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Almost automatically, I spread my legs for him and hooked my ankles together around his waist. He slid his hand down my back far enough to dig his huge fingers into my ass and shifted me slightly, gently moving me through the water toward the underwater steps. Once there, he caged me in with one hand on the railing above me, and pinned me tightly up against the wall of the pool.
I studied him, every detail of his beautiful face, hoping—praying—that he would kiss me again.
But instead of leaning in, he pulled back. The look in his eyes hardened, and with a powerful thrust he pulled me into him and lifted me right up out of the pool. I dropped my legs and went stiff, trying to make it as difficult as possible for him to carry me, but it was no use.
He scooped up my clothes in his other arm and then dragged me along down the wooden hallways, with my wet feet squeaking, drenched hair dripping down my face and back.
“I wasn’t done swimming.” I squirmed and felt my naked flesh against him.
“Looks like you are.”
I huffed and decided to let it go. So sure and yet unsure of what I was doing, the thoughts tangling in my mind, making me doubt myself.
Before I knew it, he’d opened the door to a bedroom and shoved both me and my things inside. For one instant, he eyed me up and down as if trying to make some important decision.
“You’re a royal pain in the ass, Princess,” he said, and then closed the door, locking it from the outside as he went.
I stood there, naked and dripping, flabbergasted and fuming over what had just happened. Glancing around, I saw that I was in a comfortable enough prison. The bed was large and freshly made, there was a dressing table, a fireplace, heavy curtains over the windows, even a thick rug on the floor. But it was a prison, nonetheless. I pounded hard on the door. “Well, you’re a bastard!” I shouted, knowing I didn’t mean it as I felt a loss listening to his footfalls moving farther and farther away.
A cold hug of rejection tightened around me. Why had Vasile not taken me? I was there, naked, my legs around him and yet, here I was. Alone. What had I done wrong?
Clearly, the fine art of seduction was something that needed further study.
CHAPTER 11
Valeria
They didn’t teach us lock picking at Saint Theodora’s, but that didn’t stop me from trying.
Vasile’s sudden arrival at my dorm room had one upside—I hadn’t had a chance to unbraid my hair from that godforsaken dinner, and so while my hair had fared poorly from my careless decision to take a naked swim, I still had a few hairpins at my disposal, clinging to my now-damp, unkempt locks.
But the lock was an old iron pocket lock. And my hairpins were just what you’d expect for a down-on-her-luck member of the nobility.
“Damn it,” I hissed as yet another one snapped in half in my fingers. This one had broken right at the edge of the lock. As I peered out of the keyhole, I saw it was stuck inside. I jabbed my finger at it to try to get it to wriggle free, but all that did was nick the tip of my finger.
Wonderful. I stuck my finger in my mouth to stop the little bit of bleeding and reassessed my opponent. The problem was, I had no idea how locks really worked. It was just one of those things that I had always accepted without ever thinking through
Steeling myself with a deep breath, I got comfortable in a new position on the floor, adjusting my feet so that they didn’t fall completely asleep beneath me. I pawed at my birds-nest of hair with a quickly sinking stomach.
“Don’t tell me I used them all…” I muttered to myself.
But no, I hadn’t. I found one, the last one, tucked in the back of my braid.
As I pulled it out, a lock of hair came with it, making my grown-out bangs fall into my eyes. I swiped the still-wet hair from my forehead with the back of my hand, then set to work trying, one final time, to free myself. If I couldn’t get out this time, I was stuck in that room.
Stuck there while Vasile was elsewhere, all sexy and handsome, alone in some big luxurious bed with Turkish sheets, probably wearing just his…
I was losing my focus. Shaking off the thoughts of his rippling body, I narrowed my gaze on the lock, trying hard to envision its internal workings.
But they were as mystifying to me as Vasile himself. I wriggled it and turned it, jiggled it and jabbed it. No luck.
I stabbed it one final time, with no success. Defeated, I let my forehead thunk softly against the wood. And with a quiet click, the door sprang open, the abandoned hairpin falling to the floor.
