A Royal Wedding(58)

He knew her so well now. He could see the way the color washed across her face, and knew it would be the same all over her body. She would pinken as her body readied itself for him. Were he to reach for her under the table, he would find her hot and wet beneath his hands. He felt himself harden. He could not seem to get enough of her, no matter how often they sated each other. No matter how easily she came apart in his hands.

“I am no longer a princess,” she said, her voice husky, a gleam of awareness in her magnificent eyes. “And you never use my name.”

“I use your name,” he contradicted her, smiling slightly, “in certain circumstances.” He did not have to spell those circumstances out. Her flush deepened, as they both remembered the last time he’d called out her name, sometime before the dawn, when he’d been so deep inside of her he would have been happy to die there. She made him feel like a man, he realized. Not the soldier he had been, not the King he was now, but a man.

“There is more to life than sex,” she said, and he saw a darkness pass through her eyes—some kind of shadow. But she blinked, and it was gone.

“Apparently not for you,” he said lazily. “Apparently, you are bored with everything that happens outside our bed. One solution would be to make sure you never leave it.”

“Promises, promises,” she chided him, a gleam in her eyes. “Who would run the country if we spent all our time in bed?”

The man was insatiable, Lara thought.

And what was so astonishing was that she, who had always enjoyed the company of men but had certainly never felt compelled by them, was too.

He had her in the suites of hotels where they stayed while on royal engagements, her back up against the wall, his hand and mouth busy beneath her skirts. He seduced her on a speedboat as they made their way to one of the more remote clans, only accessible across a system of mountain lakes. There was no place he did not look at her with that dark passion, that promise, alive in his gray eyes. And no place where she did not immediately respond, no matter how inappropriate it might be.

It was lust, she told herself. And unexpected chemistry.

And she was no better.

She climbed astride him in the backseat of the plush limousine as the motorcade wove through the twisting streets of the capital city, rocking them both into bliss before a command appearance at the city opera. She had taken it upon herself to explore him in every room she could discover in the old castle—behind doors, on ancient chairs, under the fierce and disapproving glares of her ancestors high above in their glowering state portraits.

It was only lust, she thought. And lust was fine. Lust was allowed. Lust would fade. Though she could not help but note, every now and again as the summer wore on, that the more she touched him, the more she tasted him, the less she worried about the ways in which she might have lost herself in this strange little fairy-tale.

She was not an idiot. She did not, in truth, wish to govern, and doubted she would be any good at it, anyway. She would have no idea how one even went about it. Lara had no particular interest in politics, but she could, she realized, use the position she found herself in for good. There was no excuse for lying about a castle, of all places, feeling bored and put upon. How she would have slapped herself for even thinking such a thing, once upon a time, when her paycheck had had to last far too long and cover books and tuition as well as pay her rent! Appalled at herself, Lara began to involve herself in charity work—to get a sense of what her people, her subjects, her countrymen really needed.

And what she needed, too, if she was to stay here. If she was really to do this long-term. She pretended it was a lifestyle decision she was mulling over, like when she’d decided to stay in Colorado after college and make her life in Denver. She pretended it was a decision about a location, and about a job.

After all, fairy-tales weren’t real. Not even this one.

“You are just like your father, may he rest in peace,” an old woman told her as Lara toured one of the local hospitals, visiting the helpless and the needy, talking to the overworked staff. I can help these people, she had been thinking just moments before, as she’d tried to smile at a little girl gone bald from the cancer treatments, clearly the old woman’s grandchild. Maybe that’s why I’m here.

“I beg your pardon?” she asked, fighting to keep her smile in place as the old woman held on to her hands. It was not the physical contact she minded, she realized, but that wild intensity in the woman’s eyes.

“He was a good man,” the woman said, in the dialect of the upper mountains. “And a great king. I give thanks every day that you have returned to us, to bless us and help us prosper as your family has done for generations, no thanks to that evil woman who stole you away in the first place!”