by Olivia Gates
Then he let her down, stood back, vibrating. She saw his fantasies, imagined each dig of fingers and nip of teeth and flay of breath as he hauled her over his shoulder, stormed into her room, flung her on her bed and ravished her.
With an explosive oath, he turned and strode through the arches of the vast corridor until darkness claimed him.
She didn’t run after him. Something she couldn’t—didn’t want to—define overpowered even the mind-numbing hunger.
She stumbled through her door, fell onto her bed fully clothed and prayed for sleep.
Eleven
Leandro had been right.
This new hunger far surpassed the mindlessness they’d once inspired in each other. It was also so different in nature, in texture. It was vast and powerful, not grabby and frantic. It wasn’t just making them tense, it was making them buoyant, exhilarated.
But he’d been wrong about something else. She had been, too.
This arrangement was no longer what they’d agreed on. It wasn’t an all-out fling to exorcise their hunger. The past week had followed a pattern of escalating enjoyment and rapport, each moment creating trust and understanding and appreciation between them—things that had been grossly lacking in the past.
It made all the difference in their relationship. It was as if each hour was a continuation of a long history of harmony.
But it wasn’t a continuation. This was a beginning. This was magic. Powerful, pure, compelling. She had no doubt it would be ongoing.
And there were more wonders.
As Leandro steered his vast business by remote control, as he handled two threats Castaldini faced, one internal and the other external, she had the chance to analyze his methods and views firsthand and find out how wrong she’d been about them. It was a delight to discover they shared the same belief in the power of logic and the art of the possible, embraced almost all the same convictions. It was exhilarating to explore how alike they were, both negotiators and intermediaries in their own way, when they’d started out so differently in life.
Every day, true to his promise, he made use of her knowledge of Castaldini, probed her insights, sought her opinions, discussed current internal affairs, everything he’d never found out through his investigations into the state of the kingdom. Then he returned the favor, taking her through more magical explorations of the seemingly endless palace complex, the district under his family’s rule and protection that was now under his.
During a conversation over breakfast, she discovered that he had never ceased to be El Jamida’s prince.
“My grandfather finally put an end to the expansions,” he was saying. “That turret was the last addition. Ironically, it was the first thing to go—it was decimated by lightning six years ago. But as it was restored, I had a closer look taken at the structure and wound up totally overhauling the outer walls, towers and ramparts.”
“Six years ago?” she exclaimed even as realization dawned. “So that’s what Ernesto was doing here all those times!”
“Yes, all those times when you saw him.” She poked him and he only sighed long-sufferingly. “Seems Ernesto is a double agent. Never telling me he’d seen you, while never telling you why he came back to Castaldini. That must be why he’s all but disappeared since we arrived. He realized we’d compare notes sooner or later and expose him. Hmm. I think I need to have a word with him.”
“Leave poor Ernesto alone. So you maintained this place? And from your popularity within the towns and villages, I bet you had a hand in their picture perfection.”
He shrugged. “The district is under my protection. It’s my responsibility to maintain it to the best of my abilities.”
“And since your abilities literally are the best, this area of Castaldini is probably the luckiest place on earth.”
“It’s one of the reasons I couldn’t hate the king. He might have exiled me, but he didn’t deprive my district’s people of my services, or this place of my preservation efforts.”
“And would you offer your services and preservation efforts to the rest of Castaldini if you become crown prince?”
“I will even if I don’t. I will see Castaldini returned to its former glory. But I won’t just throw money at problems and send others in my stead. Now I’ll again be able to inspect work progress myself, to shake hands with people, listen to their complaints and work with them on solutions.”
She stared at him, her heart doing jiggles that she knew hearts weren’t supposed to do. She was almost in tears, and in stitches, all at once. “You’re not just any Castaldinian, you’re a patriot. And not only are you a social reformer and modernizer, oh, my God, Leandro, I suspect you’re a democrat, too. What will we do?”
He bounced to his feet, pounced on her, swung her high in his arms. “We’re going to keep it a dark secret, that’s what. And since you’ve wheedled all those out of me, I guess it won’t do more damage to tell you one more—a family secret.”
She clung to his neck, beamed at him. “I’ll take it to my grave. If I don’t volunteer it to the first passerby, that is.”
He pinched the buttock filling his hand, his smile widening. “I told you the complex consists of three main parts…”
“And you showed me only two! The Eddar—the administrative area—and Elkasar, where we are. What’s the third part? Is it a catacomb filled with skeletons? A labyrinth teeming with the treasures plundered by your marauding ancestors?”
“It’s a harem.”
“No way,” she squeaked. “On Castaldini? You’re kidding me.”
“Alas, no. But the pity is, it fell into disuse for over a century until my mother took a shine to it. It was abandoned again after she died. But I’ve since restored it. If you take a fancy to it, you can stay there. And I’ll stay in my quarters and fantasize about you in one of the bedrooms, shrouded by tulle screens, wrapped in miles of satin and silk of vivid reds and blues and golds, bianco-e-nero amar elaty.”
My black-and-white moon goddess. And why wasn’t she asking him to take her there right now? Take her until he finished her?
He strode out with her still in his arms. She thought she heard whispers and saw people dashing out of their way.
“And to damage myself for life, I’ll imagine you in the main chamber. The one that’s open to the elements. I’ll imagine you as you float in a hot tub, the water massaging all your secrets, or lying on a marble platform, overheated and flushed and wet, writhing as you think of me, as the sun latches hot lips on your arms and breasts and thighs, as the wind strokes greedy fingers over your nipples, up your legs, between the lips of your—”
Her lips silenced him. Stemmed the flow of torment.
She thought she heard giggles and murmurs of approval.
Suddenly he tore his lips away, put her down on her feet, whispered in her ear, “And here’s another secret.”
He walked away. And away. Turned out, they were in a humongous elliptical domed gallery. When he was across from her on the other side over two hundred feet away, he turned. She saw his lips move.
“Jaan per voi, Phoebe.”
She lurched. I yearn for you. Oh, dear God…
A whispering gallery. She’d heard about them, but never thought they could be that…effective. It seemed impossible, how his whisper had reached her across the space, as if he’d poured it into her ear. Into her brain. And she could swear it wasn’t only his voice. She felt his thoughts possessing her, his breath on her lips, his scent filling her lungs, his heat, his fingers, his tongue…
A wave of longing rushed through her, seemingly ripping things inside her as it rippled out. She was in heat. Coming apart.
All she had to do to put an end to this torture was walk up to him and offer, take. Everything.
But now she faced it. What stopped her. Dread. Dread that once they became locked in the insanity of passion again, their magical rapport would end. He’d again be the driven man who devoured her without a word, except those of hunger.
And she loved what they shared now, couldn’t get enough of the fluency of their interaction, the purity of their connection. She loved him. Like Armando had said, the love she felt now made the younger version—which had impacted her so hard she’d never been able to move on—seem flimsy, foundationless. And she feared that if she changed their status quo, all would be consumed in the conflagration. She couldn’t go back, couldn’t risk it. She had to be sure first that this would continue. She couldn’t lose him again, in any way, now that she knew for real and in detail how much there was to lose.
She had to wait. Even though it was killing her.
She leaned on the wall behind her to keep herself from collapsing to the ground, whispered, “Jaana per voi, anche, Leandro.”
Her whisper seemed to rip through him with the same force his had through her. He jerked as if under a flesh-splitting lash. And he waited. For her to follow through on her answering confession.
After about five minutes of staring at each other across the space, chests heaving, bodies trembling, he turned and strode out.
“So what is the Merraba Feast?” Phoebe shouted to Leandro over the din of galloping hooves and whistling wind. “I found no mention of it on the Internet.”
“I would have been stunned if you had,” he shouted back, his smile eclipsing the sun. Who needed the star when he lit up the world?
After that fraught face-off a week ago, he’d sought her out, apologized for walking out, begging testosterone intoxication. And even though their yearning had taken a turn for the distressful, they’d resumed their rapport, even better than before.
“It’s a feast unique to El Jamida, and it’s exactly what its name implies. A jam-making feast.”
“Oh, I didn’t know that word. Back to hitting the books for me…” She paused, frowned, sniffed. “Leandro, do you smell a—?”
His shout drowned her words. “Fire.”
She saw it then, on the far side of the village. A black cloud rising over the horizon. Then the first tongues of flame broke through the darkness of roiling smoke. God…it was huge…
Leandro got out his phone, called in a firefighting and emergency medical operation of mammoth proportions. Then he turned to her.
“I’ll organize the efforts. You go back to the castello. I’ll call you as soon as it’s under control.” Then he raced away.
She sat on her whinnying horse, stunned, until he almost disappeared. Then she was galloping after him, screaming for her horse to go faster. But nothing was fast enough. She reached the scene to see Leandro hurtle into the burning barn.
And the fire seemed to reach out and drag him in.
Twelve
Seeing Leandro walking into the fire made Phoebe realize.
She wouldn’t die without him. But she would die for him.
What followed was something she would always find difficult to remember. The terror and heat and suffocation. The exertion and smoke and screams. It was too much to take in, to process, to retain. So she kept her eyes fixed on her goal. Leandro.
She ran after him into the inferno, ran back out when the hellish heat almost fried off her skin. But she’d seen enough.
He was helping others. Children who were caught inside and kept climbing higher to escape the flames. Parents who’d run in only to be overwhelmed by smoke or set on fire. Others who’d followed to help and met the same fate. Only Leandro had protected himself so he’d be of use to those he was walking through the fire to rescue. He’d smothered himself in soaking wraps, was breathing through their barrier. His eyes were covered in sunglasses. She screamed for people to provide her with the same protection.
Then she walked into the fire after him.
Leandro had never known what terror was. He now knew.
It was seeing Phoebe with flames lashing out at her, dragging her into their incinerating arms. It was imagining her body consumed by their indiscriminate cruelty.
Terror had a taste, a texture. He retched on its foulness, shredded his sanity on its lacerating talons.
He roared his soul bloody as he waded through the inferno, gathering small bodies and hurtling to her, as she mirrored his actions. Then, in the depths of the macabre scene, everything stilled. Fright no longer drove him mad, desperation no longer paralyzed him. Instead they infused him with strength, to demolish obstacles, with clarity to do only what would see her safe.
He would see her safe. With his last breath.
Every breath felt like his last. Every shudder felt as if it would tear his muscles off his bones. His mind couldn’t process it still. It was over. There had been no loss of life, but injuries were varying in degrees. One was…bad. Horrific.
Not Phoebe. Not Phoebe.
There was only that thought, nothing beyond it as quakes intensified, reaction crashing down on him like a caved-in ceiling. Phoebe filled his arms, alive. Unscathed.
He’d had her checked for injury, then rechecked. Dread rode him. What if her injuries manifested later?
He was assured, over and over. And over again. She’d bolted out of hell with minor respiratory irritation. So had he.
He couldn’t stop crushing her to him. Terror still roared through him. Hide her. Keep her safe. He railed at her, for coming after him, for endangering herself. He’d never—never—get over the memory gouged into his psyche. Those minutes as he struggled to save her without abandoning the children he’d retrieved would be the bottomless mine of his nightmares.
But she hadn’t needed saving. She’d saved with him, helped him, survived with him. She was safe.
He clutched her to his chest, pushed open the door to her room, entered and walked to the bed, stared down at it. Saw flames raging across its crisp immaculateness. He folded her into him until they both gasped for breath.
Among the gasps there were whimpers. “That boy…he’s Alessandro’s age…oh, God, Leandro…”
The boy with the worst injuries. He held her harder, merged their quakes. “I’ll take care of him. For life. And all the victims and their families. I promise you.”
She nodded frantically against his heart, wound herself tighter around him. She believed him.
Then she was pushing at him, struggling against him. She wanted to regain autonomy, and he couldn’t bear the separation.
He bit down hard on his needs, gave in to hers. He unlocked himself, let her thrashing form spill from his hold.
She tackled him with all her strength, took him down on the bed. Writhed all over him, tore at his clothes, at his lips, sank her teeth into them, her nails into the flesh she exposed.
His response overtook his ability to register it. He blanked out. Catapulted into his first out-of-body experience. He saw himself tearing back at her, tackling her underneath him, nothing but a mass of instincts and frenzy.
He tore her sooty, damp clothes off her, madness deepening as she rewarded each rip with a fiercer cry, a more violent tug on his hair, a harder grind of her flesh against his hardness, a more blatant offering of herself to do with as his voracity dictated…
It hit him then, what he was doing. What she was seeking. He froze. Her cry was one of panic as she clenched around him.
But he’d come back into his mind. And he couldn’t do this. Not to her. Not to them.
He exerted all the gentle force he needed to unlock her from around him, felt things shattering inside him as he swayed up to his feet and tried to move to the other end of the room.
She was there before him, dragging him back. When he resisted her, she climbed onto him, stormed his resistance with her passion, the pressure of her urgency bursting his heart.
“You didn’t start this,” she panted. “You kept your promise, you don’t need to pull back. This is me coming to you.”
“Phoebe…” He caught her hands, turned his face away from the blatant need in hers, felt control slipping like the first boulders heralding the avalanche. “This is PTS talking. This isn’t how or why I want you to come to me.”
She wrestled her hands free and clutched his head, pulling him down, sobbing into his mouth. “Then I’ve been suffering from it for eight years. I walked away then and have been pulling back ever since, for all the damn wrong reasons. But there is no reason good enough not to take what I can have with you, to live this. Maybe it took thinking we’d both die to get over my stupid fears. So I’m human, sue me.”
“Phoebe, I want you so much, it scares me.”
“Just take me,” she cried. “I need you inside me…please…”
It was that please. It made him a beast. One that wanted to wrestle his mate to submission, mount her, pound into her until she disintegrated around him and he erupted inside her.
Growling, out of his mind, he bundled her over his shoulder, strode to the bed, threw her down, watched her as the last pillars of his restraint were reduced to wreckage as she arched like a wave, breasts jutting in the air before the undulation traveled down her body, offering him herself in a thrust that blanked his mind with carnal rage.
He descended on top of her, impacted her, would have torn her legs apart if she hadn’t wrenched them wide, maddened for his invasion. He didn’t need to make sure she was ready. Her readiness steamed his lungs, scalded his skin, slashed him down to his primal elements.
He tore inside her. Her answering scream tore at the tethers of his soul. The scream of woman, of long pent-up needs bursting. He penetrated her essence, the molten flesh that poured around his shaft. It was like forging through lava, as he invaded her to the womb, as she accommodated him in a liquid vise of flame.
This flesh. This being. This. He’d been without it for so long, had thought he’d be without her forever. The despair had worn away at him with each breath. And with each exhale, he’d braced himself, for her absence, the impossibility of her return. For the next inhalation when it would all start again. And again. Until he stopped breathing. And stopped yearning.
But she was here. He could breathe again.
