The black dress she was wearing clung to her petite curves, her breasts small, but pert, her hips delicate.
He was trying to remember all of the people that had been at the funeral.
Who she might be with. Where she might be from. There was a delicate air of aristocracy around her; that much was certain. She could be a celebrity, but more likely she was a dignitary, political figure or someone of social prominence.
And allowing her to touch him in this way was a risk. As much of a risk as it was wrong.
What man would experience lust for another woman two days after his wife died? It was abhorrent. And yet he didn’t want her to stop touching him. Likely she only meant it as a comfort, but it was making his blood warm. Making it stir.
It was making him feel things that he’d decided were best left dead.
He felt hungry then. Hungry for the kind of connection he hadn’t experienced in so long. Maybe ever. This woman’s sweet touch, this simple condolence warmed him in parts of himself that he’d thought were long dead.
But it was only that. Just an act of comfort. Still, he stood frozen, letting her touch him like that, until that touch shifted, just slightly, and there was a change in the way that she was breathing. More ragged, more labored.
He could feel his own heart raging, his body responding to this.
Then the little woman in front of him lifted another hand, touched the other side of his face, holding him now. He couldn’t make out the color of her eyes, not in this light. Couldn’t make out the fine details of her features. But he knew that she was beautiful. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered. She stretched up on her toes and kissed his cheek.
Then she began to pull away, and he reached back, cupping the back of her head, her hair sliding through his fingers, silken and tempting.
What in God’s name was he doing?
Nothing in God’s name—that much was certain. This was Eros. It was Hades. It was all things wrong and sweet and tempting. Nothing he’d ever indulged in.
But he couldn’t let her move away from him.
She smelled of lilacs and of need. Of everything that he had been afraid of these past years. Afraid to miss, afraid to want.
His parents had married for duty, and within that, they’d found love. He had truly believed that he might find that for himself. He hadn’t. Instead, what he had proved was that marrying a stranger could be nothing but an absolute disaster if the two people were incompatible. Years and years wouldn’t fix it.
Nothing would fix it.
Nothing would fixthis.
Nothing except the simple glide of her hair through his fingers felt like it was fixing something.
Made him feel more alive, more whole than anything ever had.
“What do you need?” The whisper on her lips was like the finest drug.
What did he need? He suddenly needed to taste the stranger more than he needed anything, more than he’d ever needed anything, including air.
He didn’t have the words for that. Couldn’t find a way to speak them, so instead, he lowered his head, and touched his mouth to hers. And for the first time in two years, he was kissing a woman.
For the first time in longer than he could remember, he was kissing one with true, real passion. Holding her head in his palm, he angled his own, parting his lips and sliding his tongue against hers. She made a short, whimpering sound, and moved away from him. He froze.
“I need this,” he said, his voice rough, a stranger’s. “I don’t need to know who you are, I don’t need to ever see you again. But I need…”
She nodded, his strange woman, gripped his face again and stretched up on her toes, and still he had to lean down to meet her. Kissing her, gathering her up in his arms and pressing her petite frame to his body. It was like fire. It was like nothing he’d ever experienced before.
Even before his marriage he hadn’t been the kind of man to take strangers as lovers. He hadn’t been indiscriminate with sex. He couldn’t afford to be. He was a king. And he didn’t trust nondisclosure agreements to that extent. Nor did he feel that a king should act in such a manner that it necessitated them. He had relationships. A couple, before he’d chosen Circe to be his queen. He’d imagined that they would have a reasonable sex life, but it had gone from bad to nonexistent in their five years of marriage and he was…hungry.
An experience that he’d never had before had presented itself to him, and he did not possess the ability to deny himself. She whimpered against his mouth, and he lifted her up off the floor, carrying her to the large chaise in the corner of the room. The room was much darker than he would’ve liked, but he didn’t want to turn the lights on. He didn’t want to do anything to break the spell of the moment. To feel like he was lifting the veil.
This was magic.
He was a man who’d experienced precious little magic in his life, and he wanted this. He didn’t want to think about anything that had come before. Didn’t want to think about the grief that sat at the center of his chest, didn’t want to think about the future.
