Page 22 of King's Heir of Hate

She was not at all surprised when his gaze went supernova and he hauled her up, straight off the floor and into his arms.

He carried her over to the bed and she thought he meant to toss her on it, but he clearly remembered that she was pregnant at the last minute. Accordingly, heplacedher on the coverlet instead.

Esme was just pleased that he was as swept away by all this as she was tonight. More pleased than she wanted to admit, because it felt a lot less like a victory and a lot more like…something softer.

Something much more fraught with peril than beating Tadeo at his own game.

“What is this thing?” he muttered, rubbing his hands over the silk of the chemise and then pulling it up and over her head.

The look on his face when he saw her naked made her eyes go blurry.

Esme didn’t know what he told himself. She didn’t know how he justified all of these cold and distant years in his own mind. She only knew what he told her, but that always hinged on the official business of their royal marriage. Themessaging. Thepositioning. The delicate math of appearances and outreach, glamour and approachability, and what the public’s experience of these things meant in how they perceived the royal family.

It had all been so dry and cold for so long.

And then, of course, they’d had a wildly bright and blurry night that he had, apparently, decided he could simply write off as a mistake and never look at again before he divorced her—something he had always seemed to think he could do without too much public outcry. The only thing he claimed to care about was what his subjects thought of him and the job he did.

If she hadn’t been pregnant, Esme imagined she’d be locked up with the crisis team, working on messaging that elevated the King’s desire for a divorce into anational necessity.

But tonight had nothing to do with any of that. It had nothing to do with any messaging or crisis management.

This was purely between the two of them. This was a culmination of the same fire that hadbeenright here, between them, for a decade already and counting.

She could see it all over him. Like he’d forgotten how to be cold for a moment—just a moment. Just tonight. And instead he was something like starstruck as he took her in.

All of her.

There was a look of sheer wonder on his face as he crawled onto the bed with her and learned the new contours of her body.

The heaviness of her breasts. The new, darker color of her nipples.

The faint line from her navel down over the insistent swell of her belly.

He took the longest time there, smoothing his hands over the place where their child grew and pressing kisses all along the curve. Esme didn’t know how she kept from crying.

She thought that if he knew what she could see on his face then, he would have stopped this at once. He would have thrown Esme straight out and ordered her not to return.

But he didn’t know. And she wasn’t about to tell him.

Instead, she kept silent—as ordered—and somehow that made everything hotter and more intense as he slid down between her legs, spread them wide, then set his mouth to the molten core of her.

Where she discovered she was even more sensitive than before.

So sensitive that she let out a shuddering sort of sound, because she was alreadyright there—

Tadeo licked into her, growling the way he always had, as if her taste electrified him. As if he was enjoying himself as much as she was. He had been her first, her only. She had heard all sorts of things about what men liked and didn’t like, but Tadeo had never fit into those categories.

There had never been a single part of her, or any possible activity, that he had not thrown himself into the way a person only could when they loved every moment.

Esme knew this, because it was how she felt when she got to explore his marvel of a body and make him shudder beneath her own hands.

Tonight was no different. Tadeo applied himself to the task as if he’d been dying to taste her like this for years. She threw her head back and she arched up against his mouth. She moved her hips and she gave herself over to the slow, insistent, and inexorable build of all that pleasure.

He slid one finger deep inside her, then another. And that made it better. It made everything hotter and wetter and slicker, and when he started to thrust his fingers in and out of her body, Esme simply shattered.

She bucked against him, muffling the sounds she might have made against the back of her hand.

Tadeo climbed back up the bed and lay himself out beside her, then scooped her up so that he could roll her over and arrange her above him. He settled her on her hands and knees, and it seemed the most natural and inevitable thing in the world to sit up, then guide that marvelous length of him deep inside her.