Regardless, the anger—the cruelty—had gone from him. For now. Her mind churned, trying to work out an escape, but it was moving slowly, mired in the heartbreak and embarrassment of having been mocked by her own father. Did you have someone else in mind?
“Need we announce the engagement at the ball?” she said carefully, falling back on the strategy of postponement, rather than outright defiance, that she and Max had always relied on. If they could just get through the holidays, perhaps there was a solution yet to be discovered. “Won’t it draw the focus from the holiday celebration?”
“On the contrary, it will enhance the celebration. And who knows, perhaps it will do us some good to have a pleasant memory to associate with the holiday.”
Did he mean that last bit sincerely, or was he merely manipulating her to get what he wanted? Regardless, Marie didn’t know what else to say, so she turned away from him. She needed to get out of this room. Maybe then her brain would work properly. She could call Max, and—
“And . . .” her father said, drawing her attention just as she’d reached the door. When she looked over her shoulder, he looked . . . She wasn’t even sure. He almost looked contrite, but that couldn’t be right. “I’ll take a look at your UN proposal.”
She wanted to tell him that it wasn’t a proposal. It was a plan. A plan she had sent him a copy of as a courtesy. Because she was accepting the UN ambassadorship no matter what he said. But it seemed wiser to save that fight for another day.
So she sought the only concession she could think of that might be within her grasp, given that he’d softened a bit. “You’ll be civil to all our guests tonight, including the Riccis, who will stay until Boxing Day as planned?”
Whatever she thought she’d seen on his face was gone. It was now blank. But he said, calmly, “Yes.”
“Very well.”
She turned, aware anew of how lonely she was. Leo had managed to distract her from it for a while, but in a few days he would leave and she would be more alone than ever.
A sad princess to go with the sad king?
Maybe it was inevitable. Maybe this was how it happened.
When Marie came to Leo’s room late that night, she seemed off. Sad.
“Hey, Princess, what’s shaking?”
She smiled at him, but it was a fake one. He couldn’t abide that. He led her to one of the chairs by the fire. “What’s wrong?”
She shook her head as she sat. “It was just . . . a very long day.”
He sat in the companion chair, wishing the room had a sofa so he could sit closer to her. “You had a fight with your father, didn’t you?” Oddly, the king hadn’t been as much of a dick as usual during cocktails and dinner. Leo had put that down to the fact that Imogen had joined them, had thought perhaps His Majesty tolerated commoners of his own nation better than New York interlopers. And Marie and Imogen had seemed to have a good time, reminiscing and teasing each other, though he had wondered if Marie’s good cheer was a little forced.
She sighed and slumped lower in her chair. “Are you a mind reader?”
“No. I just know you.” It was a bit startling, given that they’d only met ten days ago.
Marie tilted her head and regarded Leo with a puzzled expression. “You do, don’t you?”
“Yeah, I know all your tells. You lift your chin like this”—he demonstrated—“when you’re feeling cornered.”
“I do?”
“Yeah. And you have a fake smile and a real smile, and I fucking hate the fake one.”
A startled laugh bubbled out of her, and he pointed at her in triumph. “See, that there’s the real smile. That’s better. So, yeah, you can’t fool me. What happened with your father? Spill it.”
“There’s really nothing to tell.” She hesitated in a way that he was pretty sure indicated she was holding something back. “We don’t see eye to eye on many things.”
“The watches?”
She huffed a bitter laugh. “We haven’t even talked about that since we officially broke for the holiday.”
“The UN thing?”
“Yes, but I’ve decided I’m doing that anyway. They asked me, not him. He makes the decisions about the Morneau brand because he runs the company. And I don’t have an official seat on his advisory cabinet even though I do most of his work since my mother died. But I don’t need his permission for this.”
“Good for you.” Ambition looked good on her.
But then why was she so dejected?
And another why: Why did he care so much? She clearly didn’t want to talk about it. He redirected. “You wanna go back to your room and watch some Buffy?” Maybe it would relax her, and he could find out what she was so upset about.
“No. What I want is . . .” Marie sat up straight, the way she sometimes did when she wanted to exert authority, but that didn’t seem like what was happening here. It was more like—
Oh.
She was taking off her sweater. She pulled it over her head, threw it on the floor, and reached around to unclasp her bra.
“You want to look at my chimney some more?” he said, hoping to make her smile by invoking the silly innuendo they’d used earlier in the day.
She produced a “prophylactic,” out of her pocket, and his body reacted in predictable ways. She also ignored his question. “What I want is for you to say filthy things to me, and then I want us to do those things.”
Oh, eff him. He had created a monster. Not that he could take credit. She had created herself. He’d just done a little encouraging.
All right, then. Following her lead, Leo took off his T-shirt. She raised her eyebrows as if she were not impressed. He chuckled, unzipped his jeans, and took his already-at-attention dick out. Raised his eyebrows right back at her and let himself drink her in. The only sources of light in the room were the bedside lamp he’d been reading by and the fire, so she was painted in a soft warm glow. Her breasts were as gorgeous as always—white and pink and . . . perfect.
She cleared her throat.
Right. She’d wanted him to talk, and here he was getting all moony over her breasts. “Take off your pants.” She did. And as she began to shimmy out of them, he added, “Underwear, too.” She started to move toward him once she was naked, but he held up a hand to stop her. “Sit back down.” She pouted a little. He stroked his dick and said, “I thought you wanted to talk.”
She sat.
“So what do you wanna do, Princess?” he said while he took his pants the rest of the way off. “You want to open your legs and I’ll come over there and eat your pretty pussy? I can guarantee you that’s the only way you’ll ever get me to kneel in front of you.”
Her breathing had grown audible. She was so delightfully easy to wind up. Or unwind, to use the word she had the other day. “Nobody talks to you like this, do they?”
“Just you,” she whispered.
Damn right.
Her pupils were blown, and she was staring at his mouth. He no longer regretted the lack of a couch in this room. There was something intensely erotic about sitting in armchairs facing each other, her naked and him nearly so. He let his teeth scrape across the lip she was fixated on and was rewarded with a little whimper that went straight to his dick.
“Or maybe,” he said, “you want to come over here and ride my dick and bite my lip some more.”
She inhaled sharply, bent her arms, and used her elbows to squeeze her breasts, as if they ached. He was pretty sure that signified a direct hit.
“So why don’t you do that, then?”
She expelled a soft little sigh, and he tried to keep a hold of himself as she let her teeth slowly scrape her lower lip. Another sigh—it sounded almost like she was relieved. “Come on, sweetheart. Slide that condom on my dick and then get on here and bounce around.”
And she did.
And she almost killed him—him and his smart mouth. Real big talker he was, goading her like it was something he could deliver on. Like he could just sit there wh
ile she “bounced around.” After she straddled him, sank down on a moan, and started moving, he realized he was going to blow pretty quickly. Well, hell, he might as well go down talking, since she seemed to like it so much. So he let loose a steady stream of dirty talk as he thrust upward, trying to keep with the rhythm she was setting. “Oh, fuck, Princess, you feel incredible. I’m not going to last very long. You’re gonna make me come way too fast. You think you can catch up with me? Because I want to feel that tight pussy clenching all around my dick. I want you to give it to me. I want—”
Her breath shortened, which was her warning sign. He pushed back against the incredible pressure building inside him. He wanted to be able to watch her when she came. He slid his hands up to her breasts, and she went still. He heaved upward and his dick started pulsing just as the clenching he’d asked for commenced. And fuck him, had anything ever felt so good in his life? She moaned as pleasure washed over her. He did the same, letting it pulse all through him, spread through his limbs like a narcotic. He’d thought before that she sounded relieved, and he felt that too, suddenly. It was the physical release, but not just that. It was also . . . her.
She slumped forward onto his chest, and he put his arms around her. They stayed like that for a long time, their ragged breathing and the crackling of the fire the only sounds in the room.
Eventually, she started to shift like she was preparing to lever herself off him. He didn’t want her to go. Not yet. So he stood, taking her with him. She squealed and laughed and wrapped her legs around him and let him carry her to the bed. He used one hand to hold on to the condom as he eased her off him and laid her down. After ditching it, he slid under the covers next to her.
“Are you going to finish the roof of the cabin tomorrow?” she asked quietly.
“Yeah. I intended to today, but then a princess showed up and spirited me off to lunch. I’m planning to get up first thing and finish. I only have probably another hour’s worth of work, so I’ll be back for all the cocoa nonsense.”
“Thank you, Leo.” She propped herself up on his chest and looked at him intently. “You don’t know what this means to me.”
“I do know.”
She smiled. It wasn’t the fake one, exactly, but it was a wistful one. “I wish I could do something for you.”
“Well, I’m pretty sure you just gave me the best sex of my life.”
Her face lit up. “Really?”
He probably shouldn’t have admitted that, but . . . “Yeah.” He stopped short of floating the come-to-New-York-in-the-spring idea. Because, ultimately, Dani was right. He needed to not get himself in too deep.
“I was thinking about the concept of pleasing people, actually,” she said.
“Yeah?”
“It’s going to sound odd to compare these two things, but bear with me. I was thinking about how, since we started . . .” Marie screwed up her face like she was having trouble spitting out the words.
“Ah, come on,” he teased, playing with her hair. “You can say it. You can’t make me do all the dirty talking.”
She rolled her eyes. “Since we started having sex.”
“And here I was hoping you’d say ‘fucking.’”
“Regardless, the point is, I’ve found myself wanting to please you. Wanting to do exactly what would give you the most pleasure. This evening for some reason I was thinking about how unusual a position that is for me to find myself in. I mean, in normal circumstances, not sexual ones.”
“You don’t have family that allows it.”
“Correct. I would love to make my father happy, but I can’t. My mother, though . . . Here’s the other memory. In the spring, there are wildflowers everywhere around here. She loved them. When I was young, I used to go out every day and pick some for her. I even did it as an adult. Not as often, but from time to time. And I remember on my first trip home from Oxford in the spring, after the Hilary term in my first year, I was being driven up to the castle and they were in bloom. So I asked the driver to stop, and I picked an armful. It was such a simple thing, but it made her so happy.”
He could see what was missing in her life. Well, there were a lot of things missing in her life. Dancing like no one was watching. Pastrami on rye. But the larger point was that she was, elementally, alone.
“My whole life is arranged so that I’m surrounded by other people whose entire jobs are to make me happy,” she said.
“And do they?”
“They make me comfortable.”
That was a nonanswer. But really, the nonanswer was a sort of answer, wasn’t it?
“I never get a chance to make anyone else happy,” she went on. “That’s what I’m trying to say. Happiness—whether you’re experiencing it or creating it for others—is important. And happiness and comfort, it turns out, are not the same things.”
“You know what would make me really happy right now?” If you agreed to come to New York and see me. If this didn’t have to be it.
“What?”
“If you would say ‘fucking.’”
Marie cracked up, which had been Leo’s aim. He knew it didn’t address anything she’d said, but all that stuff about wildflowers and happiness? He got what she was saying, but he was not the person who could fix any of that for her, not in any sort of permanent way. So he stuck with what he could do. “Come on. It’s not that hard. ‘Leo, I enjoyed fucking you very much.’”
She swatted his chest. “Oh, stop it.”
She didn’t really want him to stop it, though. He could tell from the way her eyes danced. He performed an exaggerated sigh. “Well, okay. I guess I’ll just lie here all unhappy-like.”
She heaved herself onto him so she was lying directly on top of him. Scooched herself up so they were nose to nose and announced, “Leo, I enjoyed fucking you very much.” But she did it in that semiprissy princess tone he loved to hate and hated to love.
Ah, shit. He was so screwed.
Chapter Nineteen
“We thought, if anyone can think of a way out of this, it’s you,” Max said.
Marie’s heart was hammering. She’d called Max last night after her confrontation with her father, and Max had suggested that when he arrived this morning, they jointly speak to Mr. Benz. Maybe, he’d reasoned, the equerry would see a way out of the engagement where they could not. She hadn’t had a lot of hope but had reasoned it couldn’t hurt. The man was a master courtier. He knew the politics of the country, the country’s nobility. He knew Morneau. He knew the family. He knew everything. What was the worst that could happen?
She just hadn’t expected to be so nervous. Before, when she and Max had talked about the impending engagement, she’d been . . . bummed, as the Americans would say. Bummed but resigned. Now, though, she felt like she was back at the United Nations, about to step onstage. Panic was unspooling inside her, edging into despair, even.
“Have you told your father you don’t wish to marry?” Mr. Benz asked after they’d laid out their concerns.
“Yes.” Marie had to fight to keep her voice even. She had told him, and he’d mocked her.
“We’ve been trying to postpone the inevitable for years,” Max said, idly sipping a cup of tea, clearly not feeling the same dread she was.
“Indeed,” Mr. Benz remarked.
“I’ve already done my master’s thesis,” Max said. “I’m just pretending I need more time.”
“I’m aware.”
“You are?” Max aimed an astonished face at Marie. That had shocked him out of his languor.
“I told you he knows everything.”
“I was going to suggest that you at least try making your case directly to His Majesty,” Mr. Benz said, “but His Majesty doesn’t . . .”
She could tell he’d been going to say something he’d thought twice about, probably something he’d decided would come across as disloyal. So she filled in the blanks for him. “Listen to reason? Care about what I want? Have a heart anymore?”
He sighe
d. “It’s true your father has not been himself since your mother’s passing.”
“We all miss her. But it’s been three years. I can’t keep doing this.” Her voice was rising, and she could hear the hysteria creeping in, but she couldn’t control it. “I can’t keep doing his work as well as trying to do the work I want to do. And I can’t marry the wrong person!”
The wrong person.
That suggested there was a right person to marry, didn’t it?
Oh dear god. That’s what was different now. That’s why she was so upset.
She did want to marry Leo, even though there was “no universe” in which he wanted to marry her.
She was in love with him.
Her stupid, naïve heart had opened right up to him. Marched right over to his rough-gentle hands and laid itself inside them.
Marie gasped. Audibly and mortifyingly. She wanted him so terribly.
She reminded herself, though, that she was accustomed to not getting what she wanted. She closed her eyes and pressed her knuckles against her eyelids, hoping the pain would make the sobs that were about to come recede.
“Aww, Marie.” Max came over to her and tried to touch her arm. She didn’t want that. She didn’t want him. She shook him off.
She had to get a grip. Max aside, there was no scenario in which she was going to marry Leo. She had to stop conflating the issue of the engagement with . . . the fact of Leo.
Marie pulled her fists off her eyes and straightened her spine. “I’m sorry. I lost my head there for a moment.” She turned to Mr. Benz. “I’m sorry I bothered you with this nonsense. If you’ll excuse us for a moment, I’d like to have a word with Max before we join everyone on the grounds.” Max’s family was scheduled to join Marie and her father for a walkabout, to take in Cocoa Fest. She’d invited Leo and Gabby, too. She needed to fill Max in—to prepare him, at least, for the possibility that her father might be horrible to the Riccis. And she needed him to back her up in making them feel welcome.
And then there was the ball. The fucking ball, which was what Leo would call it.
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