by Maisey Yates
Instead he just felt the ache in his gut widened.
He had won nothing.
And for a man in his position, it was unacceptable.
But he had been unacceptable for a very long time. Without even a hint of satisfaction to make it bearable.
CHAPTER SIX
SHE STOOD THERE on the edge of the wood.
The Dark Wood.
Her cottage was on the other side of it. And she knew there was no way she could ever pass through and make it out alive.
But as she stared into the dense green wildness, she wondered if this was what had driven Prince Lazarus forward when he’d been a boy. She wondered if even drunk, this is what Dionysus had felt the need to test himself against.
This deep, dark forest filled with secrets. Filled with danger.
It was a mystery.
She wondered, sometimes, why the royal family had not cleared the wood. Knocked it over.
But there was now, and had always been, such a strange relationship with the royal family and this enchanted place. They had won wars there, bolstered against their enemies by their knowledge of the forest. They had lost kings, sons, daughters to the dangers of the wood. Generationally. It was as if the source of their power came from it, as well as the source of their potential demise.
And what of her own demise? It seemed to be back there in the palace.
He’d said all those things to her, and they had cut her deeply. His words were sharp knives, and she had felt the cut of every single one of them. And then he had touched her. And his skin was so warm and enticing. A temptation, even as his words caused harm.
He’d spoken to her of dark things that she barely understood.
And she had felt no less like she was standing on the edge of a perilous wood in his office then she did now. In fact, the Dark Wood seemed safer.
For Alexius contained mysteries. She suspected there was a dark magic beneath his tailored suits. Shattered things brought to light resting in the palm of his hand. If he touched her, would he light up all those things that were still hidden from her?
When he touched her, she felt bright.
Even as anger simmered through her blood, there was something else that he had ignited over the surface of her skin.
I’ve heard that sex often holds more appeal when the object of desire is forbidden.
Her breath caught.
She wasn’t running from him. She was running from herself. Perhaps that was what brought everyone to the edge of this wood. Fleeing yourself.
For that’s what it had to be. You had to be more frightened of the monsters outside of it, than the monsters that might be within. Otherwise... You would never set foot in it.
“What are you doing?”
She whirled around to see a mountain of large, angry alpha male coming her way. His expression was thunderous, filled with rage.
“Nothing,” she said.
“Get away from there.” He closed the distance between them and grabbed hold of her, physically moving her a foot away from where she had been standing. “Don’t be a fool.”
“I’m not being a fool. Running away from you is the first sensible thing I’ve done in days.”
“And so you would run into the wood? You would never come back out.”
“You think you can survive the wood, but I can’t?”
“You think Lazarus and Dionysus can perish there but not you?”
“I guess my arrogance matches yours.”
“Do not be a fool,” he said again, his words carrying a veil of threat over them.
“If I’m a fool it’s because you chased me away. Perhaps you should reflect on that.”
It was a lie. And she spoke those words with no conviction, and she knew that he heard it.
“I think,” he said, his voice soft and deadly, “cara mia, that you were running away from yourself.”
And that was when she found herself being hauled toward him, and when his lips crashed down on hers it was like the whole mountain had fallen over the top of her.
His mouth was hot and firm and certain as it moved over hers. And she... She was lost.
She had shared pleasant, nice kisses with Dionysus that had felt nothing like being wrapped up in fire.
But that’s what this was. Licks of flame moving over her skin as he parted her lips and licked into her mouth.
She had never seen the attraction to kissing like this.
With all of yourself.
With the full weight of your body pressed against another person, and your lips parted, gaining them access to taste you. She had never understood why the scrape of someone’s teeth against her lips might be erotic. But it was. Everything about this was. And she realized then that she should have just gone straight into the Dark Wood, for she had a better chance of emerging unscathed than she did from this kiss.
But he was uncompromising.
He did not allow her to rethink. Not because he was holding her with his strength, but because he immobilized her, in thrall because of his mastery of her body.
She was cocooned in his arms. He was so big and hard and he lifted her up from the ground with no effort at all. One large palm was pressed between her shoulder blades, the other low on her back. And he kissed her. Like a beast.
Like a wolf.
Set on devouring her.
She couldn’t breathe. She was dizzy with it. With the slick glide of his tongue against hers and the heavy strength of his hands weighting her to the earth.
For if he wasn’t holding her she was sure she would fly apart into a million pieces and be lost as a mist in the air. There was salvation in this devouring, and she could not explain it any more than she could understand it. But she could feel it.
Oh, she could feel it.
And then, as suddenly as he had caught her up, he set her back down onto the ground. The rejection was startling. Verging on terrifying. For somehow, the world had been tilted on its axis and she didn’t know who she was when she wasn’t in Alex’s arms.
Alex.
Alex, who had always felt like a dark, forbidding figure in the corner of her world. But the lens had shifted now and he felt like the center of it. No less dark, no less forbidding. But more tempting than the wood itself.
“You,” he said, his voice low. “You have tempted me for far too long. And it is unacceptable. I am not tempted. I do not deviate from the path.”
He turned away from her then, and walked back toward the palace, leaving her standing there, shattered.
He had been tempted by her?
He had been tempted by her. Those words echoed inside of her like dark magic.
He had wanted her. All those years when he had been disapproving? She could remember when he had come after her one night, there had been a dinner party, and she and Dionysus had been laughing at the end of the table. She knew that Alex had disapproved of their behavior, found them disruptive. Treating them like naughty children rather than the young adults they’d been. She had been annoyed with him, as she always was. And her annoyance with Alex always felt large. It was never simple.
It always seemed to take up every available space inside of her, then expand.
There was something about Alex that always did that to her.
And she could remember him cornering her in a corridor, his dark eyes blazing with black fire.
That is not the behavior of a princess.
And is this but the behavior of a future king?
You should show me more respect.
You should give it.
Earn it. Though I would prefer you did it as an occasional houseguest, and not as the future wife of my brother.
Do you not wish to be my brother-in-law, Alex? Is our relationship quite so damaged?
She remembered how his irritation
had flared up.
But something deeper. Something more.
And now she wondered.
She wondered now if the feeling inside of her whenever she had been alone with him had not been fear. Had not been irritation at his disapproval, but a desire to...
As he’d said. To test herself against him.
Because he wanted her.
And if he wanted her, in this state that he disapproved of so...
Didn’t that make it powerful?
It was like the sun had risen on a personal darkness inside of her, and lit it all up.
She could not be controlled. Any more than her hair could be. She wasn’t tamed.
And that was what her mother hated. It was what bothered Alex.
She was chaotic, it was true. And she could be messy. And most of all, she simply wasn’t that which all the people around her seemed hell-bent on making her into.
And they couldn’t force her to, not with the whole weight of their disapproval.
And Alex wanted her anyway.
He wanted to marry her off, he wanted to get rid of her.
He wanted to do his duty and not have to face this big, bright thing between them that was wrong in every single way.
Wrong.
Yes, it was wrong. That Alex had the power to ignite this thing in her blood that no other man had. Not even Dionysus, who she had been certain she loved.
Perhaps it was just age. Perhaps she was coming into herself a little later than some.
Maybe now any man would have the power to invoke this kind of response in her.
But she didn’t think so.
Her body felt overly sensitive the entire day following the incident. And it was the eve of the ball, and a team of servants were sent to her room.
“You must be prepared,” Charis said.
She was led to a place in the palace that she had never been before. Down a winding staircase, all the way down to the bottom of the palace, where she would have assumed that a dungeon might exist. But there was no dungeon here.
Instead, it was nothing but marble tiles, intricate mosaic inlaid into the floors. Jewels.
A spectacle unlike anything she had ever seen in Liri. The country tended to be more Spartan than this. Everything quite medieval, rather than ornate.
“What is this?” she asked one of the women.
“The baths. The royal family has a long tradition of preparing for either war or celebration in the private baths.”
Tinley had never heard of such a thing. It seemed rather a luxury for the royal family, as she knew them. For with the exception of Dionysus, they had been austere, not given to indulgence.
“There are several rooms,” Charis told her.
“How will I know what to do?”
“I can stay and guide you if you like.”
The thought of being assisted with bathing made Tinley uncomfortable. “No.”
“I thought not. The first is cold. It will bring the blood closer to the surface of your skin. You can move through it quickly. Then there is a tub that’s very hot, you go into that next. And finally, you’ll find the perfumed pool. It has been prepared with essential oils to perfume your skin. There will be sugar scrubs and other products to make your skin glow. It is how the Queen always prepared for parties.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“Why is this so secret?”
“I think rather it’s...humanizing. And the royal family always does resist being seen as human.”
A very insightful comment, Tinley thought. For it was true. They were a lineage wrapped in legends that had survived centuries, and they seemed to do nothing to try and dispel it. “How long have you worked for them?”
Charis frowned. “Ten years. I remember you. As a girl. Just like I remember Dionysus. And the Queen.” There was something in the way she said the Queen that stuck out to Tinley and she couldn’t quite place it.
“Did you like him? Dionysus. Only, sometimes I don’t think his brother did.”
“Alex loved his brother very much,” the woman said. “I think he doesn’t know how to show it.”
“Oh. That being human again.”
She laughed. “Yes. I think of all of them, he resists it most of all.”
Tinley was bundled into a robe, her clothes taken from her, and then she was sent into a small room with glimmering, clear gemstones on the wall. They reflected in the water, made it look like ice. Which was appropriate, because when Tinley slipped her robe off and got into the water, she was certain that her skin would not survive. It was freezing. She moved through the pool quickly, getting out on the other side. Her robe was back where she had entered, but it was too late to do anything about that.
Her skin burned, and felt bright. Tingling from the water. She couldn’t tell if her blood felt closer to the surface of the skin, or if it had frozen right in her veins. She passed through to the next room, which had red gems inlaid, glittering on the walls like fire. And so, she didn’t have to guess what she would feel like when she entered and exited this pool.
The scalding heat of the water was nearly unbearable, particularly after her ice bath, and Tinley was wondering if the royal family was human after all. She moved through that pool quickly as well.
After that, there came a long corridor. The rock laid into the wall was blue and jade, like swirling waves all around her. She walked on a narrow path, with water on either side of it, as if a river flowed underground here. It made shifting, moving reflections on the wall. There were pedestals on either side of her at the center of the corridor. In one bowl, there was a textured looking substance. She put her fingers in it, and found it was the sugar scrub Charis had spoken of.
There was a smaller bowl next to it, and she put a small measure of it inside. Then she smelled it.
It smelled... It was not floral, nor was it feminine. There was a rich, spicy scent to it, and she realized it reminded her of Alex.
Unbidden, she had an image of him walking through here, naked. Of him scrubbing this onto his skin, for he must.
In the bowl on the other side was a cream, and she took a small measure of that as well.
Then she continued on her way, walking naked through the hall.
She didn’t know what she expected of the grand pool she’d been instructed was waiting for her, but it was... Something else entirely. It was not a large rectangle, no, rather it was a winding, organic looking body of water that extended around the corner she could not see. The entrance had a slow slope into deeper water, like the ocean, but here, the sand was made from marble, precious stones and gold.
It illuminated the water from beneath, and overhead, the glittering stones cast fractured light all around.
It was like being in a sparkling cave of gems, in a river of light. She stepped into the water slowly and sighed when she found the temperature perfect. She set her bowls down on the edge of the winding pool, and slid beneath the surface. She allowed the silence to envelop her. The solitude. These last days had been... She could not recognize her life. Or rather, she could, but it was a strange, twisted mirror, showing her the past while driving her on toward a future she could not envision.
Was she really going to marry a stranger? Was she truly going to meet that man tomorrow, choose him, and...have Alex arrange it?
Alex.
The mention of his name made her skin burn hot and bright and it had nothing to do with the water.
She came up for air, no longer feeling cocooned by the water.
She swam over to the edge of the pool and put a bit of the sugar scrub on her fingertips, working it over her body, grimacing at the roughness.
But part of her welcomed it. For it felt a bit like a punishment, and she was angry with her skin.
Her breasts.
That treache
rous place between her thighs that she had never given much thought to until him.
Her heart, which was filled with fear and trepidation. Which lacked the courage to run away, but also the courage to embrace where she was with any full passion.
The heart stuck in limbo.
And had it not been for years now?
She had been certain of a path, and then it had vanished, and she had tried to find something new.
And instead hadn’t she just sunk into some kind of strange rebellion at her mother.
Choosing to live in a tiny cottage and take a job where she worked from home so she never had to concern herself with her image?
An image that felt so short of what she knew her mother wanted it to be.
So it was so much easier to pretend she didn’t care.
And in many ways she didn’t.
But part of her yearned for an acceptance she would never have.
And even now it made her chest ache.
But Alex wants you.
Even thinking it made her nipples go tight, even as she scrubbed that punishing mixture over her skin.
She finished quickly, touching herself only creating more problems. Then she submerged herself in the water again, rinsing it all away.
She swam forward, the warm water a pleasant glide now over her skin as she went. As she tried to school her mind into something blank.
The pool wound on, and she could sense the many feet of the palace above her, all stone and stark and intimidating. And now she would never not know that this was here underneath.
This enchanted river that was something so different than the enchanted wood that stood all around.
For this place did not offer certain death. But a strange kind of pleasure that seemed absent from everywhere else on these grounds.
She came around another bend, and stopped.
For there he was.
She knew it was him. It took only a glance for her body to react in the most violent fashion. Her stomach seizing tight, her heart slamming against her breastbone. He was facing away from her, and he lifted his arms, running his fingers over his hair, water sluicing down his back. His every muscle moved and flexed as he did so. And she was enthralled.
