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You were anything but kind to him, she reminded herself.
And anyway, she wasn’t sure she had it in her to confront him. What did it matter what he said now or what she’d done back then? What mattered was this. This overbright, almost painfully intense connection between them. It had been there from the start. And right now, all she could seem to do was bask in the fact that the years hadn’t dimmed it one bit.
So she took his hand.
More than that, she reveled in it as he tugged her up and onto her feet. The feel of his hand around hers once again. The grip she’d never expected to feel again. It was as if he was still holding her face, her head. Keeping her right where he wanted her.
Amalia was a little too invested in him wanting her. She accepted that. But then, the force of Joaquin’s wanting could, she was reasonably certain, shift the stars in the sky to make the patterns he preferred. That was what it felt like.
As if, deep within her, she was only stars he rearranged at will.
For a moment they stood like that, their hands clasped together. He still leaned there against the stone wall, his green gaze as demanding on her as his hands had ever been.
She watched a new storm track across his face and held her breath, but then he moved. He tugged her along with him as he walked through the open stone lobby. He led her out the other side from the path she’d walked from the docks and her heart took up a kind of drumming, because she knew immediately where he was headed. Sure enough, they wound down away from the hotel, on a path marked PRIVATE. Down the stone stairs that ran along the cliffs and offered views of the sea, before winding around again to the owner’s villa.
Though it was no airy villa built with tourists in mind. It had once been a dungeon, perched perilously close to the water line to give the prisoners something to think about.
Sometimes a man needs something to focus his attention, Joaquin had said the first time he’d brought her here. Though he had been looking at her, not his handiwork.And if it is not perilous, what is the point?
Joaquin had transformed the old dungeon, a complicated maze of cells that let the sea in. She had laid with him here, on that altar of a bed in his stark bedroom, staring out at the sea that ragedjust there.
You could have had any one of the villas on the island be the owner’s villa, surely, she had said.Why would you choose a former jail?
I am the orphan child of nobody at all, he had replied in a lazy voice that had not matched his words.Nearly everyone I met predicted I would end up in prison. Or worse. The dungeon seems appropriate.
Not that there was anything particularly dungeon-like about the home he’d built here, save its historic purpose. He had kept some of the details. The entrance, left intact, was a circular, medieval affair with bars everywhere. It had always made her laugh. Because it was all suitably intimidating, she’d thought then. It suited him, the fiercest man she’d ever met.
It still made her smile today, but that was more nostalgia than anything else. The door opened easily, a testament to the kind of money and attention he poured into every detail. No heaving and squeaking hinges here.
He ushered her inside, and everything was as she recalled it. Cool, stark whiteness everywhere, suggesting an airiness she felt certain none of the original inmates had ever felt. The stone was chilled and hinted of damp and was therefore strewn here and there with thick, richly colored rugs. There was art on the walls, most by identifiably famous artists. And instead of the thick stone walls that had once stood, every outward-facing wall was made of glass.
So that, depending on the tide, sometimes the ocean crashed right there against the walls.
It was still exhilarating, she found, as he led her from one room to the next as if he was on a mission. It was still overwhelming and exhilarating at once to be this close to the might and power of the water.
It still felt like him.
In his bedchamber, he whirled her into his arms, then backed her up. Amalia didn’t know where they were headed and she didn’t care. That, too, felt like a freedom. Because she was no longer the Crown Princess, duty-bound to put a stop to whatever happened with this man. She was no longer required to marry a man of Queen Esme’s choosing, however little they might match her own inclinations.
She was no longer required to be anyone but herself, whoever that was.
Right now, all she knew was that she could not get enough of Joaquin Vargas. That he had tattooed himself upon her years ago, and if anything, the colors of that tattoo were brighter now than they had ever been then. As if time had made the mark upon her all the more vivid.
And only he could see it.
Her lips parted on a kind of gasp as her back came up against the thick stone wall at the far end of his bedchamber, hard and cold. Then he was leaning over her, a dangerous glint in his gaze and that storm in the green of his eyes.
And once more, Amalia thought that too many things were said between them, without a single word being passed.
This close, with the light from the sea and sky outside dancing over them, she found herself studying his face. The years had only made him more beautiful, more astonishingly, bracingly handsome. Maybe there were a few more crinkles beside his eyes. Maybe those sharp, sculpted lines of his face had been drawn by a heavier hand these days.
But he still made her heart flutter in her chest and her knees go soft, no matter what stone he felt she should kneel upon.
Going on instinct, and maybe not wanting to hear whatever he might say next—not now, not when she was lost on that wave of nostalgia and need—she reached up and began to trace the bold lines of his face with her own fingers. As if she intended to sculpt him herself. She followed the line of his brow, then the dark slash of his eyebrows. Down the length of that aquiline nose, then backtracking to trace this cheekbone, then that. Then she moved over that stark mouth of his, all the more sensual because she knew how he could use it.
Finally his jaw, so intensely masculine, making him look not so much like a fallen angel, but the sin that had preceded that fall.
He murmured something dark, too low to hear. And Amalia couldn’t tell if she was sad she didn’t quite grasp his words, or just as happy that they remained opaque. Either way, she didn’t ask him to repeat himself.
