Tearing his mouth from her, he said, “Damn it!” with such feeling she felt his frustration through to her bones. Still holding her, he backed her toward some unspecified goal. When her soles slipped, he tipped her over his arm.
She sank into the pile of straw, and he sank on top of her. He was heavier than she expected, more than she expected, surrounding her with his scent, his weight, his size. Her hands scrabbled on his chest, slid up to his shoulders... his shoulders. They flexed beneath her fingers, as broad and strong as she’d imagined, the muscles clearly delineated beneath the fragile material of his shirt.
He adjusted her beneath him, wrapping his legs around hers. He leaned down to her mouth, kissed her again with swift impatience. “You shouldn’t have done this,” he said, and with one arm he lifted her just enough for her head to fall back. Her neck and chest were exposed, and he growled like a wolf presented with a feast of soft flesh.
Yet his lips, when he laid them against her throat, were soft, open, his tongue a precursor of delight. He sucked hard on the skin, then smoothed the sting, and laughed softly, so softly. “I’ve marked you, Your Highness.”
She didn’t understand what he meant, she only knew his mouth resumed its downward trek and with each kiss and taste, she wanted more. Her nipples tightened, anticipating what he would do, how he would suckle. A low groan broke from her throat, a startling sound, a sound she’d never made before, and she half-lifted her head.
He, too, had lifted his head, and his eyes glinted. He watched her with a smile, a real smile this time. “Sing for me again, sweet princess.” His free hand roamed over her rib cage, approached the soft lower reaches of her breast, caressed it with sure strokes she felt through the velvet and cotton and right through to her flesh. Nerves leaped, her head fell back again, and she groaned once more.
“Beautiful.” He bent to her, but this time his mouth missed her bare skin and rested right where she wished. His breath warmed her nipple through her clothing .. . and then not through her clothing.
She dug her fingers into his shoulders and shouted, “Dom!” But his name came out in a whisper.
He’d unbuttoned her, pushed away the soft lace and thin cotton of her chemise, and now he tormented her. The barbarous kisses he had crushed to her mouth he now smoothed to her breast. He didn’t care that no man had ever touched her there. He offered her no quarter. He sucked at her nipple, bringing it to a peak. His teeth skimmed her skin, a threat and a promise.
Agony. This was agony, She was tense, she was ready, she was surging beneath his body, frantically gripping his hair between her fingers, trying to get away, trying to get closer. . .
He moved off her onto his side. His hand slid down to smooth the mound between her legs. The pressure he put there felt right, added another brushstroke to the reality of lovemaking, made her writhe, and she moaned in soft, short, continuous bursts. Now he tried to separate her legs, but the tight skirt she’d been daring enough to wear thwarted him again. He swore savagely. She almost wept with frustration.
He slid his fingers into her hair, plucking pins free and tossing them away. He held her head still, looking at her so intently she was forced to open her eyes and look back at him.
“Wear all your clothes from now on,” he commanded. “Don’t leave anything off.”
“Is that what you really want?”
“No.” He examined her bare chest, one breast exposed, the brown velvet crushed every place his hand had touched. “No, I want you naked, but not in a stable, not for the first time, not you.” He took a breath and for one moment, the insincere smile she hated returned. “And for damn sure, not me.”
Scruples. Scruples from Francis. Scruples from a bastard mercenary. “Why do I always get a man with scruples?”
The smile disappeared. “Has this happened a lot then”—he brushed her nipple with his knuckles— “Your Highness?”
“No.” In frustration, she slapped his hand away, rolled away from him and sat up. “Just with you, yesterday. Francis, I could never even get this far.”
His mouth tightened in further bad temper. “Maybe no one’s ever told you, Your Highness, but it’s bad form to discuss your previous lovers with your new lover.”
The ecstasy was fading, leaving her cranky and disgruntled, and the straw made her itch. “He was never my lover.” She pulled up her chemise and set to buttoning her jacket.
“Good.” Dom stroked his hand down her back, then down again, removing the straw. “If the world were just, I would be your first lover, and your last.”
She froze.
He thought she’d had other lovers. Of course he did; she’d been married. Even if she hadn’t been, that would have been a fair assumption. After all, she was older, and because of her position, she was poised and debonair.
The touch of his hand on her back made her shiver so, she could scarcely finish buttoning the jacket.
But she wasn’t experienced, and Dulcie said there was a world of difference between a virgin’s initiation and a sophisticated woman’s lark. Dulcie said a woman should tell her first lover so he could ease her first time. So Laurentia ought to tell him the truth.
Purposely she wriggled around until she faced him—and found his gaze fixed on her loose hair as he combed it with his fingers. “Dom, you will be my first lover.”
Lifting a handful of her hair, he buried his face in it. “Yes.”
As he bent, he presented the shell of his ear, and she couldn’t resist stroking it with her fingertips. “I want it that way.”
“I want it that way, too.” Somehow his mouth wandered to her cheek, and he kissed it softly. “I want it to be however you want it.”
“All right, then.” She liked his gentle caress after so much intensity. She liked what he said.
But somehow, somehow, she felt as if he hadn’t really heard a word.
He wrapped an arm around her waist. “Since that’s why you brought me here, I say we should go up to the house.”
“Yes.”
“And finish what we started.”
“No.”
He drew back, startled, but he had promised it would be however she wanted it. And—
“First, I want to talk.”
Chapter Nineteen
Talk. Just like a woman. She wanted to talk.
While Laurentia bustled around the one-room cottage, sweeping and dusting and generally giving off housewifely sparks of satisfaction, Dom stood in the doorway, so aroused he could scarcely walk. How could he, when he couldn’t take his eyes off her?
Just as she’d planned. She might as well have lit the fires of hell between his toes as stroll around, pretty as you please, with her hair dangling down her back, her eyelashes fluttering, a flirtatious little smile touching her lips—and that damned fichu gone. The slope of her chest was lovely, creamy pale skin without a freckle, but he’d seen that before just the other night. Women showed these things in a ball gown, and the princess’s ball gown had been cut low enough to pleasure his gaze.
But when a woman didn’t wear the correct garments beneath her clothing, a man leaped to the logical conclusion that all garments could be removed, in fact should be removed, and as soon as possible. Never, since the dawn of time, had a man realized a woman wore insufficient clothing and thought, We should have a conversation.
Talk. As she wished, he’d talk. And as soon as they were done talking, he’d take her hand, lead her to that bare rope bed built into the corner, and love her until she couldn’t walk. He braced his hand against the door frame. Sometimes in this world justice reigned. He couldn’t walk before, she couldn’t walk after.
She paused in the act of transferring food from her saddlebags to the cupboard against the wall. “You look so ill at ease. Why don’t you sit down?”
“I’ll stand.” This was all his fault. He should have just swived her in the stable, but he’d fornicated in enough places to know his lousy pile of straw wasn’t thick and well stacked enough to protect h
er royal behind during the crucial moments. And women got funny about things like straw sticking them in the back. Of course, he could have put her on top, but he got funny about straw sticking him in the back, too.
More important—the first time with Laurentia, by God, he would be on top. Usually it didn’t matter, but this time it did. Oh, yes, this time it did.
So in the stable he’d been a gentleman and called a halt, and this was his reward. She wanted to talk.
She stepped in front of him, smiling whimsically. “You can come in. You don’t have to hang around the door like some dog I’m going to kick.”
She took his hand between both her own, holding it, raising it to her mouth, kissing it, a soft, affectionate peck on the back of his knuckles. A gesture that looked so natural coming from her, he might have been the prince and she the bastard.
“I came to the cottage just for you,” she said.
For him? “Why?”
“Mostly just for you.”
In his opinion, she corrected herself most unnecessarily.
“I wanted you to see what I love. To see if you love it, too.”
His gaze swept around the cramped room. She’d opened the shutters all the way around, the sunlight streamed in, and he didn’t see anything to love. The fireplace dominated one wall, a huge behemoth that must consume logs at a great rate. The rough, rounded rocks that rose in twin pillars beside the iron grate looked as if they had come from a riverbed. The hearth could only be called primitive, with a hook for a cooking pot and old mortar turning to gravel between the stones.
“Who chops the logs?” Dom asked, seeing hard labor ahead for him.
“Papa won’t let me do that. Not when I’m up here by myself. He worries about me with an ax, and I have to admit I’m not good with sharp blades.”
Appalled, Dom reversed their grip, holding her hand between both of his while trying to make her clarify herself. “You mean you tried chopping wood?”
“No.”
“Good.”
“I couldn’t heft the ax.”
It did him no good to realize she was here, safe, and relatively sound. His mind conjured up a picture of her raising an ax above her head and—
She gave a gurgle of laughter. “You look just like Papa did when I told him!”
Yes, Dom understood her father’s anxiety. The thought of Ruby dancing on her little feet toward danger horrified him, and he always wanted to keep her wrapped in cotton wool to keep her safe. Laurentia’s father would feel the same way about her ... and King Jerome would feel like the lowest of criminals when he realized he’d brought the greatest peril to her when he’d hired Dom as a bodyguard. Yet Dom was the best man to thwart the kidnappers, whoever they were. Protection for the princess was truly appalling, and so Dom would tell King Jerome after he’d ... betrayed them.
He looked down at Laurentia. He had never played a lover false before. Not even a royal lover. Yet he’d never betrayed an employer before, either. His honor was at risk. Brat needed security and safety. Ruby’s future was at stake. Laurentia didn’t matter when compared to those three great loyalties. And she was using him for his body, for his expertise. He had to keep that in mind.
“The chores I can’t handle are taken care of by a couple loyal to my family for generations,” Laurentia explained. “Minnie and Roy stock the hayloft and the woodshed—you were speaking to them yesterday, remember?”
He remembered, and now he understood why the old couple had been so free with their opinions.
“Papa closed the house when Mama died, so except for that family no one else knows I come here.”
“Even if someone stumbled on the place, they wouldn’t think it was a royal abode,” Dom said dryly.
The bed stood in one corner, a rough wooden frame hooked to the wall and ropes looping back and forth to support a mattress. The mattress was nothing more than a large, flat, empty sack which Laurentia had dragged toward the front door. She was going to fill it with fresh straw, she had said. He had thought she was hinting that he do it; maybe she was, but he was coming to realize the princess could do it for herself. Had done it for herself many a time.
They still held hands like lovers, and Laurentia tugged him into the room. “My father made the cupboard for my mother, and she decorated it. Isn’t it lovely?”
The food cupboard graced one corner, a precarious piece of furniture. Dom thought it looked as if rodents with large teeth had done its decorative carvings, but he wouldn’t dream of dissolving Laurentia’s delight. “It’s lovely. Did His Majesty make the table, too?”
“And the chairs.”
That explained a lot, like why one chair tilted on uneven legs and why, if a man put his bare elbows on the table, he would come away with splinters.
But compared to the two primitive chairs and legless seat in the middle of the floor, the table looked good. “What are those for?” He pointed.
She got a foolish grin on her face and moved to the other door, the one at the back of the house. Opening it with a flourish, she gestured him outside.
Transfixed by her smile, by the way her eyes sparkled, he walked across the wooden floor, his boots echoing. Again she gestured him out, and he obeyed, stepping onto the porch—the porch that hung over the mountainside like an aerie over an eagle’s kingdom.
Twelve feet wide, as long as the cottage, shaded by an extension of the roof, the porch dug its supports into a slope that dropped rapidly away from the cottage. His breath caught in his throat as he looked into the treetops, alive with birds nesting close enough to touch. Red squirrels dashed from branch to branch. Pines creaked as they swayed stiffly in the gentle breeze.
Amazed at the wealth of beauty, he walked to the whitewashed railing and leaned out. Off to the side, the brook tumbled down a rocky bed, adding its music to birds’ song, and far below, the hillside leveled out again and the stream joined another stream on its way down the mountainside. He let his gaze wander to other mountains, blue in the distance. Beyond even that, in the cleft between two mountains, to another blue, deeper and misty with eternity—the Mediterranean.
Dom took a slow, sweet breath of mountain air, almost intoxicated from a beauty that struck at the last remaining remnants of his miserable, cursed soul. He’d viewed a lot of scenes in his travels, but none of them had filled him with awe like this. No place had touched him since the day he’d been thrown out of Sereminia, but this cottage almost hummed with tranquility, with peace, with the sense that sometime, somewhere, someone had been happy here, and someone would be again.
“Do you like it?” Laurentia didn’t sound tentative, but quietly proud and delighted to be showing him her domain.
“Yes.” He nodded, captivated by the splendor. “I understand why you come here.”
“I knew you would.” Coming to him, Laurentia put her arm around his waist and laid her head on his arm, against his biceps. “It’s my own personal treehouse.”
His focus shifted from the distant to the immediate. She was touching him, but not in any salacious way. She leaned against him as he’d seen hundreds of women lean against their husbands, for comfort and support, to share a moment or to rest their head. The familiarity of the gesture caught him off-guard, and the man who knew just how to respond to an advance found himself unable to do anything but stand immobile.
Which apparently was just what she wanted. For a long moment, she remained tucked against him with every appearance of contentment. A contentment he could have shared, if only she were not royal, and not the object of his assignment.
Then she rubbed her head against him like a domestic cat and stepped away. “The chairs are for out here.” She tucked her hands behind her and looked out into the distance. “If you like, we can sleep out here, too. It’s cold in the mountains, but we have lots of blankets, and the cold keeps the midges away and the stars are beautiful...”
She was nervous, he realized. Nervous about suggesting such an intimacy? As if he would reject her!
>
But maybe someone had. Turning, he seated himself on the rail and looked at her. In the stable, she’d said he would be her first lover. He hadn’t been paying a lot of attention to anything but that one breast, pretty and pink, but he remembered that.
He supposed she’d been trying to tell him she’d never found satisfaction, and his function in her existence was to provide it. He acknowledged that easily enough, but it made him wonder about her again. She really did brim with passion and exuberance, so what kind of man could have failed to hit the bull’s-eye with her? “You’re going to have to tell me about that husband of yours.”
The excited flush faded from her cheeks. “I don’t want to.”
“You said you wanted to talk.”
“About this.” She gestured past him at the view. “And about you. I scarcely know you at all.”
His enjoyment of his surroundings died a rapid death. What was it with women wanting to pry into his background? Did Laurentia think it would make her choice of him more ethical if she could pretend they were friends? “I’m not worth talking about.”
Chapter Twenty
Laurentia watched him walk inside, stiff-legged like a stalking wildcat. She’d offended him. He didn’t want to talk about himself. She could understand that; he was a mercenary, and contented men didn’t travel that route. Only the desperate left home to fight for strangers and die in a foreign land. Still, she wanted to know. A hunger gnawed at her, a need to delve into his mysteries, to heal the wounds and soothe the anger.
Dulcet could have bedded him without knowing his name. Laurentia wanted to be part of his life.
Shaking her head at her own folly, Laurentia went back into the cottage. The mattress was gone, the back door open, and she couldn’t help but be happy he’d taken mat job in hand. It seemed a sign of domesticity, as if she’d taken the wildcat and had begun the process of taming him.
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