Chapter Seven
WHEN HE DIDN’T MOVE, she felt her scowl deepen.
“Please,” she said, searching his gaze. “You can’t say all these things to me and not show me, Kyriakos.”
Though Aikaterini could see from the way he stared down at her that he intended to do exactly that. Exactly nothing.
She could not accept it.
Everything in her became part of the same hot rush of what she could only think of as fury, but it wasn’t that simple. She could feel her hips cradling him, that great big length of him, and something about that felt like knowledge. Like wisdom.
And so she didn’t think or second-guess the urge that flooded her then.
She angled herself up slightly and wrapped her arms around his neck, aware that doing so pressed her breasts against his chest, flattening them in a way that made everything inside of her feel dizzy and giddy and good.
And then the way he had done already so many times, and this time not as some kind of strange object lesson, she lifted her head and pressed her mouth to his.
Not the way she’d kissed Venediktos, but the way Kyriakos kissed her.
It was as if the world started spinning in the opposite direction, and faster than before. It was as if everything suddenly became clear.
Because it had been a glorious sort of assault on her senses, the way he’d kissed her. The way he’d blown open doors she hadn’t known were there, much less closed up tight.
But doing this herself—opening her mouth and licking her way into his—was less like being pushed off the side of a cliff, and more like leaping out into thin air to discover that she had wings.
And she, by God, intended to fly.
The more she kissed him, the better it got.
She could feel his marvelous body all over her, pressing her down into the bed.
He was keeping her held down at her hips with all of that heat and contact, and she only got softer and hotter there.
The only thing she could think to do was to arch into him so that she could keep her mouth on his mouth.
Aikaterini thought she could do this forever.
Kyriakos pulled his mouth away as if he heard her think it. And then he laughed, there against her mouth.
“Okay,” he muttered, and he shook his head, as if he couldn’t help himself. As if his world was spinning too.
She wasn’t sure she understood why it was that hearing him sound shaky made everything in her shake more. Or why the more she shook, the better it all felt.
He pushed himself up and off of her, and when she frowned, he laughed again. “I promise you that I’ll take care of you, Princess. It’s the very least I can do to show you that, as stated by law, the principality will make sure you are always properly seen to.”
She could tell that he meant something specific by those words. Seen to. And her body certainly seemed to know what he meant, even if she didn’t.
He rolled to the side of the bed and stood beside it, but he kept his gaze on her as he shrugged out of his clothes, tossing them aside as if he didn’t care if he ever saw them again.
As if all he cared about was her.
Because the whole time he did this, all of that dark hazel intensity was hot on her.
“Come here,” he ordered her softly.
Aikaterini had the urge to argue, though she didn’t know why—because she didn’t feel like arguing with him. She had certainly never fought with Venediktos while nakedness was involved.
But then, a voice in her whispered, what would have been the point? There were no sparks to strike with Venediktos.
She didn’t have to dig into that thought to understand it. And to hate that she understood it, though that didn’t make it any less true.
There were nothing but sparks between her and Kyriakos, and so far, fighting with him had somehow lit them both up.
She was going to have to file that away to consider later.
Assuming there was any version of later where she wasn’t as consumed with this man, this impossible Prince, this husband, as she felt right now.
But in the meantime, she obeyed him. And that felt like its own kind of electrical current.
She crawled toward him, and was very aware of the way flames danced in his gaze as he watched her do it.
When she reached him, she knelt up in front of him and then let out a gasp when he hauled her up off the bed and set her next to it. In front of him in all his naked glory.
But that was good, because it gave her the opportunity to study him. The sheer, relentless maleness of him and how…different he was.
She expected him to be smooth everywhere, like marble. Like Venediktos had been smooth, if with significantly fewer muscles—
Though she found that she did not feel distant and intellectual about this experience at all. And she no longer wished to think about the things that had happened here, in this room, with anyone else.
And in any case, there was no comparison.
Kyriakos bore no resemblance to any other man she had ever seen, on a screen or in real life.
For one thing, there was all that hair on his chest. It was dark, dusted over that chest of his and then picking up again below his navel.
It became thicker and darker as it went lower and eventually framed that giant, astonishing bit of hardware that stood proudly between them.
If asked, even an hour ago, she would have said that she preferred the true marble version of masculinity. The sort she’d seen on statues and in innumerable pieces of art and that she’d thought, until now, was simply how men were supposed to look.
Refined, not rough.
But there was something about Kyriakos’s hair-roughened chest that made her feel as if everything within her was melting into something scalding.
Like she couldn’t catch her breath. Like for some reason, the only thing she could think about doing was tipping her entire body forward and burying her face right there between his pectoral muscles.
Kyriakos had other ideas.
He turned her around, and with that same brusque efficiency that he’d showed on their wedding night, he rid her of her ball gown. He made a low noise when he peeled the dress away from her corset, and his gaze was so hot it made her shudder when she looked back at him over her shoulder.
Then he spun her around again so she was facing him, and his whole face seemed particularly and notably hungry. A hunger that seemed to reverberate inside of her, making parts of her she’d never considered much seem to bloom into life.
“Take your hair down,” he told her, in that same hoarse command.
As she moved to obey him yet again, without even thinking about it this time, he sank down to his knees before her.
And then there were so many sensations that Aikaterini didn’t know what to do with them.
She pulled the pins out of her hair because he’d told her to, and ran her fingers through it so that the dark weight of it tumbled down past her shoulders, but the only thing she could really concentrate on was the way he was setting about carefully unhooking her stockings from her garters.
He moved around one leg first, and the way his fingers brushed against her thigh made that hot, rebellious bit of flesh between her legs ache. And throb. And ache some more.
“The fact that you wear garters kills me,” he muttered, in a low voice that was even rougher than before.
“Garters are efficient,” she said, though she felt…almost as if her teeth might start chattering at any moment, though she was the very opposite of cold. “I don’t know why everyone doesn’t wear garters.”
“Believe me, Princess. Neither do I.”
He rolled her stocking down the length of her leg, off her foot, and tossed it aside.
Then he started on the other one, and there was something shocking and marvelous about looking down at him—such a big, dangerously shaped man—as he knelt before her, putting all of that fierce intensity and focus into his task.
She could no longer tell which parts of her weren’t trembling.
When he was done, he slid his hands up to her waist, tucked in tight as it was in the corset, and, for a moment, only gazed up at her.
There was something deeply shattering in his gaze. It moved through her with a certain ruthlessness that felt inexhaustible. She had the sense that everything was shifting, that it was being knocked down, crushed down into dust, and made entirely new.
That she wasn’t sure she could breathe hardly seemed to signify.
Kyriakos lifted her up, and pivoted so that he could place her on the bed. He set her on the very edge of it and then she found herself making sounds she couldn’t even describe as he moved with her, propping her legs up over his shoulders.
She wanted to push him away. She wanted to drag him closer. She didn’t know what she wanted because she wanted all of it. All of him.
All of this, whatever this was.
Then he leaned closer and ripped her panties right off her body.
It was shocking. It was glorious.
Aikaterini forgot all about it when he bent even closer and sucked what felt like the whole of that molten hot part of her between her legs directly into his mouth.
She burst apart, like a sudden, deadly spike of flame.
But he held her where she was. And when she was aware again, he was still exactly where she’d left him—only now he was licking his way into that place that she was beginning to think had been meant entirely for him.
Made for him.
Because he knew exactly what to do. How to taste her and tease her, how to chase her from one wild peak to the next.
At first she felt self-conscious, as if the whole of the principality was pressed in all around the bed, staring at them, and judging her for allowing what surely must be a depraved act to happen—to keep happening—
But every time he tossed her into the center of that fire and let her burn, Aikaterini cared less.
And soon enough, she fell all the way back against the mattress, aware that the way the corset clutched her in tight made it all better. Or worse. It was like fuel on that fire.
She shook and shook, aware only distantly that she was crying out every time.