing at the office door. I open it and Eric and Grayson turn to me.

  “I was upstairs. I heard you talking. I wasn’t trying to, but—” I turn to Eric. “Tell me. Tell me everything. Is nothing between us real? Is this all a lie? Why can’t you afford to let me walk away, Eric? What is this really all about?”

  THE END…FOR NOW

  ***

  Readers,

  Thank you so much for picking up THE PRINCESS! Harper and Eric’s story concludes very soon in THE EMPIRE which is available for pre-order on all platforms now!

  PRE-ORDER AND LEARN MORE HERE:

  http://filthytrilogy.lisareneejones.com

  ***

  AUDIOBOOK LISTENERS!

  The audio for THE BASTARD and THE PRINCESS will be out on March 26th!

  ***

  In the mood for a cowboy romance? I have a brand-new one coming out this year in mass market paperback (in stores everywhere!) and ebook on August 27, 2019! Check it out here:

  https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43582158-the-truth-about-cowboys