by Kim Lawrence
KIM LAWRENCE lives on a farm in Anglesey with her university lecturer husband, assorted pets who arrived as strays and never left, and sometimes one or both of her boomerang sons. When she’s not writing she loves to be outdoors gardening, or walking on one of the beaches for which the island is famous—along with being the place where Prince William and Catherine made their first home!
Also by Kim Lawrence
Surrendering to the Italian’s Command
A Ring to Secure His Crown
The Greek’s Ultimate Conquest
A Cinderella for the Desert King
A Wedding at the Italian’s Demand
A Passionate Night with the Greek
Claiming His Unknown Son
Spanish Secret Heirs miniseries
The Spaniard’s Surprise Love-Child
Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk.
Waking Up in His Royal Bed
Kim Lawrence
www.millsandboon.co.uk
ISBN: 978-0-008-91367-0
WAKING UP IN HIS ROYAL BED
© 2021 Kim Lawrence
Published in Great Britain 2021
by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.
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To Jane and the ‘Artists Unlocked’.
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Booklist
Title Page
Copyright
Note to Readers
Dedication
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
EPILOGUE
Extract
About the Publisher
CHAPTER ONE
BEATRICE RESISTED THE instinct to fight her way through the layers of sleep, instead easing her body closer to the warmth of the hard male contours she was lying… Male… The shocked acknowledgement hit at the same moment a distant clatter was joined by the melodic voice of her sister, who had clearly recovered from her migraine of the previous night and was singing something catchy and irritating downstairs.
One of the major differences between them, beyond the fact her sibling was not blonde, did not have blue eyes and was frequently referred to as petite and delicate, was that Maya was a morning person who woke with a smile on her face and a spring in her step. She could also hold a tune, and finally Maya would never have woken up beside a man who had walked into a bar alone and walked out minutes later not alone!
A protective hand went to Beatrice’s face before she conquered her sense of dread and opened her eyes, widening her fingers fanlike to peer through them.
Maybe it was all a bad dream—with some very good parts.
It wasn’t a dream!
Connecting with the pair of dark polished ebony eyes framed by lashes too thick and curling for any man, containing a sardonic gleam that stared right back at her, she loosed a low moan, scrunched her own eyes tight and twisted away.
The reaction of the owner of the eyes and the body, which even fully clothed had had every woman in the bar regarding her with envy as she had left with him, prevented her rolling into a foetal bundle of denial.
In her head she had stiffened in reaction to the heavy arm thrown casually across her ribcage; in reality her body softened and the determination to put some distance between them was overwhelmed by a fresh surge of toe-tingling heat, as a voice as deep and sinfully seductive as the warm breath against her earlobe sent sharp tingles outwards from the core of liquid warmth low in her belly.
‘What’s the hurry?’
Eyes closed, she loosed a quivering sigh and then moaned as he brought his hard body suggestively up against the curve of hers, providing enough reasons not to go anywhere as her resistance to the heavy throb of desire that robbed her limbs of strength dissolved utterly.
For several long languid moments she allowed herself to enjoy the feel of strong, sensitive hands and clever fingers moving up her ribcage, tracing a line down her belly, causing her to suck in a shocked, excited breath, before lifting to cup the weight of one breast, his thumb rubbing across the tight, aroused peak.
‘Stop it?’
Now where did that question mark come from? she wondered, feeling a stab of frustration when he did just that, pulling his hand away. An action that caused her to squirm backwards a little and catch the thumb of the hand that came to rest on the curve of her jaw between her teeth.
‘Play nice, Bea.’
Before she could react to the husky remonstrance, she found herself flat on her back. It wasn’t his superior strength that kept her breathless there—she could have easily slid from underneath him. There was air between their bodies as, hands braced flat on the pillow either side of her face, knees either side of her hips, his body curved above her.
She was pinned there as much by the hungry ache inside her as his predatory bold dark stare fastened onto her face, lingering on her lips that still felt swollen from the kisses that had continued last night, even as they had torn each other’s clothes off as they had stumbled across the room to the bed.
Her eyes darkened at the memories of the passionate coupling. The stress of discovering him beside her was pushed to the fringes of her mind as she stared back. His face was really a total miracle. Perfect was too mild a word to describe the sculpted arran
gement of his perfect bone structure, the deep golden tone of his skin, dusted on his hollow cheeks and square lower jaw by a shadow of dark sexy stubble, the sensuality of his mouth, the firm upper lip counteracted by the full sensual lower.
She blinked and cleared her throat. ‘I don’t want to play.’ She husked the words out past the ache in her throat. It was true there was nothing light or playful about the ache. It was on a par with the need, the craving for oxygen as she opened her eyes and managed to disconnect from his stare, but only escaped as far as his mouth, which did an equal amount of damage to her nervous system.
The sharply etched angle of his carved cheekbones, the hawkish dominance of his nose blurred as his head lowered. The first kiss was a warm, tormenting whisper across her parted lips, drawing a fractured moan from her throat. The second, still soft on the side of her mouth, drew her body up into an arch as she tried to deepen the pressure. The ones that followed increased the torment until, unable to bear it any longer, she reached up, her fingers sinking deep into the thick dark hair, her hands locking on the back of his head as she dragged his face downwards, glimpsing the glitter in his dark eyes, before she pressed her mouth to his and closed her eyes.
Restraint gone, they kissed with a wild hunger, and they fell back. Warm bodies sinuously twisting to deepen the contact, driven by a passion that drove every other thought from Beatrice’s head.
‘Bea, are you coming down or shall I bring your coffee up?’
Beatrice stiffened as she was jarringly jolted back to reality. Eyes scrunched, a moan of self-recrimination locked in her throat, as without a word she rolled away from the warm body she was pressed against.
‘Weak…stupid…weak…stupid!’ she mumbled, beating herself up verbally as she swung her long legs over the side of the bed and, with a sinuous, graceful swoop, grabbed a sheet that had at some point fallen on the floor. She didn’t stop until she reached the far corner of the room, where she stood, shoulder blades pressed to the wall, holding the sheet against her body. It was an inadequate shield but better than nothing.
She glanced nervously at the door; a nightmare scenario played in her head of the door opening and Maya appearing.
‘I’ll be down just now!’ she yelled. ‘You need to go!’ she whispered, transferring her agonised glance to the man lying in her bed.
He looked in no hurry to go anywhere any time soon as he rolled onto his back, tucking one hand behind his head, causing the light sheet that lay across his narrow hips to slide another inch lower. He was totally at ease with his naked state but she was not. He was a living, breathing sculpture of perfectly formed muscles and warm olive-toned skin—just looking at him made things shift deep inside her.
The mockery in his expression was not quite in tune with the dark frustration in his heavy-lidded eyes as his glance came to rest on the swell of her full breasts above the sheet she held clutched against herself.
As he watched her struggles to control the white swathe, he visualised the slim curves beneath the tented fabric. The smooth, warm scented skin, the silk touch of her long legs as they wrapped around him. The thousand razor cuts of desire that came with the memory darkened his eyes to midnight.
‘That is not what I need, cara.’
Before she was fatally distracted by the bold challenge of the seductive gleam in his heavy-lidded eyes, the timely interruption of her sister’s voice drifting up the stairs again saved her from getting sucked back into the dangerous sexual vortex.
She clenched her even white teeth so hard she could hear the grind of enamel. She didn’t feel saved at all, or maybe she didn’t want to be saved?
‘Oh, my God!’
He grinned a slow devilish smile of invitation.
‘Oh, my God!’ she whispered again with even more feeling as she realised how close she had come to accepting the invitation in his sinful eyes. She took a deep breath and thought, Do not go there. Her eyes flickered towards the figure in the bed—again!
Once was enough—actually it was too much!
She cleared her throat. ‘I’ll be right down!’ she belted out, then directed an accusing glare at the figure occupying the bed, even though she knew the guilt was as much hers. When it came to Dante, why was she such a weak idiot? ‘Do not make this any more difficult. You need to get out of here.’
His brows, dark, straight and thick, lifted above polished ebony mocking eyes. ‘Why?’
‘You can ask that?’
He casually levered himself into a sitting position with a distracting display of contracting muscle in his washboard belly. ‘I really don’t see what your problem is.’
Eyes indignantly wide, she managed to drag her gaze upwards, not that the breadth of his muscled shoulders and chest offered much respite for her wildly surging hormones.
‘What?’ he responded with an innocent look and a seemingly mystified shrug that intensified her murderous glare. ‘Unless you have forgotten, we are married.’
CHAPTER TWO
HUFFING OUT A defiant gust of breath through clenched teeth, Beatrice refused to drop her gaze from the challenge she saw in the dark eyes of Dante Aristide Severin Velazquez, Crown Prince of San Macizo.
Her husband.
‘If only I could forget.’ Her mumble came with a resentful glare, at odds with the mood of their civilised divorce.
She never had really understood what a civilised divorce entailed, but she was pretty sure it did not entail having a night of passionate sex with your soon-to-be ex. But on the plus side, her peevish attitude did provide some sort of cover for her deep inner despair.
Everyone made bad choices, and she was no exception, but it sometimes felt that from the moment Dante had walked into her life the only sort of choices she’d made were of the bad variety—actually, disastrous!
She had always operated on the principle that your actions had consequences, and you lived with them. Or, in her case, you neatly plotted a course around them, or at least the more dangerous ones.
Then Dante happened and she forgot her philosophy; her navigation skills took a vacation. She didn’t so much forget as didn’t give a damn about the consequences. The primitive instincts that he had awoken in her were totally in charge. Instincts that had drowned out the warning bells that she had remained determinedly tone deaf to. Actually, last night there had been no bells, just a fierce need.
She had lifted her head and seen the reason why the crowded bar had fallen silent, and had felt a bone-deep desperation, much like any addict who found their drug of choice was close enough to smell. Dante was her addiction, the virus in her blood she had no antibody to.
Which made it seem as though she’d had no choice, but she had. She hadn’t sleepwalked into the situation. She had known what she was doing every step of the way. Admittedly she had not typed his name into a search engine when she’d accepted the offer of dinner, knowing that he wasn’t actually talking about a dinner. But you didn’t need a bio to see at one glance that he represented the sort of danger she had spent her adult life avoiding.
The idea of experiencing an attraction strong enough to make her share intimacy with a man she didn’t know had been a concept she had considered with a disbelieving smile, tinged, if she was honest, with smugness. But she’d had total confidence in her belief that any relationship she had would come from friendship and respect.
She’d slept with Dante that first night. She had been so determined to have that first night end the way she had imagined from the moment she had set eyes on him that she hadn’t told him that this…that he…was her first, in case it made him back away.
Her instincts there had been bang on because Dante had not been pleased by the discovery she was inexperienced, sternly telling her that virgins were not his thing and demanding an explanation.
It could have ended there—it should have—but it hadn’t, because she hadn’t wanted it to.
When she had retorted that she wasn’t a virgin any more so that was one obstacle gone she’d made him laugh, and he’d laughed again when she had explained that it hadn’t been a conscious choice. She hadn’t been waiting for the right man or anything, she simply wasn’t a particularly physical person.
They had spent the next three days and nights in bed disproving this theory. Nothing and no one had disturbed them in the penthouse with million-dollar views that she’d never even looked at, and Beatrice had savoured every hot, skin-peelingly perfect moment of the intimacy because she’d known this heaven wasn’t going to last. Dante had made that painfully clear.
He had left no room for misinterpretation when he’d explained that he was not into long-term relationships, or actually any sort of relationship at this point in his life.
Facts she’d already known, having finally typed his name into her phone’s search engine—even if a tenth of the women he was alleged to have slept with were actually real, it would be amazing that he found time to be so hands-on with the charitable foundation that he had founded.
It made a person wonder if he ever actually slept, except she knew he did. She had watched him and been utterly fascinated by the way the strong lines on his face relaxed in sleep, made him look younger and almost vulnerable in a way that made her conscious of an empty ache inside her.
There had been more than one occasion over that weekend when he had felt the need to drag her feet back to earth by reminding her.
‘This is just sex—you know that, right?’
The fantasy bubble she had spent the weekend in had ended when she’d opened her eyes and found him standing there, suited, booted and looking every inch the exclusive playboy prince who was always good for a headline.
She remembered fighting the self-respect-killing urge to run after him when he had stopped of his own volition, his long brown finger curled around the doorknob. She had managed a response as cool and offhand as his suggestion that they meet up in three weeks when commitments would be bringing him back to London.