The sound of tearing filled the room. The cloth was thick and heavy, but in his hands it ripped apart like tissue. He tore it right down to my waist and then, with a shrug of my shoulders and a twist of my hips, the whole thing slithered down to the floor.
I stood there in just my cream-colored corset, panties and heels. And the crown, of course. My whole body was tingling and throbbing. The exhaustion had dropped away completely: adrenaline was flooding through every vein. I looked down at the dress on the floor. It was wrong and yet having it ripped off me felt so right.
He lifted me again and then laid me down on the table on my back. The polished wood was silky smooth and cool against my heated skin. He smoothed his hands over the lines of the corset: it was a fully-boned one in glossy cream, with gold trim. It started just at the waistband of my panties, scooped in at the waist, then blossomed outwards a little as it lifted and squeezed my breasts. I was covered... just. But without the dress there was a great deal of cleavage on display and that was where Garrett’s eyes were now locked. His gaze was just feasting on me and I pressed my thighs hard together at the feeling.
He grabbed my ankles and pulled me to the edge of the table. He grabbed my panties and jerked them down my legs and off and I gasped at the sudden shock of the cool air. Then he was stepping between my legs, lowering his uniform pants and—
I swallowed. Stared at the thick length of his cock, heavy as it brushed my inner thigh. He rolled on the condom and—
I groaned, arching my back as he plunged into me. He grabbed my waist to stop me moving and looked down into my eyes, then pushed his hips forward. I drew in a shuddering breath as he hilted himself in me.
As my head rocked back, I glimpsed the huge oak doors. They didn’t lock. And we were right in the heart of the palace, with servants and officials all around us in the hallways. What if someone knocks? What if Aleksander just walks in?
Then Garrett began to move and I just didn’t care anymore. Each silken stroke of that hard flesh inside me sent ripples of pleasure right through my body. I grabbed hold of his wrists, squeezing him, needing to feel him. Our bodies were locked together, our breathing in time.
We didn’t speak. We didn’t need to. I gazed up into those clear, Texas-sky eyes and I knew how he felt about me. Knew that we were together, now: rules and traditions didn’t matter and neither did his past. Both of us had let go of something.
He drove into me again and again, strong hips and muscled ass making him unstoppable. I gasped and clawed at his arms, heady from his size, from the feeling of being so completely filled, but wanting more of him. Both of us were breathing in quick, heated gulps as sensation took over. The delicious strength of his forearms under my fingertips. The hardness of his hips between my soft inner thighs. The hot stretch of him inside me, the glorious push of each thrust and the silken pull of my walls against him.
I caught our reflection in one of the room’s big, gilt-framed mirrors. The rough, muscled soldier between the thighs of the princess. The image made me go weak. Each pump of his hips, each stroke of his cock inside me, sent another wave of heat rippling up through me to coalesce into a hot, tight ball at my center. Soon, I was twisting and squirming around it, frantic. I could see the pleasure in his eyes, too, hear it in his growls each time he plunged into my liquid heat.
“I never knew anyone like you,” he rumbled.
His thrusts increased in force and pace, his strong thighs and tight core powering him into me. My back arched up off the wood, my ass and shoulders bearing all my weight. He hunkered low over me, his hands on my shoulders to hold me in place as his thrusts became faster and—God yes! —almost brutal.
The tight ball of heat inside me contracted and tightened and—
I knew I mustn’t scream. So I grabbed his hair, pulled him down to me and kissed him, letting out my orgasm in a shuddering groan that vibrated against his lips. His hips kept pumping and it was a long time before I finally slumped down to the table.
When I opened my eyes, he was grinning down at me. Then he carefully picked me up again, his cock still inside me. That was when I realized we weren’t done.
He used his foot to push a chair out from the table and then sat, carrying me down with him and—
Oh! God, I was on him, impaled on him, my ass against his muscled thighs. We were face to face and I sat there astride him, panting, eyes wide. He gave me a moment to get used to it, satisfied to just run his hands up and down my body for a while. I gradually settled, getting my legs under me and tentatively allowing myself to slip lower... right down to his root.
I put my hands on his shoulders. Even now, even after all this time, I still marveled at the size of him, at the breadth of those shoulders, at the hardness of his muscles under his uniform. I pressed down experimentally, pushing myself up…
... and down. Both of us caught our breath. I started to move again, but he put his hands on my shoulders to stop me. He reached behind me and found the bow where the laces of my corset were tied, and pulled it free. Then he hooked his fingers around the edges of the corset and pulled. The cords protested, holding firm... but his strength won out. The whole thing loosened and I drank in a huge, grateful gulp of air. Then it slid down and suddenly my breasts were free.
He leaned forward and I dug my fingers into the muscles of his back as he devoured me: first teasing licks, then using his whole mouth to engulf my breast. My eyes closed and I began to ride him, rising on my toes and then sinking down. Each stroke sent streamers of silver heat up inside me. They twisted together with the ones coming from my breasts, curling into a hurricane that spun faster and faster.
He reached up into my hair and pulled out the pins that held it. My hair spilled down my shoulders and back and he ran his fingers through it, delighting in it. He covered my lips and throat with kisses and then returned to my breasts.
I started to buck on his lap, my movements turning urgent. He could feel how close I was: his tongue lapped and flicked at me, then his teeth teased my nipples. I was out of control, now, twisting and circling my hips as I bounced on him, the heat inside twisting faster and faster, the huge room echoing with the sound of my pants. His mouth followed me, his lips and tongue always on one breast while his hand roughly squeezed the other. I moved harder, faster, desperate—
I gasped and cried out, tilting my head back as the heat exploded inside me. My hands clawed at his back and then buried themselves in his hair, pulling him to me as I rocked and shuddered against him for a second time. He gave a deep growl that vibrated against my wet breast...and then I felt him release deep inside me.
I slumped on top of him and we sat there, my head on his shoulder, until I started to cool down. Then he took off his uniform jacket and wrapped it around me, and we called Caroline.
“I don’t understand,” said Caroline, when she arrived and Garrett met her at the door. “Why does she need a new dress? Did she spill something or—” Then she noticed Garrett’s missing jacket. Then she caught a glimpse of me as I sheltered behind the door, naked except for jacket and panties. “Oh!” She handed over the dress she’d brought with a huge grin. I flushed... but I couldn’t stop grinning, either.
When I’d dressed and done my best to make my hair look neat and formal and less... wanton, we hurried upstairs to my chambers and collapsed on my bed. After everything we’d been through that day, we were both exhausted, especially now the adrenaline had worn off. But neither of us could sleep. We stripped off and lay there naked in the darkness with the window open, looking out at the stars.
Garrett drew in a long, deep breath and let it out. “I like the air here.”
“I thought it was too cold for you,” I said. He was lying on his back and I was using his chest as a pillow.
“It is too cold. And wet. But... that’s kinda nice, sometimes.” He sighed. “Like now. It’s different.”
“To what?”
He drew in another long, slow breath. “To the desert.”
I tensed, twisting
around to look up at him as I realized what he was going to do. “You—Wait, you’re sure?”
He nodded and reached down, wrapping his arms around my body. Not with a sexual touch, just smoothing his palms over my shoulders and arms and then my stomach. Drawing calm from me.
“You don’t have to,” I whispered. I could feel how his whole body had gone hard with tension.
“I want to.”
I didn’t want to hurt him... but the pain was inside him, just like mine had been. Getting it out would hurt... but it might be the only way he could heal. I rolled over onto my stomach and lay atop him so that I could hug him.
And he told me.
55
Garrett
“I enlisted right out of school,” I said. “My teachers said it was a good idea. What else was a big lunk like me going to do?”
Kristina squeezed me tight. “They shouldn’t have just written you off! You’re smart! Smarter than they knew!”
I shook my head. “Wasn’t just that. I’d always wanted to serve. Saw my dad doing it, wanted to be like him. Wanted to be part of something bigger. Saw the flag at the recruiter’s office and it just felt… right. First week of basic training, I realized I’d found something I was good at. I was bigger and I was strong and they just had to give me a mission and I wouldn’t stop until it was done.” I felt the rage inside me flare hot as I thought about how that loyalty had been betrayed.
“Anyway, I wound up in a squad with a great bunch of guys, all from Texas. Drummond, he was this tall, skinny guy, looked like he should be playing basketball. He could put a bullet through the O on a Coke can from half a mile away. Felton was our medic: he was the smart one. The marines had put him through medical school. Martinez always kidded around, but he always had your back. But the guy I got on best with was Baker, our squad leader.”
“He was tough, but he was short: he always said he was 5’5” but we all knew he was 5’4”. When he was giving me an order and there was gunfire, I had to hunker down so he could shout in my ear. People joked about it: the little guy and the big guy. But we just fought well together. And back home, it was Baker who helped me move into my apartment, Baker who had my back in a bar fight, Baker who was there for me when my mom died.” I shook my head. “He was a great leader. Always looked after his people.” I looked down at Kristina. “You remind me of him.”
She blushed.
“In a squad you fight together, you eat together, you guard each other while you’re sleeping. We went on too many missions to count, all over Iraq. When we came home to Texas on leave, we’d hang out. One by one, they got girlfriends, got married.” I felt my neck color. “I didn’t. Never was too good at all that stuff.”
Kristina drew in her breath in sympathy, but I shook my head. “But it was okay, I didn’t mind being the single one. We were one big family. The summers were barbecues and pool parties....” I trailed off, remembering. I didn’t know how to put it into words, but those long summer days, sinking a cold beer and seeing the kids running around... it had reminded me what we were fighting for. “The squad was my life,” I said simply.
Kristina tightened her arms around me. She could sense something bad was coming.
“Then one day, back in Iraq…. We’re on a plane, flying back to base after a mission. Just the five of us, plus the pilot and co-pilot. A storm blows up out of nowhere. Worst storm I’ve ever seen in my life, the kind we used to get in Texas, where the whole sky’s alive and best thing you can do is hunker down in the cellar. But we’re right there in it, being hurled around, and there’s no place to land. It goes on for hours, until the plane sounds like it’s going to come apart. Then we lose both engines and after that we’re just a twig in the wind.”
Kristina was clutching at me, holding me as tight as I’d held onto my seat on that plane. “Don’t remember the crash,” I told her. “Just woke up in the wreckage. Pilot and co-pilot are dead, but my squad’s okay, just banged up a little. We get outside and we’ve got no idea where we are: dawn’s just breaking and it’s just desert in every direction.”
“We wait till nightfall for rescue: no one comes. We don’t have much water so we decide we need to get moving and it’s better to travel at night, when it’s cool. So we pick a direction and we start walking. Mile after mile after mile, the sand coming over our boots. But it’s okay: we’re marines. Marching ain’t gonna kill us.”
“Then we come to the town. Abandoned, most of the houses just rubble. Takes us an hour before we find part of an old sign and Felton translates. That’s when we find out that we’re not in Iraq, anymore. The storm blew us over the border. We’re in Iran. The only five US soldiers, at that time, in the entire goddamn country. And we’re right out in the wilds, where it’s just local militia who hate the US. We’re... alone.” I looked down at Kristina and she nodded somberly. She was the one person who could really understand what it had felt like.
“We hide out in one of the houses that’s mostly still standing and get on the radio. We manage to raise a US airbase that’s just over the border in Iraq, and everyone cheers. But then we give them our location... and it all goes quiet. We raise them again but we’re told to wait for instructions. And then the local militia arrives and starts shooting. They’d found the plane and followed our tracks, I guess. And they’re not going to stop until we’re dead.”
“There are way too many of them. We barricade ourselves in the house and try to hold them off. But they’re calling their friends on the radio, spreading the word that we’re there. All of us have been fighting in Iraq for years. We’re not new to war. But this isn’t war. They hate us. They’re going to slaughter every one of us.”
I’d closed my eyes. I could feel the heat of the desert on my skin, taste the dust in my mouth. I could see the abandoned house all around me: crumbling stone block walls, ragged mats on the floor, odd items that the family who’d fled had left behind: a jug, a plate, a kid’s sweater. I knew that I was still in Lakovia but the softness of the bed beneath me, the quiet, even the cool, wet air from the window... all of it faded away until I was crouched by a window, eyes straining against the sunlight as I watched figures creeping over the rubble towards us. Only Kristina remained real. Touching her was all that kept me grounded.
“It’s hell: baking hot, dry and dusty, there’s not enough water and we’re all strung out from walking all night after the plane crash. We’re trying to watch every direction at once: there’s so many of them and they just keep coming. We can’t take a break even for a minute to rest or drink. Then Martinez takes a bullet in the chest. A really bad wound. Felton, our medic, says he needs medevac, but we still can’t get anyone on the radio. So Felton’s got to treat him right there, in the damn dining room, as best he can.”
“That takes us down to three guys guarding the house: Baker, Drummond and me. And we’re running low on ammo, too, so we have to make every shot count. It’s getting bad, but Baker, he just looks at the rest of us and he says, we are going to hold this house. We are going to hold out because that’s what Marines do. And when he said it, we believed it.” I stroked Kristina’s hair. “Like I said, he was a lot like you.”
“Night comes and we don’t have night vision so it’s just black. You see movement and you have to pray and fire. We’re begging now on the radio, begging for someone to come get us out of there, but no one answers. And there’s this moment when I look at Baker and he looks at me and we realize—” My voice grew tight, my throat suddenly dry. “We realize they’re not coming.”
“By morning, it’s really bad. We’re down to our handguns and we’ve been two nights without sleep. We’re jumping at shadows, really losing it. Felton’s trying to keep Martinez alive, but he’s in agony.” It was hard to speak, now. I could see the blood seeping through the bandages. “Martinez was the fun one. Like when we had the pool parties, he’d always cannonball into the pool. Or this one time, we were out there in Iraq over Christmas. So he puts on a Santa outfit—all he ha
d was a Santa hat and a red shirt, but he stuffed a parachute up the shirt—and he goes around handing out gifts. It was only cookies from the mess hall and dumb shit like that, but... damn, if felt good, just to know we weren’t forgotten. He had kids: two little girls. And he had this big, deep laugh, like he was laughing from the bottom of the sea.” I swallowed. “Only... now he’s screaming. So loud the walls are rattling with it. And he’s pleading for something for the pain and Felton keeps telling him there’s nothing left.”
I could feel that Kristina had lifted her head and was staring up at me, but I couldn’t look at her. If I did, I knew I wouldn’t be able to continue. So I gently stroked her hair, stared at the ceiling, and kept going.
“We finally get someone on the radio. American, but no call sign. Some other grunt, probably disobeying orders just speaking to us. He just says, “Sorry.” And that’s when we know for sure: no one’s coming.”
“Just before noon, Drummond screams. He’s at the window across the house from me: I turn around and there’s a militia fighter right there, with a knife stuck into Drummond’s throat. We were all so tired and strung out, he’d managed to creep right up to the window without Drummond seeing.” I swallowed and had to stop for a second. “Drummond was the oldest. He had a stepdaughter who had something wrong with her spine, and he needed the pay for medical bills.” I pressed my lips together. “I shoot the guy but it’s too late, Drummond’s dead.”
“Now there’s only two of us, Baker and me, who can guard the house. Felton’s too busy trying to keep Martinez alive. There’s no way we can watch all the windows and doors so we have to go outside, try and hold them off at a distance. But we’re barely outside when it starts getting dark. At first, we think maybe we’ve lost track of time and it’s dusk. Our watches are telling us it’s noon, but we’re so exhausted, we can’t think straight. Then we see this... thing on the horizon. Not like cloud, or smoke. It’s just dark brown nothing, you can’t even tell how far away it is because there are no features. It looks like the goddamn edge of the world. And whatever it is, it’s growing fast. Everything stops. Even the gunfire from the militia stops. Everyone’s just standing there staring at it.”
Saving the Princess Page 23
