Chapter Six
HIS EYES, SO FULL of fire and need, told her everything she needed to know.
Esme knelt up and slid her palms along his powerful thighs. As she did, she could not mistake the thick impression of his cock or the way it pressed out against the soft fabric of those lounging trousers of his.
He was so big. So hard. He made her mouth water.
Still holding his gaze, she rubbed her cheek against the length of it. And listened to the telltale sign of his breath as it sighed out of him, as if against his will.
But Esme knew the sound of this man’s surrender when she heard it.
Just as she knew the way it echoed inside her, making her feel shivery and magical, bright with yearning in every last cell.
She put her mouth on him, through the fabric, and smiled against him when he jerked. Though he did not push her away. She could feel the tension in him, but if anything, he pressed himself toward her mouth, not away from it.
Esme worked her way up until she could peel the waistband of his trousers down and free him at last. Then she used both of her hands to take him out of the trousers, fully.
She sighed a little, happily, sitting back on her heels.
She let her hands do what they liked, relearning the shape of him, the heavy weight, the bold heat.
Then she wrapped her hands around him, knelt up high again, and took him in her mouth.
She heard him groan but better yet, she could feel it. Then he did it again, the sound even deeper and more raw, like the fire was taking him under.
Like he was already burning alive.
And then his hands were in her hair. He took the thick length in his fists and held her head where he liked it as she licked and sucked and gave herself over to the sheer, dizzying glory of this.
To the sounds he made in the back of his throat and the hint of salt on her tongue as he surged into her mouth.
Esme could feel her whole body respond to the taste of him. To his excitement. To the delicious tension she could feel all through his long, rangy body and the fists in her hair.
She could tell the exact moment he gave himself over to her, completely. When he stopped even pretending to fight, or hold back, or keep himself apart from her in any way. When he stopped doing anything but this.
There was another raw, rough sound and then everything was sensation—so hot, so intense, so them—until he flooded her mouth with the essence of him.
Esme tilted her head back, swallowed him all down, and then smiled up at him. She didn’t wipe away the tears that had gathered in her eyes and trekked down her cheeks, her body’s usual reaction to taking him so deep in her mouth.
She was not at all surprised when his gaze went supernova and he hauled her up, straight off the floor and into his arms.
He carried her over to the bed and she thought he meant to toss her on it, but he clearly remembered that she was pregnant at the last minute. Accordingly, he placed her on the coverlet instead.
Esme was just pleased that he was as swept away by all this as she was tonight. More pleased than she wanted to admit, because it felt a lot less like a victory and a lot more like…something softer.
Something much more fraught with peril than beating Tadeo at his own game.
“What is this thing?” he muttered, rubbing his hands over the silk of the chemise and then pulling it up and over her head.
The look on his face when he saw her naked made her eyes go blurry.
Esme didn’t know what he told himself. She didn’t know how he justified all of these cold and distant years in his own mind.
She only knew what he told her, but that always hinged on the official business of their royal marriage.
The messaging. The positioning. The delicate math of appearances and outreach, glamour and approachability, and what the public’s experience of these things meant in how they perceived the royal family.
It had all been so dry and cold for so long.
And then, of course, they’d had a wildly bright and blurry night that he had, apparently, decided he could simply write off as a mistake and never look at again before he divorced her—something he had always seemed to think he could do without too much public outcry.
The only thing he claimed to care about was what his subjects thought of him and the job he did.
If she hadn’t been pregnant, Esme imagined she’d be locked up with the crisis team, working on messaging that elevated the King’s desire for a divorce into a national necessity.
But tonight had nothing to do with any of that. It had nothing to do with any messaging or crisis management.
This was purely between the two of them. This was a culmination of the same fire that had been right here, between them, for a decade already and counting.
She could see it all over him. Like he’d forgotten how to be cold for a moment—just a moment. Just tonight. And instead he was something like starstruck as he took her in.
All of her.
There was a look of sheer wonder on his face as he crawled onto the bed with her and learned the new contours of her body.
The heaviness of her breasts. The new, darker color of her nipples.
The faint line from her navel down over the insistent swell of her belly.
He took the longest time there, smoothing his hands over the place where their child grew and pressing kisses all along the curve. Esme didn’t know how she kept from crying.
She thought that if he knew what she could see on his face then, he would have stopped this at once. He would have thrown Esme straight out and ordered her not to return.
But he didn’t know. And she wasn’t about to tell him.
Instead, she kept silent—as ordered—and somehow that made everything hotter and more intense as he slid down between her legs, spread them wide, then set his mouth to the molten core of her.
Where she discovered she was even more sensitive than before.
So sensitive that she let out a shuddering sort of sound, because she was already right there—
Tadeo licked into her, growling the way he always had, as if her taste electrified him. As if he was enjoying himself as much as she was. He had been her first, her only. She had heard all sorts of things about what men liked and didn’t like, but Tadeo had never fit into those categories.
There had never been a single part of her, or any possible activity, that he had not thrown himself into the way a person only could when they loved every moment.
Esme knew this, because it was how she felt when she got to explore his marvel of a body and make him shudder beneath her own hands.
Tonight was no different. Tadeo applied himself to the task as if he’d been dying to taste her like this for years. She threw her head back and she arched up against his mouth. She moved her hips and she gave herself over to the slow, insistent, and inexorable build of all that pleasure.
He slid one finger deep inside her, then another. And that made it better. It made everything hotter and wetter and slicker, and when he started to thrust his fingers in and out of her body, Esme simply shattered.
She bucked against him, muffling the sounds she might have made against the back of her hand.
Tadeo climbed back up the bed and lay himself out beside her, then scooped her up so that he could roll her over and arrange her above him.
He settled her on her hands and knees, and it seemed the most natural and inevitable thing in the world to sit up, then guide that marvelous length of him deep inside her.
For a moment, when she sank down on him, it was like the whole world stopped spinning.
It was that glorious, that impossibly right, that good.
It was the same as it always was. It was perfect.
It was scalding hot and it made her want to sob out the pleasure of it, of him. He filled her completely, then slightly more, so it took her a moment to settle in against him. To let her body adjust that last small bit so that she could truly take all of him.
And this time there wasn’t anything the least bit blurry about it.
Esme breathed until she felt herself relax internally. Even if she hadn’t been able to feel it herself, she would have known by the way his gaze sharpened. Those bright blue flames.
Making her wonder if this was the time he’d cause her to simply combust.
After a moment, then, she propped her hands on his chest and began to work herself against him. She rocked herself back and forth. She raised herself up and then slid back down that whole, hard length of him.
He watched her, his hands on her hips to help her and to guide her, that gorgeous face of his filled with passion and command, desire and longing.
She doubted he knew she could see that, too.
Esme bit her lip and every stroke felt like glory. Like them.
Like everything she ever wanted, the way it always had.
The way it always would.
She kept on and on until his head fell back and hers drooped forward, his hands gripping her while he pounded into her from below, until they both exploded all over again—scattering themselves to every part of the Pyrenees. And the galaxy. And any universe that waited beyond.
Esme collapsed against him and he caught her, then pulled her down on top of him. She lay there, spent and giddy, especially because he didn’t toss her aside the way she had assumed he might. He didn’t order her to go. He didn’t ruin this.
She had been so sure he would cut them back down to size that the fact he didn’t made her heart swell inside her chest—until she was terrified that he would hear the way it beat. That he would know how much she loved this sweet heat they’d made and do something to make it cold again.
They lay there in the dark, silent—save for the way their breath sawed out into the dimly lit room.
And she got to drift off to sleep curled up into Tadeo’s side, which was—the way it always was, the way it always had been—the best sleep of her life.
Esme wasn’t exactly surprised to wake up alone the next morning. Hurt, yes. But not surprised.