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Maybe that was all fanciful justification, but it amounted to the same thing. She could not turn away from Matteo. And more to the point, she didn’t want to.
So, she kissed him. Kissed him until she couldn’t breathe. Luxuriated in the feel of his mouth against hers, his gorgeous, hard body the sheltering place she had never had while living on the street.
He gave her so much. So much more than she could have ever hoped to have. Why did she insist on asking for everything?
Everything was...
She was a girl who had come up from a place of wanting only to survive.
She did not need more than being Queen.
She was selfish. And she was fanciful.
Because you look at him and he makes you believe that you could have everything.
No. This was everything. It was all she needed.
He stripped her comfortable clothes away from her body, and she made quick work of his. She’d not had the time to examine the full glory of his male form last night. Last night had been frantic, and it had felt like the end of something.
This, this was just the beginning. This really was a promise she was making, not only to him but to herself.
That she would be thankful for what she had been given, that she would do her best with what fate had set out before her. Because it really was sort of a miraculous thing, and there was no purpose in keeping herself from it.
He laid her down on the glorious, velvet bedspread that she loved so much—she had left it behind when she had gone to Paris. She had been willing to leave so many things behind—for what was a preferred bedspread when she was leaving behind the only man she had ever cared for?—and covered her body with his.
She moved her hands over the muscles on his back, the raised ridges of scars there. And when he raised up slightly, she ran her hands over the scars on his front too. Then she leaned in, kissing them. Tracing the line that she knew his father’s knife had followed across his skin. As if she might heal it with her touch.
With the love that burned in her breast, whether she wanted it to be there or not.
Perhaps it would be easier to simply not love him. She knew that Javier and Matteo loved each other as brothers. She knew that they cared, but they did not show that caring in an effusive way. She was the only one that could ever love Matteo like this. And she did not want to hold it back, not now.
All of a sudden, she wanted to pour it out over him. Make him feel it. For hadn’t he brought her into the palace and into a sense of safety that she had never known possible? She had spent all these years trying to earn her place, but perhaps she simply needed to be thankful for it. And she was. She was so immensely grateful for all that he had given to her, and it made her want to give no less than she had received.
She wished she could heal him. She really did. Wished that her kisses would penetrate not only his scars, but the hardness of his heart.
But she would take the feel of his body trembling beneath her touch, she would take the apparent arousal that he felt as she moved her hands over his skin, her lips.
She kissed a path down his chest, down his stomach, down to that most masculine part of him. He was glorious. Beautiful.
She had not been prepared to think a man’s body was half so beautiful as his was, but it was. A glorious work of art. Carved from the white mountains of their country. Carved from the hardship that he had endured. Weakness. That was the thing he feared most. Not pain. Not death or defeat. Weakness.
That his father might have found a way to make him weak. And what hurt her the most was that she knew that he had.
Whether Matteo could ever see it that way or not...
He had taken away Matteo’s ability to feel. Because he had made his son fear that that might be the biggest weakness of all. No. Matteo would never be weak in that way. He was a good man. It was only that he feared himself so deeply.
But when you had been shaped and formed by a monster, how could you do anything else?
She knew that. She knew him.
She worried enough about her own value, her own worth, because of what her mother had done.
And it hurt.
You did not simply unlearn those things, you did not simply unfeel them.
It was not half so simple.
