AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Yes. I know you think so.”
“You can take it up with him when he returns. He tells me he’ll be back in two days.”
Shock flared in the depths of her eyes. “Two days?”
“Yes. Don’t look so dismayed.”
“I can’t help it. I am dismayed.”
“Why exactly?”
“I just thought there was more time.”
There was something wild in the depths of her eyes then, and he wanted to move closer to it. But he knew that would be a mistake. Still, when she stood, it was to draw closer to him.
“I know that you feel it,” she said. “It’s crazy, isn’t it? I shouldn’t feel anything for you. But you... I mean, look, I know it’s chemistry, or whatever, I know it’s not feelings. But...” She bit her full lower lip and looked up at him from beneath her lashes, the expression both innocent and coquettish. “Don’t you think that maybe we should have a chance to taste it before I’m sold into marriage?”
“I thought you were intent on resisting that,” he said, his voice rough.
“With everything I have in me.”
“I cannot. I owe my brother my undying loyalty. And I will not compromise that over something as basic as sex. You mistake me, querida, if you think that I can be so easily shaken.”
“I know that you’re a man of honor. A man of loyalty. But I feel no such loyalty to your brother. And it is nothing to me to violate it.”
She planted her hand on his chest. And he knew that she could feel it then. Feel his heart raging against the muscle and blood and bone there. Feel it raging against everything that was good and right and real, that which he had placed his faith in all these years.
She let out a shaking breath, and he could feel the heat of it brush his mouth, so close was she. So close was his destruction.
He was iron. He was rock. He had been forced to become so. A man of no emotion. A man of nothing more than allegiance to an ideal. Knowing with absolute certainty that if he should ever turn away from that, he might become lost. That corruption might take hold of him in the way that it had done his father. Because he considered himself immune to nothing.
And so, he had made himself immune to everything.
Except for this. Except for her.
So small and fragile, delicate.
Powerful.
Not because of her success or her money. But because of the light contained in her beauty. A storm wrapped in soft, exquisite skin that he ached to put his hands on.
And when she stretched up on her toes and pressed her mouth to his, no finesse or skill present in the motion at all, he broke.
He wrapped his arms around her, cupping her head in one of his hands, shifting things, taking control. And he consumed her.
What she had intended to be a tasting, a test, he turned into a feast. If he was going to be destroyed, then he would bring the palace down with him. Then he would crack the very foundations of where they stood. Of all that he had built his life upon. Of all that he was. If he would be a ruined man, then the world would be ruined as a result. As would she.
He nipped her lower lip, slid his tongue against hers, kissed her deep and hard and long until she whimpered with it. Until she had arched against him, going soft and pliant. Until there was no question now who was in charge. Until there was no question now who was driving them to the brink of calamity. It was him.
He had made his choice. He had not fallen into temptation; he had wrapped his arms around it. He had not slid into sin; he had gathered it against his body and made it his air. His oxygen.
And she surrendered to it. Surrendered to him.
The white flag of her desire was present in the way her body molded against his, in the way that she opened for him, the small, sweet sounds of pleasure that she made as he allowed his hands to move, skimming over her curves, then going still, holding her against him so that she could feel the insistence of his desire pressing against her stomach.
He was a man of extremes.
And if she wanted a storm, he would give her a hurricane.
