Penelope and Prince Charming (Nvengaria #1)(27)
Penelope would climb into her bed, lay her head on the pillow, and close her eyes, unaware that Damien watched, in pain and need, from behind the wall.
“Most definitely I will have him nail it shut,” Damien finished. “And have him prepare me a cold bath while he is at it.”
Penelope leaned her forehead against his cheek, her eyes half closed while she savored his touch. Her breasts were heavy in his hands. Damien could pull the nightrail down and suckle them, taste her until he was satisfied.
He did not believe a day would come when he was satisfied with her.
“I do not want you to leave,” she whispered.
“I do not want to either.” Damien traced her cheek, his silver ring catching the light. “But I should.”
“No.” Penelope slid her hands up the backs of his arms, palms warm through his thin shirt. “Not yet. I need to touch you. I do not know why.” Her fingers bit down through the fabric, points of desperation.
“I know why. It is the same need I feel.” Damien smiled into her skin. “We will burst into flames, I think, my Penelope.”
Penelope’s hands moved from his arms to his shoulders, then to his neck, touching the hollow of his bared throat. Damien imagined those interested hands roving the intimate places of his body, and he groaned softly.
She kissed the corner of his mouth. Her lips were innocent, wanting to learn. Damien slid his hands from her nightrail, pressed her mouth open with hard fingers, and kissed her deeply.
He tasted sweet innocence experiencing the first longings of a woman. Penelope moved her tongue against his in an unpracticed manner, and the heat inside Damien pulsed. Need surged, and his reason began to drain away.
Dear God, I am being punished for every sin I have ever committed.
He’d done them all—lechery, wrath, envy, gluttony, avarice, sloth, and most of all pride. His damned pride. The curse of Nvengarians, pride was.
Penelope’s fingers tangled his hair. She played her lips over his, her eager kisses driving him mad.
Too soon, and the prophecy will be broken. The words pounded in Damien’s brain, as though someone else spoke them.
Why not have her? another, more treacherous voice suggested. Tip her to the floor, strip off the dressing gown and nightrail, and have her right here. They would marry; what difference did it make whether Damien took her now or later? The betrothal ceremony would be only a few days hence. Why wait?
It took the iron will that had seen Damien alive through the mountains of Nvengaria and into the Transylvanian Alps with nothing but the rags on his back, to stop kissing Penelope.
He eased his mouth from hers, her little whimper of regret flaring hunger through him. Damien took Penelope’s hands in a firm grip and clasped them between his.
“Penelope, love, this is the most difficult thing I have ever said in my life, but we must stop.”
Chapter 8
Penelope gazed at him with half-closed eyes, her lips red from his kisses. She was ripe for bedding and a so-convenient bed waited nearby.
“I do not wish to stop,” she said.
“I know, love. But if I lose this gamble … ” Damien would be stood against a cold wall in Nvengaria, while soldiers aimed muskets at him. Alexander, smiling, would take the first shot. Damien would deserve it, he thought, for not fulfilling his bargain to his people, for not being their hope.
He could have refused the ring and told Misk and his men to take themselves off when they’d found him in Paris. Instead, Damien had realized that he had a chance to put right all that his father had destroyed. A fierce protectiveness had awoken inside him, which had only burgeoned when he’d ridden at long last over the pass in the Nvengarian mountains and looked down to the lush river valley that was Nvengaria. His home.
“Gamble?” Penelope asked.
Damien inhaled sharply. He once had taken refuge with Franciscan monks in Italy, and one of them had taught him how to clear his mind of thought and bodily desires. Damien had never mastered the art of meditation, but he’d learned how to calm himself when the need arose.
The peace he’d found in the monastery eluded him here, but breathing gave him something to focus on besides Penelope’s body.
“I will win,” he said, jaw tight. “We both will.”
“You think the prophecy is making us want each other?” Penelope asked. “That what we feel is not natural?”
Damien moved his gaze to Penelope’s open nightrail and the shadow of her bosom inside it. “No, me wanting you is perfectly natural. You are a beautiful woman.”
She blushed, shy. “You think me beautiful?”
Damien lifted her hand and kissed her fingertips. “Your beauty is—how do you say?—a fact. Not my opinion.”
“No one has ever expressed such an opinion,” Penelope said softly. She kept her gaze cast down, lashes shielding her eyes. Not false maidenly bashfulness; she was embarrassed.
In London, young ladies tried to be sticks, starving themselves to look like narrow cylinders in their gowns. Pale hair, pale faces, pale lips, pale hands—this was the pinnacle of beauty, or so they thought. Walking marble statues, but they were not as lush as real Hellenistic statuary. The Greeks had known how to sculpt a woman.
In Nvengaria, the portrait of beauty was vibrancy. Black hair, blue eyes, high color, a ripe, womanly body. Nvengarians were a temperamental people. They lived at the extremes of anger, joy, love, fear, and elation. Not very restful, but they did not hide their feelings behind stilted conversation and rigid standards of acceptance.