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Because it was the best—and only—defense she could imagine having against this man.
“I had no expectation that you would be here,” she managed to say now, because a defense might protect her but it also seemed critical that he know she hadn’t come here for...this. “I intended to be a guest at this hotel, nothing more. Just a regular guest. Not like last time.”
“I see the years have made you a liar.” He tipped her chin up, his eyes a green fire. And yet even if he hated her now, her body couldn’t tell the difference. This fire was still a fire, and she burned for him the way she always had. His mouth was merciless as he brought it closer to hers and that, too, burned bright and hot inside her. “But don’t worry, Amalia. I will deal with that, too.”
And then he slammed his mouth to hers.
CHAPTER TWO
EVERYTHINGINSIDEHIMwas a roar.
Of triumph. Of need.
And that longing he had not been able to stamp out, despite five years of trying. Five years of assuring himself that there was nothing this woman had that he would ever need again, not after she’d left him the way she did.
She had eviscerated him and Joaquin Vargas never forgot a single slight.
He had made a career out of answering each and every one. All those who had laughed at his ambitions, growing up in and out of homelessness in Bilbao. Fighting for every scrap, until it occurred to him that what he was good at was the fight. Therefore, why not make the scraps bigger?
That was how he’d battled his way to his first million. Then several more millions. He’d been reveling in that accomplishment the summer Princess Amalia had wrecked him, then compounded that sin by leveling him when she’d left.
Unforgivable offenses, by his reckoning.
Joaquin had responded the only way he could. The only way he knew how. By exponentially increasing his wealth and holdings so that now he was one of the billionaires the world took such pleasure in claiming to hate.
He imagined he would hate billionaires too, were he still where he’d begun.
But in a world where there were billionaires, Joaquin had long ago decided that he might as well be one of them. Better that than be stepped on by someone else’s billionaire shoe.
But all of the focus and fury that had defined his life and meteoric rise seemed to melt away from him, because he was kissing Amalia again. And she tasted the way he remembered. Like the lie he had believed for too long, that summer. Her soft, yielding lips. The little noise she made in the back of her throat.
Her taste, God help him. Innocent, when he knew better. Unutterably sweet, still.
At least this time around he was prepared.
Joaquin set her away from him, but didn’t let go of her slender shoulders. More slender than he recalled, he thought, and then hated himself for entertaining even an inkling of the concern for her she certainly didn’t deserve.
“I warned you not to come back here,” he reminded her, his voice raw. “Or perhaps you were not paying such close attention, so focused were you on making certain I knew my place.”
Her singular blue eyes were too wide, too bright. But it was her lips that caught his attention. He had always loved them swollen from his. Today was no exception.
It was harder than it should have been to focus on anything but that as his hunger for her stormed through him as if she had never betrayed him.
But he forced himself to study her closely, because he needed to remember that the woman he looked at now—elegant from head to toe, draped in cashmere with her hair swept up into something fussy—this was the real woman. This was the Princess she had chosen over him. The girl who’d captured his heart, dancing in the moonlight with her black hair all around her like a careless shadow—she was the dream. She was someone he’d made up.
And he’d paid the price for his fancy.
“You don’t understand,” Amalia said quietly.
And as he watched, she blinked a few times, then straightened. Her expression shifted from the hints he’d seen of her emotions to something opaque. She looked distant, yet calm, and he felt that as a kind of loss, because she was different now. She’d been so vibrant, so bright, that summer. The very hint of his disapproval had made her tear up.
Joaquin found he didn’t like the evidence that she had grown while they’d been apart. For in his head, whenever he thought of her—and he did not like to admit how often he thought of her—she was still his unexpected princess. Perhaps crueler than he’d given her credit for at first, but then, she had been so young. Perhaps no longer the innocent he’d discovered here, sitting in the sun, eating fruits far less sweet than she was.
Beneath his hands he could feel the difference in her. She was bonier, perhaps. But stronger.
“What choice did I have?” she asked him now, sounding very nearlyserene.An insult, surely, when he was nothing like serene himself. Not in her presence. That she could act otherwise was like salt against an open wound. “There was no possibility, ever, that the Crown Princess of Ile d’Montagne could have a relationship with you outside the privacy of this island. You must know this.”
“Is this where you tell me that you had no say in this matter? I think we know that is another lie. We all have choices, Amalia. It is only that some of them are more pleasant than others.”
