Secrets of His Forbidden Cinderella

by Caitlin Crews

  And finally, the Nineteenth Duke of Marinceli claimed his Duchess.

  * * *

  His mouth was all demand, delirious and divine in turn.

  Any power Amelia might have imagined she was claiming by throwing herself on top of him—something she probably wouldn’t have done if she thought it through—shifted in an instant. She still lay there on top of him, but he was the one in delicious control.

  He held her head where he wanted it and he took her mouth with a lazy certainty that rolled into her, then through her, like a wildfire.

  Every time he angled his head, every time he took the kiss deeper, the fire burned hotter.

  And she felt delicate, and sacred, and something far earthier than either as he pulled her more tightly into his arms. The shift made her legs spread as she sprawled over him, and his hard thigh was right there where she was so soft and so hot.

  It made her head spin.

  Then again, it was hard to say which particular sensation was making her head spin.

  And then her head was the least of her concerns, because he shifted again. She’d been paying attention to his hand at the nape of her neck, but it was the other one that got her attention then. His fingers splayed out over her bottom, and found their way beneath the hem of her shirt and sweater to find her bare skin.

  Amelia had enjoyed two previous encounters with this man. At the Masquerade there had been the wild pleasure in that hallway, followed by what had happened in that salon after. And then there had been the morning she’d come to Spain to tell him about her pregnancy.

  Both times she’d been fully dressed throughout.

  She was dressed now, too. But the way his palm moved over the small of her back, then upward, she understood that she would not remain clothed for long. And the notion made her shudder.

  In the next moment, he jackknifed up in the bed, taking her with him. He kept kissing her. Long, drugging kisses, so hot and intense, and in between each one he methodically rid her of her clothing with a certain skill that made her heart do cartwheels inside her. The sweater and the shirt he pulled off her in one go, and he easily removed the soft bra she wore. His big hands of his wrapped around her waist, then he tore his mouth from hers.

  Amelia was dazed. Her lips felt swollen. She felt glorious, and she was half-naked, right there where he could see her.

  The look in his dark gaze slammed through her, thick like greed.

  Teo lifted her toward him, then took one hard, proud nipple in his mouth. And sucked.

  And it was as if her head...flatlined. Except Amelia was fully aware of the sensation storming through her. Washing over her. Tossing her from one hot burst of flame into the next, brighter blaze.

  There was so much...skin. He was hard in all the places she was soft, and the slide of her body against his elated her. Tempted her. She wanted to taste every inch of him. She wanted to rub herself against him, and see what happened. She didn’t know what to do with her hands, so she put them everywhere. Anywhere.

  He made a low noise that she remembered from before. It was so male. So deep and rumbly, and she could feel it like a new heat between her legs.

  Then he slid one of those wicked hands around, slipping beneath the waistband of the stretchy trousers she wore, and again, it was as if her head blanked out.

  Leaving her nothing but a mass of sensation and need, so intense it ate at her.

  Then the whole world spun as he rolled them over. And this time, he found his way into her pants yet again, but from the front.

  She remembered so vividly, there in the hall where he’d taken her that night last fall. The music and noise from the Masquerade had filled the hallway where they stood, his mouth on hers, and his clever, determined fingers tracing the slit in the side of her dress before making his way beneath it. And finding the center of her need. So easily.

  Amelia almost shattered from the memory.

  But reality was far better than any memory, because this time, instead of stroking her heat, he helped her strip the pants from her body. One leg then the next. She had the vague impression of his flat, ridged abdomen and his strong, hair-roughened thighs.

  And the fact that he had been naked under that sheet, all this time, was like another bright flame.

  Then they were naked. Together.

  It felt like a storm.

  She was in the storm, and he was the storm, and together, skin on skin, they were like thunder.

  Teo plundered her mouth and Amelia died, again and again, but lived again to keep tasting him. Learning him. Losing herself in him, over and over again.

  But then he was between her legs, the hardest part of him flush against her. Teo tipped his head back to meet her gaze, and she was keenly aware that she wore no mask this time. And neither did he.

  Amelia was open and vulnerable and herself as he pressed against her, then into her. He was thick and big, and it was different, lying on her back on a bed.

  She felt possessed. Taken. And it was so much better. So much hotter.

  It took her a confused jumble of a moment to understand why.

  “You’re not...” But she had to stop and shudder when she felt him, lodged deep inside her body, filling her completely. “You’re not wearing...”

  He was propped up above her, his weight on his elbows and a fierce, intent look on his face. “No.”

  Her own breathing seemed too loud to her then, too wild. Too revealing.

  And something clawed at her, some great sob or scream, or possibly it was panic. His chest was like a wall, and he surrounded her. He was inside her and he could see her, and the look on that austere face of his was pitiless.

  But as she stared up at him, trying to catch her breath, trying to adjust to the size of him, he moved his hands to cup her face.

  And Teo leaned his head down and pressed a soft kiss on her mouth.

  It was a peck, really. But to Amelia, it felt like a poem.

  The simplicity of it, the sweetness, pried open that tight little noose that had tightened around her. His thumbs moved against her jaw, she found air to breathe, and inside, she felt her body accept him.

  And when this was over—when she felt like herself again—she would take the world to task for failing to mention that sex wasn’t magically more comfortable when a person had only had it once before.

  But here, now, Teo’s gaze was black and intense. He was a hard length of steel deep inside her, almost too hot to bear. With no condom to dull the potency of his possession this time.

  And her body had rolled straight from that would-be sob, that almost scream, into a delirious sort of desire. So intense she felt herself clamp down, and heard another growl from him as a reward.

  So she did it again.

  His mouth curved. “Okay?”

  “Okay,” she agreed, in a voice that sounded far too breathy and needy to be hers.

  It felt like a chain between them. A set of vows like iron.

  And that was when he began to move.

  She remembered this part. That slick pull and thrust, that impossible rhythm. It was more than simply hot. He was so hard.

  And it was different like this, with his weight and so much skin and his mouth against her neck.

  She shattered at once, and then again. On and on he went, until she couldn’t tell if she was shattering or recovering, climbing or falling.

  It was all fire. Calamity and crisis, glory and need.

  And this time, there was no one to hear them.

  So he taught her how to scream. How to sob. How to cry out his name as she fell apart.

  And when he took his own pleasure at last, he added his voice to the chorus and carried them both over that edge one more time.

  She slept, hard and deep. And when she woke, it was still night. Teo was sprawled out beside her, one heavy arm ancho
ring her to his side.

  The room was cool, but he was hot at her back.

  It stunned her how safe that made her feel. How protected. When she had never slept in a bed with another person and had always imagined it would be strange, cluttered and uncomfortable.

  The lantern still flickered beside the bed and when she turned beneath his arm, she watched it dance over his golden skin.

  And she was somehow unsurprised when his eyes opened.

  “You’re awake,” she said quietly. Foolishly.

  The lantern light spun between them, all around them, and Amelia felt caught in it. Glued to him and lost in that dark gaze of his.

  And she couldn’t say she minded.

  “We’ll leave at first light,” Teo said, but she didn’t want to talk about that.

  She didn’t want to talk at all. She put her hand out and slid it over those sculpted, serious lips. And she smiled as his arrogant brows rose.

  This time, she understood that the feeling expanding behind her ribs was as much a longing as it was lust. It was hope and fear entwined. But she didn’t tell him that. She didn’t intend to tell him any of that, ever.

  Amelia crawled on top of him, smiled wickedly at him and then did exactly as she pleased. She tasted him. Everywhere.

  By the time he flipped her over again, and rocketed them both toward that same bright finish, Amelia had convinced herself that she’d made the right choice. Because surely two people could not burn like this unless what fueled those flames was real.

  It had to be real.

  That was what she told herself the next morning, when Teo did exactly as promised and took her back to the historic seat of the Marinceli dukedom.

  And set about making her his Duchess.

  CHAPTER TEN

  “FAIRY TALES ARE for little girls,” Marie said in that way of hers, half a throaty laugh and half an accusation. “Silly girls. Not grown women, Amelia.”

  If Amelia made it through her wedding without killing her mother, she thought it would be a miracle.

  Teo had taken her back down from his mountain and put the rest of his plan into motion. Exactly as he told her he would.

  “We will get married on the grounds of the estate,” he told her as they flew out of the Pyrenees. He had boarded, disappeared into a stateroom and reappeared in a crisp suit. He had looked devastatingly attractive, of course, but Amelia had found herself mourning Teo in his jeans and a fisherman’s sweater. “There’s an ancient chapel that dates back to the Third Duke, which will suit our purposes.”

  By which he meant, his purposes. But Teo’s purposes suited Amelia well enough.

  Because this time, when she had her things sent from San Francisco and moved back into that same sprawling monstrosity of a house, it felt a whole lot more like a home. Because she got to share the ducal suite with Teo.

  And while Teo was the remote, demanding Duke outside the doors to the bedroom suite, within them, he was hers.

  There was not a single surface they did not explore. Not a single possibility they did not exploit for the greatest possible pleasure.

  And she was so dizzy with the wonder of it in those first days after they came down from the mountain that she would have agreed to anything he asked. She was giddy, made of lust and delight, and it all seemed like a blur to her, looking back.

  But reality had a way of intruding, even in the hushed halls of el monstruo. Teo gifted her a wardrobe she would have said she didn’t want, particularly as he called it her “appropriate clothes,” but he made it his business to compliment her so much when she wore what he’d chosen that she found herself reaching for his significantly more upscale selections. And when she was dressed in the sleek, quietly elegant clothes he liked, she found herself doing more with her hair. Wearing jewelry.

  Becoming a duchess by default.

  Teo also had his people confer with the appropriate authorities, produce the necessary documents—hers as well as his—and set a date for their wedding a week out. He further decreed it would be a simple affair.

  “Just the two of us and the priest,” he told her.

  “You must be joking,” she’d replied, sprawled out in cheerful abandon in his bed. Because that was where they always seemed to end up, on his side of the vast master suite that took up the better part of its own wing. “I can’t get married without my mother.”

  “Whatever for?”

  “She may be complicated,” Amelia had admitted. “But she’s my mother even so. She may love herself more than she does me—” And it should have bothered her, the way her voice cracked then. But his gaze was on her and she let her poor voice do as it would. “That is likely true. But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t love me deeply, you know.”

  “Your mother has already attended the wedding of one Duke of Marinceli,” Teo had replied after a moment, sounding resigned. “Surely that is more than enough.”

  And if she wasn’t hoarse from the way he’d just made her scream, and still a bit dizzy with it—not to mention the emotional wallop of considering Marie’s selfishness all over again—Amelia might have taken offense at that.

  “I promised that I would marry you,” she’d reminded him instead. “I did not promise to marry you in secret, which would break my mother’s heart forever.”

  Or dent it, anyway. Which to Amelia’s mind was the same thing.

  She thought that perhaps he was more affected by these things that went on between them, skin to skin, than he let on. Perhaps even as rocked as she was. Because all he did was sigh.

  Amelia had taken that as assent.

  But then she’d had to...tell her mother. Not only that she was pregnant, but that the father of her baby was, of all people, Teo de Luz. And more, that she was going to marry him and become the newest Duchess of Marinceli.

  Soon.

  The initial conversation had not gone well.

  But now the wedding was in two days. Marie had arrived in all her state the night before, dripping in conciliatory smiles to celebrate with her only child. And her former stepson, who had looked as if he was suffering through elective dental surgery rather than a happy family dinner to celebrate Marie’s arrival.

  “I could very easily not have invited you,” Amelia said now. Pointedly. She sat on the settee in the dressing room of the guest suite where her mother had been installed, literal miles away from where she and Teo were. “If I thought you would come here and say snide things about fairy tales, I wouldn’t have.”

  “You would have invited me no matter what,” Marie said, with that laugh of hers, and that she was right only made Amelia scowl. “I’m your mother. We’re stuck with each other no matter what.”

  “You’re reminding me why I prefer to be stuck with you from a distance.”

  Marie had been attending to her toilette, but she turned around then, meeting Amelia’s gaze straight on instead of through the mirror. And Amelia knew it wasn’t what she’d just said, because such things rolled right off her deceptively steely mother.

  “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” Marie asked instead.

  “I’m getting married in two days,” Amelia replied lightly. “It seems pretty straightforward. White dress, aisle, husband.”

  Her mother’s smile was sad. “And then you’re a duchess.”

  “There have been a great many duchesses. Most of them lived long enough to die of old age. Or what passed for old age in their time.” She shrugged. “Again, perfectly straightforward.”

  “There’s nothing straightforward about the de Luz family.” Marie rolled her eyes, seeming to take in the whole of this impossible house, from all the treasures it held to the pedigree that seemed to ooze from its very walls. “You cannot simply marry the Duke. You must marry the dukedom, too. And everything that goes with it.”

  Amelia didn’t like the way Marie wa
s looking at her. “I thought you enjoyed endless wealth, social standing, cachet, whatever you want to call it.”

  “I do indeed.” Her mother’s gaze was kind, then, Amelia realized, but no less sad. Something inside her seemed to clutch at her heart, then hold it with too-tight claws. “But you do not care one way or another for any of those things. And if I found the Marinceli name too heavy a burden to bear, I wonder, what will it do to you?”

  Her throat was dry, indicating a panic Amelia refused to entertain. “That hardly matters. I’m carrying his baby.”

  Marie made a small sighing sound. “Yes, yes. I’m sure he thundered on impressively about bloodlines that predate Spain, but so what? You can raise a child on your own, love. Whether Teo de Luz gives you permission or not.”

  “I don’t know that I have it in me to deny my child a father when he’s on offer, actually.”

  “You didn’t miss having a father around,” Marie said dismissively. “In fact, I think you thrived without one.”

  “That’s a lovely story, Mom,” Amelia said. Maybe with a little more heat than she’d intended, because that was bypassing all kinds of hurtful things that they pretended they’d settled years ago. Like the fact that Marie hadn’t encouraged Amelia’s relationship with her father while he was alive. And hadn’t thought to save any keepsakes, either, since Amelia could barely remember a man she’d barely seen who’d died when she was five. It was one more reason she’d been determined to tell Teo about his child, so that part of history need not repeat itself. Not by her hand. “But it’s your story. Not mine. I didn’t have my father, but that didn’t mean there weren’t all kinds of father figures around. Most of them terrible.”

  “Most men are terrible. That’s the tragedy of loving them.” And if Amelia had thought that she could shame her mother, she was disappointed. Marie smiled, as merrily as ever. “And that’s what I’m trying to tell you. You’ve had a thing about Teo forever.”

  “What? I haven’t had a thing—”

  “What I thought would save you is that he really, truly hates me and everything I touch,” Marie continued as if Amelia hadn’t protested. Or gone a shocking shade of red. “On the other hand, look at you.”