by Maisey Yates
His shoulders and back were so broad, his waist narrow. He was like a god.
Or a wolf.
The moment she had thought it might all be safe.
She had forgotten.
That the deadliest predator was in the palace walls, not beyond them.
She could slip away. She could. She should. But she was frozen.
Just as she had been on the edge of the Dark Wood.
So close to danger and unwilling to turn away from it.
Your heart lacks courage.
Her heart lacked courage and it was why she lived in a tiny cottage. Her heart lacked courage and it was why she was here. Moving toward a future that she wasn’t sure she wanted.
It was why she had never gone to see her mother, not since college, and asked her why she never seemed to think she was enough. Not as a princess, not as a student, not as the head of a charity.
Why her hair was so wrong, and why her laugh was so loud, and why everything she seemed to do held them at further and further distance.
She was suddenly so very tired of herself.
And whatever happened at the ball tomorrow night, it needed to happen because there was conviction in her heart, and not simply fear of what might happen if she didn’t do as Alex bid her.
And she...
She wanted something. She wanted something she didn’t have a name for. She wanted more of what he’d made her feel yesterday. Desired. For what she was. As she was before any makeovers or scrubs or whatever else was going to become of her before tomorrow night. All the comportment was certainly leading up to a fair amount of oil masks and waxed body parts and scrubbings and makeup.
And here she was, in this grand bath washed clean of anything. She had on no clothes, nothing that signified her as the former future Princess, the woman who had arrived at the palace in leggings. And he had on no suit. Nothing that made him King.
Except all the everything about him.
She was a virgin.
What had surprised her most about going to college was the fact that it wasn’t all that rare. Even a lot of the boys she knew hadn’t actually been with anyone yet. Though, by the end of the four years there, almost everyone had dealt with it. She was in the minority, but not alone, and none of her friends had ever mocked her for it. They had all known about Dionysus. And while they could certainly all relate to feeling awkward, or not finding the right person, the grief of losing someone they were in love with was unique to her, and as a result, no one had ever pressed her. But she knew plenty about sex.
She had one roommate in particular who had been quite active and comfortable with her sex drive, and she brought a fair amount of men back to the dorm. Her other roommate had been a bit more reserved, but by the end of school even she’d had a boyfriend who’d spent the majority of his nights there.
She also talked with enough of her friends about first times to know that while every experience was different there were certain things to expect.
And nerves was one of them. But they all survived it.
And maybe this was simply... This was right.
Maybe this was what the royal family owed her.
Because she had been bound up in them for so many years, and maybe... Maybe she would decide to marry no one. Maybe she would decide to walk away with nothing and no money.
And maybe that would mean never returning to this place, never being here where she had felt so accepted. Her father had been happy here, and that had spilled over to her. Dionysus had been kind. The King had treated her like another child.
But Alex, the man who had made her feel like she might not be enough, wanted her. And maybe that was the ending she needed. Maybe this was the courage her heart needed.
To be big and fierce and bold.
She wanted to be.
She played at it in her own little world. Rescuing animals and heading up a charity that spoke to something in her heart, and made everything she did feel natural. Doing the things that mattered to her without having to put herself out there. But she could certainly exploit her position as Dionysus’s former fiancée. As the once-and-no-longer-future Princess of Liri.
Maybe she didn’t need her family’s money. Maybe she simply had to be bold enough to put herself forward.
Yes, she had rebelliously dug into her image, but she had still kept it to herself.
And perhaps the key to that lay on the other side of this mystery. On the other side of this man.
Dionysus had been a dynamic, and obvious, influence on her life. But Alex had always been there.
Alexius. Tall and broad and imposing and creating wide, sweeping feelings inside of her.
She had felt uncomfortable around him. Always. And when his lips had met hers yesterday she had to wonder exactly why.
If perhaps she didn’t truly understand the real reason she felt uncomfortable around him.
If it had never actually been fear.
No. It was fear. And the fear heightened inside of her as she stepped toward him.
It was fear. But it was something else as well.
She had never felt afraid of Dionysus.
But she had never felt this mounting, terrible excitement either.
Alex had given her a deep, trembling excitement over the years that had frightened her unto her core.
She could remember being on the beach with him in Italy. Him being angry at her for her swimsuit...
It all came back in a rush. What the undercurrent of that anger was.
And she’d touched him...
This was like standing on the edge of a cliff and trying to bring herself to jump off of it. Having to trust that somehow the bottom didn’t hold doom, but escape.
He turned suddenly. His dark eyes connected with hers, and she felt her nipples go tight. For she was exposed above the hips, hiding nothing from his sharp gaze.
And he was...
It was only a fleeting moment that she felt embarrassed over her own body, because then she was consumed with the look of his.
He was...
She had often thought of him as a mountain, and she was correct. His chest was broad and heavily muscled, covered with dark chest hair.
He was a man.
That word emblazoned itself on her mind, her soul.
He was not a boy. Not a young man her age. A man with strength and depth and vast experience. And he would not give quarter if she took a step toward him and then decided she was too frightened.
She knew. In that moment. She had to make a choice now, and there would be no reversing it. And so, with her heart pounding sickeningly in her ears, she took a single step toward Alexius. She took a single step toward courage.
CHAPTER SEVEN
SHE WAS A WITCH. There was no other explanation for it. He had been here in the baths, doing his best to scrub her from his skin, doing his best to scrub this unwanted desire from all that he was, and she had appeared. A siren in the water. Naked and glistening and far beyond the beauty he had ever allowed himself to imagine she might possess.
Her breasts were full and plump, rosy tipped and delicious.
Her waist nipped in gently, then sloped outward, rounding into luxurious hips that would be perfect for a man to hold on to. She was the embodiment of his temptation. Of his weakness. And when she took a step toward him, he knew that his fate was sealed.
He had spent much of his life denying a belief in fate.
For the legends about his family and fate were dark indeed, and they suggested that there was no hand stronger or mightier than that of an invisible, immovable force that might decide to rearrange the whole kingdom on a whim.
To kill young princes and leave but one remaining.
In his position, a belief in fate had always felt somewhat grim.
That he was chosen for some reason
beyond anything he had done or could do. But his brothers had been chosen for death.
That belief did not make him stronger or better. That belief meant that trying was truly a pointless exercise. And so he had rejected it. But Tinley. Tinley had gotten under his skin for all these long years, and he had convinced himself that there was nothing in this world that was inevitable.
Here she was, a slick, bare inevitability that seemed to make a mockery of the idea that he could outrun anything. Her red hair hung damp and curling down her back, a couple of stray locks falling into her face. And as she walked toward him, the water moved around her, concealing the most womanly part of her from his view. It changed nothing.
It changed nothing and everything.
It simply was.
And down here, in this ancient, traditional place, ceremonial in many ways, and important to the royal family, it felt sacred.
A confirmation.
One he might have tried to outrun, but he... decided not to.
And so he stood firm and fast as his doom closed the distance between them.
He looked down, saw that her nipples were hard. That her breathing had gone shallow.
“You’re right,” she said. “I’m not afraid of you.” She reached out, delicate fingertips touching the side of his face. They drifted downward slowly, making contact with his broad chest.
Like on the beach. But this time she did not touch him in anger. And this time she didn’t stop there. Her hand went down farther. He breathed hard, his stomach pitching as her fingertips ended where the water began. Just above where he was hard and aching for her.
“I didn’t understand,” she whispered. “But I want to.”
“Do you know what you’re doing?”
Those green eyes, always filled with challenge, with rebellion, sparked. “Of course I do. I’m not a child. I know what it means to walk into a room with a naked man. To touch him. I know what I’m asking you for.”
“But do you know how it will change things?”
For it would. It would change the entire way he had arranged the world.
It would have to.
Damn it all. Burn it all.
Tinley Markham was his. Everything else could go straight to hell.
He’d made this choice once before and as he looked at her...he had the sense he would make it again and again until the end of days.
So why not make her a duty, rather than a sin in waiting?
Why not embrace it, and her.
Her body. Her lips. He would sink inside of her and claim her. And he did not care if his brother had had her first. He didn’t care how many men had had her since. She was his and had been from the beginning. Fate.
Destiny.
He alone survived. He alone remained. How could this destiny be denied? How?
It could not be.
He was the Lion of the Dark Wood, and he would devour that which wandered into his path.
He would devour her.
“Yes,” she said, her voice thin and breathless.
“And you accept that? All for this? All because your body craves mine?” He studied her closely, the crimson stain in her flushed cheeks. “Do you even like me?”
She shook her head. “No. I don’t. But yesterday you made me feel more beautiful than I ever have in my life. I don’t like you. That’s an insipid word. I feel...tormented. My body is not my own. My skin is not mine. It blushes at the memory of you, and becomes sensitive at the thought. Every time my heart beats it’s sore. Because it wants to be with the excitement of the touch of your hands. My lips feel swollen, changed. How can I go on if it isn’t completed? If this is unfinished?”
There would be no finish to this. Not one that either of them would like, not one he was even certain he could live with.
But there was nothing to be done.
There was no turning back.
“You’re walking into the wood, little girl? Tell me you understand that.”
There was half a breath, a heartbeat, where he thought she might turn away. But then she nodded. “I have to know. I have to know what’s on the other side.”
It was decided.
He reached out and hooked his arm around her waist, bringing her slick, naked body up against his. Her lush breasts pressed against his chest, and he could swear he almost felt the rapid beat of her heart against his own. He knew that she would be able to feel the hard, insistent length of his arousal pressed against her body.
He was so hard he could scarcely breathe.
He rocked his hips forward, making sure she knew.
And he could tell, by the widening of those eyes, that she felt it.
“I am not an easy man,” he ground out. “In this or anything.”
“I know.”
“You’re soft, Tinley. And you have been swaddled and cosseted and protected for all of your life. But I will not do that. No harm will come to you.” He slid his thumb over her cheekbone. “But this will not be gentle.”
“I don’t need gentle.” Tears filled her eyes, but he knew they weren’t tears of fear. They were defiant. They were angry. “I just need real.” She tilted her chin upward. “Tell me that you want me. Tell me that I’m beautiful. Even like this.”
“Is that what you need to know? Is it?” He moved his fingers over the freckles on her cheeks, then pushed his fingers through her wet hair. “This. All of this, it tempts me. When you were a girl of eighteen all I wanted was to press you up against the wall and claim you as mine.” She was the source of his greatest sin, that girl. And yet she doubted him. But she could never know that. She could never know the truth. “Even when I was angry. Even when I was telling you how unsuitable you were. What I wanted was to sink myself into you and make you mine. You were unsuitable for him. You were supposed to be mine.”
The words, the ferocity behind them, shocked even himself.
“But not suitable enough to be Queen,” she said breathlessly.
“Not suitable for any damn thing. I am a king. And I must keep my head. I am a king, and I must have supreme control over myself and all that I do. And you test that. I am at my end. If you had not been his then...” But it was a lie. He very nearly had. And all that had protected Tinley was his brother’s death. “It didn’t matter. In the end it didn’t matter, did it?”
“You sent me away.”
He remembered when she’d come to his office—formerly his father’s—after the funeral.
What will I do now?
Anything you wish.
School?
If you desire. There is no more need for you to be here. Of course the palace will care for you, but this is no longer your home.
Guilt and the desire to be rid of her had spurred him on.
“You were happy enough to go.”
“I was,” she said. “But the speed at which it happened... I had to make a lot of choices and it was overwhelming.”
“I was not going to debase myself, or the position of Queen, with my brother’s leftovers.” Lies on his tongue, bitter. “I was not going to be slave to these feelings.”
“And here we are.”
So simply she spoke of his failure. So simply she laid out the inevitable.
“I want you,” he said. “You must understand, it is not easy.”
“I know. It isn’t easy for me either.”
He didn’t have to explain this dark, tortured thing that aided him. Of course he didn’t. Because it was like that for her too. There was nothing sweet or simple about it. Nothing misty or magical. This was not fated mates. It was deeper than that. A fated, tortured attraction that existed to make a mockery of all that he was. To make a mockery of whatever power he thought he might possess.
Their desire was the wolf pack. Come to devour them both.
And he surren
dered.
He lowered his head and kissed her, harder, darker than yesterday. He plunged his tongue deep into her mouth, wanting to consume her. As she consumed him. Would that it were so simple as want. Would that it were so simple as sex.
Sex was easy. He’d had sex.
This was something else.
This was shame and need and torture all wrapped in a soft, delectable package that he could not turn away from.
He moved his hands to her breasts, cupped them, teased her nipples. For why hold back? Why make slow what had been on the verge of boiling over for all these years?
She gasped, and he took advantage of that. He ate deeper into her mouth, before abandoning her lips and blazing a trail down her vulnerable throat. To her collarbone. He kissed one rounded curve of her breast before taking her nipple deep into his mouth and sucking.
She whimpered, spearing her fingers through his hair and holding him there. As if he would abandon her. As if he would abandon her now that she was finally his.
The only sound in the echoing chamber was their breathing, the gentle sound of the water lapping against their skin. He moved his hands down her body, to her hips, and then, between her thighs where he found her wet and slick and perfect, just waiting for his touch.
His own body pulsed with need. He had never known anything like this. It consumed him.
It was a temptation that surpassed anything he had thought was possible. And the fulfillment of it was beyond anything he had imagined.
Centuries of duty could crumble all around him, he didn’t care.
He didn’t care.
He moved his hands to her thighs, lifted her up and urged her legs around him, carrying them both up out of the pool.
He walked them both round the bend, to the end of the winding pool. There were low cushions, a cabana of sorts with plush pillows and fabric draped around.
Privacy that was unnecessary, here in this place shared by no one other than royalty.
And as he lowered her down onto the cushions, he asked himself... He asked himself if perhaps he had known that she would be here.
For of course he had given permission for her to use this place to ready herself for the ball.
