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And then the girl with the saddest eyes spoke and made her first joke to him. ‘Champion skiers have very powerful thighs.’
He smiled. ‘Perhaps I missed my vocation.’
He made her wait even longer as they arrived at her little stone cottage at the end of a perfect date, and he made one thing very clear.
‘Don’t ask me to come in, for I might find it impossible to leave.’
‘I won’t.’ Antonietta nodded. She would not lower herself to deal with ‘paperwork’, but she did have one request. ‘Can you ask your minders to leave, though?’
She was not just quiet, Rafe realised, she was shy, for the cars were all parked well away. He was about to point that out, and even possibly to add that they could not be less interested in a mere kiss, for they had seen far more. In truth, should he be asked in, they were the men who would speak with her first and get her signature on a page.
Except it was not amerekiss.
And he would not be asked in.
‘One moment.’
Dismissing Royal Protection Officers was not that easy, for though they were mindinghim, they answered to the King. And this was irregular indeed.
But in the end Rafe was Crown Prince, and when the Crown Prince told you, in no uncertain terms, to back the hell off because you were dismissed for the night, then—albeit reluctantly—you left.
She heard the crunch of gravel as the cars drove away and watched as Rafe walked back towards her—alone. She was nervous, but no longer daunted. He took her little purse from her hands and he took off her shawl. But it wasn’t the night air that made her shiver as he placed them on the stone wall, it was the thought of the kiss to come.
He looked right at her as his fingers went to the spaghetti strap of her dress. They made a new language, one without words, for as his fingers toyed with the strap his eyes told her that he had wanted to do this on the dance floor. She swallowed as he pulled the strap down her arm, and she was shaking like a trapped bird as he lowered his head and kissed the bare skin.
Oh, his mouth was warm and soft, and then not so soft, more thorough and deep, and her lips parted, and her knees did not know how to keep her standing up.
No matter, for his hand slid around her waist and his mouth worked up her neck and then came to her mouth.
‘All night,’ Rafe said, ‘I have wanted to kiss you.’
Antonietta had dreaded Sylvester’s kiss, let alone the thought of anything more. She had never envisaged that she might ache for a man’s kiss. But now, with her neck damp from his mouth and his hands on her cheeks, she was wound tight with anticipation, and desperate to know the weight of his lips on hers.
It was a soft weight, and at first it satisfied. The graze of his lips had her own mouth pouting to reciprocate and her eyes simultaneously closing. He kissed her slowly until she returned it, and when her lips parted she shivered at her first taste of his tongue.
She had never imagined that a mouth could be so sublime, that his tongue could dance her to pleasure. His hands slipped from her face and moved down her bare arms, and Antonietta remained in his kiss, felt the pleasure building. He kissed her harder, and she felt as if she were nailed to the wooden door by his mouth, by the hands that were on her ribcage and the stroke of his thumb on her breast.
It had her weak and yet faintly desperate. Yes, desperate. For his kiss no longer satisfied. Instead it shot need into her veins. And the way his hand cupped her breast and lightly stroked her felt as if he was stroking her on the inside.
Rafe wanted her.
Badly.
But she had stated her case. So he removed his mouth and looked down at her, flushed and wanting and desirous.
‘Go inside,’ he told her.
Yet she remained.
For it felt as if the sky had parted and she had glimpsed behind it—as if everything she had been told and all that she had assumed was wrong.
Her bodyworked.
She wanted Rafe’s kisses.
She craved Rafe’s touch.
Sylvester’s taunts had pierced her, embedded themselves so deeply, and yet she felt them lifting now.
