Bride by Royal Decree

by Caitlin Crews

  Maggy liked the rain against all the windows. It made her think of that hunger Reza had talked about. It made her feel it everywhere, roaring inside of her. Making her feel far braver than perhaps she should.

  Reza was talking about something so light and so far removed from what she was thinking that she didn’t pretend to follow it. He’d given her a glass of something as sweet as it was alcoholic, but she’d only tasted it once before putting it aside. She was after something else entirely tonight.

  It took her a long moment to realize that Reza had stopped speaking. That the room had gone silent. That there was no sound at all save the fire crackling and spitting against the grate, and outside, the winter storm rattling the windows. That Reza’s gaze was on hers, all that dark gray unreadable. If not outright forbidding.

  Trouble was, it didn’t intimidate her. She liked him granite and imposing. She thought the truth was, she liked him. Full stop.

  “I apologize.” He was quite obviously not sorry. That was clear from his tone, not to mention that frigid, regal expression on his face. “Am I boring you?”

  Maggy stood then, trying to remember how to be graceful the way she’d been taught. She ran her hands down the front of her gown, a sweet fall of dark blue silk that brushed the floor despite the high shoes she wore. And any nerves she might have had now that she was really doing this—and she was really, truly doing this, no matter what—were swept away by the way Reza tracked the movement. As if he couldn’t quite help himself. As if he wanted it to be his hands on her like that.

  That was what she wanted to find out. If he did. If he wanted her as much as she wanted him.

  If that kiss had been a mistake—or if it was the new beginning between them that it had felt like to her.

  “I want to thank you,” she told him.

  He was lounging in yet another armchair, the way he always did. How he managed to give the impression of slumping without actually doing so was a marvel, she thought. A bit of royal magic. He’d opened the jacket of yet another perfect suit—and Maggy knew enough now to understand that the word for the kind of hand-tooled clothing he preferred was bespoke. That he had many such suits, all made to his precise specifications and all, like this one, a love song to his hard, solid, sculpted body.

  She wanted to know the words to that song. Then she wanted to sing it.

  Reza said nothing, and that was almost more alarming than all the cutting things he could have said. He only watched her as she moved toward him, though she could feel the weight of it, as if his gray gaze really was the hard, pounding rain that washed over the windows behind him. He remained silent when she came to stand before him, just inside the V of his outthrust legs.

  “You’ve given me everything,” she told him.

  And even though she’d planned this to be light and airy, the way everyone kept teaching her these royal games of intrigue over waltzes and dinners and after dinner drinks were meant to be, it didn’t sound that way when she said it. It occurred to her, once the words were out, that it was no less than the raw and simple truth.

  Oh, well, she thought. No use pretending now.

  She made herself continue. “I want to give you something in return.”

  “You will give me your hand in marriage soon enough.” His voice was too low and a bit too rough, but he was watching her with a certain alertness that made her blood seem to quicken inside her veins. It encouraged her even as it moved in her like a deep, sweet caress. And most importantly, he didn’t order her to step away from him. Or to take her seat again. “That is more than sufficient.”

  “I can’t possibly give you any kind of gift you don’t already have,” she told him. Her heart was pounding inside her chest. Her eyes felt glassy. “So I thought instead I would give you something I’ve never given anyone else. Ever.”

  Something in his gray gaze changed then, like a new storm washing out the old. That hard mouth of his moved. “Princess. That isn’t necessary.”

  But she had no intention of heeding that warning she heard in his voice. She wanted this too much. She wanted him too much. And she’d spent a lifetime refusing to allow herself to want things she couldn’t have.

  She didn’t want to do it any longer. It felt like defeat, and that was a part of her old life. This was her new start. He was her new life.

  Maggy wanted to taste every bit of it, starting with him.

  She gathered up all her courage and every last bit of that greedy, ravenous hunger that stormed through her now and, if she was being as honest with herself as possible, had since he’d walked through the coffee shop door and she’d thought he was extraordinary. She still did. That made it easy to sink down on her knees before him, until she was kneeling up between his legs.

  “Maggy.”

  She liked her name on his lips, and no matter the tone he used—just this side of a command. She liked the arrested, aware look on his harsh face and, even more, the way it shivered all through her, as if that silver gleam was inside her, too.

  She shifted forward so she could put her hands on his thighs, then run them up toward his lap, her goal obvious.

  Maggy thought of the coffee shop again, and how she’d thought he’d seemed like a man who was used to having people on their knees before him. Had she wanted to do this even then? Her mouth watered at the thought.

  Reza didn’t move. If anything, he got more still, as if he really did turn to stone beneath her hands. But it was a hot, masculine sort of stone. It made her belly seem to twist into a complicated knot, then sink down between her legs. Maggy tipped her head back so she could keep her eyes on his. Too much gray and too much silver besides, and when that muscle clenched in his jaw, she felt it in her core, molten and greedy.

  She slid her hands up farther, reveling in the feel of his strong, corded thighs beneath her palms. All his power. All that heat. She sensed more than saw the way his hands gripped the arms of his chair.

  “Maggy.”

  The way he said her name was supposed to stop her. She understood that. But he didn’t actually order her to stop.

  So she didn’t.

  She paused for the faintest moment at the top of his thighs, where she could see his hard length against his fly—growing larger and more fascinating the longer she sat there and looked at it. She slid her hands up farther still, only grazing the front of his fly in passing as she reached for his belt.

  He jolted as if he would reach to stop her—but he didn’t.

  The sound of his buckle seemed louder than it should. Ruder and more delicious with only the snap of the fire behind it. Maggy felt herself flush, but she couldn’t stop now. She was too close. Her breath kept tangling in her throat and between her legs, she felt a matching rush of sensation.

  Molten heat, soft and wild, and all for him.

  She pulled his trousers open, her heart punching at her hard. So hard it made her stomach flip over and over. Her hands trembled slightly. She didn’t know which was worse, the longing that made her knees feel soft and weak beneath her or the panic that he might stop her at any moment when she was this close. When she was finally so close.

  She reached into the opening she’d made and pulled out the hardest part of him, wrapping her fingers around the thick, hard length. She swallowed, hard, and looked up at him as she indulged herself, moving her hand all the way down to his root, his silken smoothness against her palm making her whole body shake with need.

  His face was set, that muscle in his jaw something like ferocious. He was so fierce, so harsh, he should have scared her—but he didn’t. He never had. She understood that glitter in his gaze now, the way she had the other night when he’d kissed her. She felt it racing through her, making her feel clumsy and needy and maddened with this same hunger.

  And she knew that whatever else happened, however stony he became, he wanted her exactly as much as she wanted him.

  The knowledge felt like safety. Like freedom. Like both at once, wrapped up together and indisting
uishable from one another.

  Maggy wrapped her free hand around him, too. Then she tipped herself forward, kept her gaze on his as she opened her mouth, and sucked him in deep.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  REZA DIDN’T KNOW how he didn’t embarrass himself on the spot.

  Maggy’s hot, clever mouth closed over him, the world exploded into bright red need and a mad rush of pure lust, and he was nearly lost.

  Nearly.

  She took him deeper. She wrapped her fingers around the base of him and she tested his length against her tongue. She pulled back and lavished attention on the broad head before sucking him back in again.

  She’d said she’d never done this before, and he was amazed at how...primitive that made him. How possessive.

  He thought her inexpert attempt to please him with her sheer enthusiasm and that hot, wet mouth of hers might actually kill him.

  But if this was how he was going to die, Reza thought it might be worth it. He kept his hands fisted hard on the arms of his chair. He let her play with him, her dark hair swirling around her bare shoulders and moving over his thighs like heat. He watched in dark fascination and that same red-hot greed as she took him deeper. Then deeper still.

  He felt her everywhere.

  And he had never wanted anyone or anything more.

  He knew that should have alarmed him, that razor’s edge of desire that was a bit too close to desperation. He knew what indulging in this, in her, made him. He knew he should push her off, reclaim his control, insist on all the cold, clear boundaries that had to stand between them or everything else would shatter—

  But he couldn’t do it.

  He didn’t want to do it.

  Reza wanted her. Her. He wanted his princess, his queen, the woman who had been promised to him at her birth. The girl he’d lost before she’d had a chance to grow up into his woman. The future that had been wrenched away from him when he’d only just become a man. He wanted the queen he’d mourned throughout his twenties.

  He wanted the real, live, insanely beautiful woman who knelt before him and thanked him with every blazingly slick slide of her smart, hot mouth along the hardest, neediest part of him. Again and again and again.

  And he had already damned himself when he’d kissed her in that ballroom. Why not enjoy the flames?

  All the lies Reza had told himself since he’d seen that photograph with his own lost princess bride in the background, all the walls he’d built since then and tried to keep solid, all the thousands of ways he’d pretended he could maintain his boundaries against this woman who had been born to be his, the power she wielded over him because she was his lost Magdalena and because she was his Maggy besides—it all simply crumbled around him.

  And Reza found he didn’t much care, because in the wreckage there was still her, his princess, knelt there between his legs with her mouth against him, driving him straight toward that cliff.

  “No,” he bit out, aware of the harshness of his voice only once he heard himself, the echo of his furious, ungovernable hunger rough in the quiet of the room.

  Maggy froze, pulling her mouth free of him while her hands were still wrapped tight around him. But even that was too much. Reza muttered out something in Italian, a curse or a prayer and he didn’t know which, reaching down to pull her off of him before he lost his last little shred of control. He eased her up from between his legs even as he moved out of the chair, sliding down to the floor to kneel there with her.

  Then he took her face—her exquisite, impossible face, intelligent and lovely and his—between his hands.

  “Reza,” she whispered, her hands moving to curl around his wrists. “I want—”

  “I want,” he corrected her gruffly. “And believe me, Princess, I intend to have what I want. Everything I want.”

  And then he took her mouth with his, and let that bright red desire for her wash over him. He couldn’t taste her deeply enough. He couldn’t hold her close enough. He angled his jaw, tangling his tongue with hers. He indulged that sharp greed inside of him, letting one hand move to fist in her thick hair while the other learned that delicious arch of her back, then settled on the sweet curve of her bottom.

  It wasn’t enough. Reza feasted on her mouth the way he’d wanted to forever, and even more since that kiss in the ballroom. She shivered as she kissed him back, rubbing her breasts against his chest as if she was as desperate as he was. As needy. As impatient.

  And everything had changed tonight.

  The brakes were off. The walls were down.

  There were so many reasons he shouldn’t do this—but chief among them was the fact that with Maggy in his arms, her mouth beneath his again, and her lush, lean body pressed against him, he couldn’t think of a single one of them.

  To hell with the king of the Constantines. Tonight he was nobody but Reza.

  With Maggy that felt like a revelation instead of a disaster.

  He lost himself in her taste. The scent of her skin, vanilla and coconut, as if she was a touch of the tropics in the middle of the winter storm outside. The sheer, dizzying perfection of her mouth against his and the way her taste inflamed him and wrecked him, over and over again.

  Reza lost himself in sensation. In her. In the perfection that was his lost princess, finally found. Finally exactly where she’d been meant to be all along.

  He let his hands move over her again, restlessly testing her curves and making her moan into his mouth. He trailed a line of fire and need down the length of her elegant neck, learning every inch of her and where a lick or a graze of his teeth made her shudder. He bent to taste the plump, smooth thrust of her breasts above the bodice of her dress and in the mad fire of that he took her down with him to the soft, thick rug.

  And then she was beneath him, her caramel eyes shining and her mouth faintly damp from his. Finally. Reza remembered her down on her knees in that coffee shop, staring at him as if he was an unwelcome intrusion. He remembered her soft and asleep on his shoulder in the back of the SUV, so vulnerable and so trusting at once. He could still feel her mouth all over the length of him, while the taste of her rocketed through him and made him something like thirsty.

  She was his. Here, now she was entirely his. At last.

  Her gaze was wide. Dark with the same need that moved in him. Her hair was a dark cloud around her, gleaming in the firelight, and it took everything he had to hold himself there for a moment, up on his elbows above her. As if he needed to etch this moment into his memory forever. Maggy reached up and pushed his jacket off his shoulders and he let her do it, tossing it aside as soon as possible. And then he hissed out a breath when she went further, reaching up beneath the tail of his shirt to get her hands on his skin.

  It was like fire. It was better than fire. Her hands were a torment and a blessing as one traced its way up his spine and the other moved lower to test his backside against her palm.

  He needed to be closer to her. He needed...everything.

  “I need to be inside you,” he gritted out, and he was too far gone to care that he sounded wrecked. Like a stranger to himself. Like a man with no brakes, no control, nothing.

  Like a man, not a king.

  It should have stopped him dead. But Maggy was clinging to him, her mouth to his.

  “I need that, too,” she whispered. “I need you, Reza.”

  And everything shifted then. It got hotter. Wilder. Deeper red and far more intense.

  Reza reached between them and pulled her filmy, silken dress up and out of his way with rather more intent than finesse. He didn’t care that he’d lost all his ease and grace and caution, not when her smooth, sculpted legs were bared to his gaze. He ran his hand up, growling his appreciation of her taut thigh and continuing until he reached the tiny little scrap of silk and lace between her legs.

  He held himself above her, his gaze hard and greedy on hers, as he stroked his way beneath that little scrap and found her scalding heat at last.

  She shivered beneat
h him as he tested her with one finger. Two. So hot and soft. He thought she might kill him and he couldn’t think, just then, of a better way to go than wrapped up tight in all her molten heat.

  “Maggy—” he began, but he didn’t know what he meant to say. Maybe he’d simply needed her name on his lips.

  “Please.” Her voice was stark. Greedy. Her gaze was dark and glassy at once, and she was writhing beneath him, every part of her a sweet, scalding invitation. “Please, Reza.”

  “Use your hands,” he ordered her, low and sure. “Guide me in, Princess. Take me deep.”

  He felt the way she jolted against him at his words. He saw the fire dance over her face, making her gaze a gleaming thing, over-bright and needy.

  Then her hands were on him again, a torment and a glory. She wrapped her fingers around his aching length, raising her hips to him as she did as he’d commanded and guided him toward her entrance, using one hand to rake her panties to one side. Reza bent to take her mouth as she lifted herself up, impaling herself on him. He slid one hand around to hold her bottom where he wanted her, and then he thrust into her. Deeper and then deeper still, too hungry, too greedy, to wait the extra seconds it would take to undress either one of them any further.

  And when he was buried to the hilt, they both froze, their eyes locked to each other. His whole length snug inside of her, deep and hard.

  The whole world narrowed down to this. Here. The two of them.

  His princess. His queen. At last.

  “Please...” she whispered. Again. And he thought he’d never heard a prettier sound than his tough little princess begging him.

  Reza began to move.

  It was throwing himself into an inferno, again and again and again. It was a wild taking. A deep, greedy possession.

  It was perfect. She was perfect.

  She wrapped herself around him and Reza couldn’t get close enough. Deep enough. He couldn’t taste her enough. Her wicked mouth. Her sweetly elegant neck. Her gorgeous, ripe little breasts.