Chapter Five #2
“What do you mean?” he asked, as calmly as he could manage.
“I mean… All of that. I don’t…” She shook her head. “It’s just so confusing and physical and I don’t think—”
An impossible notion took root inside of him then. It was incomprehensible—and yet once it settled in, it seemed to grow, until it seemed not only plausible…but probable.
Though he knew that it could not be true, he found he had to ask.
He reached over and smoothed an errant bit of hair back behind her ear. And he watched her skin prickle into goose bumps at the touch even as she turned her head away.
“Aikaterini,” he said, quietly. Gently. “Look at me.”
He didn’t think she would, and then she did. Her gray eyes were wide, and almost…afraid. Wary, certainly.
Giving more credence to the ludicrous possibility that he was finding more and more possible—even likely—by the moment.
“Are you trying to tell me that you’ve never done that before?” he asked.
“Of course not,” she breathed, sounding horrified. Her eyes were wide. “I don’t even know what that was.”
“Aikaterini.”
There were too many competing thoughts in his head, then. But he couldn’t get ahead of himself. He couldn’t let himself assume. Not about something like this.
“Aikaterini,” he said again, and he knew he had to be careful. So very careful. “Did you and my cousin share a bed?”
She looked at him as if that was an utterly foolish question. Her frown took on a sort of pitying cast, as if she couldn’t believe he’d said something like that out loud. “Of course we did. Are you mad? What kind of question is that?”
It was tempting to stop there. But she’d been so tight around his finger. She hadn’t seemed to understand what was happening to her body when she shattered all around him.
There was more than that. On their first night in this room, he’d kept thinking that she seemed astonishingly innocent.
It couldn’t be possible. He was sure it wasn’t possible.
“And what did you do in this bed?” he asked her.
She shook her head at him. “Why are you asking such bizarre things?”
Aikaterini was getting the natural color back in her cheeks. Her frown was taking root between her brows. Kyriakos was sure that he could read her desire to turn and storm off to her room all over her.
So he reached over and hooked his hand around one upper arm. “These are very important questions,” he told her, keeping his voice level. Quiet. And sure. “And I’m afraid that I do need you to answer them.”
She looked down at the place where he gripped her. And when she looked back up at him, she looked completely befuddled.
And a little bit angry, besides.
“If you must know, we did what people always do in beds,” she told him sharply. “We slept together.”
“Of course. But before the sleeping, or perhaps in the middle of the night, did you do anything else?”
“Like what?” she asked, looking at him as if he was being deliberately obtuse. “Perhaps play a few hands of Kontsina?”
“No, my lovely Princess bride,” he said, very deliberately. He was not talking about a card game. “I’m talking about fucking.”
She actually flinched at that. “I would never describe anything that happened between Venediktos and me in such crude terms.”
“What I am trying to ask you,” he said, and it was hard to hold on to his cool the more agitated she became, “is whether or not my cousin ever took this part of his body—” he gestured to his own cock, somehow gratified to watch her eyes widen as she noted the size of it and how it pressed out against his trousers “—and put it in the very place where my hand was, in the car.”
Her mouth dropped open. Her cheeks blazed with color. She couldn’t seem to look away from his groin now that he’d pointed it out. Not exactly his brightest idea.
Kyriakos wanted more than anything to simply pull her toward him and show her exactly what kind of question he was asking, but he didn’t.
Because he had a suspicion and he couldn’t let it go.
“We planned to have children one day,” she said, as if the words hurt her mouth as they formed against her tongue. “But that day hadn’t happened yet.”
“That is not an answer to the question I asked.”
“This is absurd.” She stepped back from him, and her hands were on her hips again. “I don’t understand why you think you have the right to go storming into my memories, demanding answers and asking all these vulgar questions.”
“You don’t?” His head tilted to one side. “That makes me think no, none of that ever happened. It makes me wonder what did happen.”
“We slept in the same bed,” she told him, with the air of someone who was being forced to say things that were so obvious that he should have been embarrassed for asking them. He was not. “We held each other. But no, in answer to your remarkably vulgar question, we did not…do that.”
Aikaterini waved her hand in the direction of his cock when she said that. She looked as if she might faint.
And there it was.
There was a kind of deep, ruthlessly male satisfaction inside of him then, like a deep, atavistic roar. Kyriakos wasn’t proud of it. But it was there all the same.
It took a Herculean effort to control himself.
To keep his hands to himself. To keep from shouting out the truth to her, since she still didn’t seem to grasp the situation.
To keep himself from grabbing her by the neck, throwing her on the bed, and showing her in every possible way that he could make her his.
Only his.
He made himself step back instead. “What kind of education did you get?” he demanded. “What did you think consummating a marriage entailed?”
“Sleeping together,” she said, very deliberately. Each syllable as sharp as a knife.
And she was the Serene Highness of Zaccaria. So she did not tack on things like obviously, you idiot to the end of that sentence.
But he felt it was implied.
“Consummation involves sex,” he told her after a moment, trying his best to sound matter-of-fact. “You have to have sex, Aikaterini, to properly consummate any marriage, but this is of particular importance in a royal one where the bloodline is of great concern.”
“Right,” she said, in the same tone that made it clear she thought he was an idiot of the highest degree. “We slept together. Every night.”
“That’s not sex,” he managed to say without raising his voice. It might have been the greatest act of diplomacy he had ever achieved. He gazed at her lovely face. “How could you possibly be this isolated? Have you never looked at a single website in your life?”
“What are you talking about?” she demanded, and she was getting louder now.
“Venediktos and I slept together, Kyriakos. Every night, in fact. We were both perfectly aware that when it was time to try to have children, there were additional things that we would do to make that happen. I’m not the half-wit you seem to imagine. ”
“No, my darling wife,” he agreed, because he could see it—just barely.
What tutor would have taken it upon themselves to teach the Princess about her sexuality?
Clearly her family had never bothered to do it, either.
And why would this woman, who had made her whole life a virtuous expression of her duty, go scrabbling around on the internet to look for things she hadn’t known she was missing?
He remembered what his cousin had been like with her.
They had been inseparable. Best friends since they were small, as everyone always said, including the two of them.
He wouldn’t have been surprised if the palace staff and every single member of each of their respective families had assumed that the two of them had figured out sex on their own.
That made some kind of sense—if he squinted at it.
“No,” he said again, as something inside of him seemed to shift, heavily. Then click into place. “I don’t think you’re any kind of half-wit at all, Aikaterini. But I do very much believe that you’re a virgin.”
When her mouth dropped open, he took hold of her again and steered over to the bed. Once there, he simply picked her up, and set her down in the middle of it. Then he crawled up, fully clothed, to stretch out beside her.
He propped himself up on one elbow, and she was so busy frowning at him that he thought it took her moment to realize that they were both horizontal. In what some might call a compromising position.
“I’m not going to leap on you without invitation,” he told her, drawing on some level of patience he’d had absolutely no idea he possessed.
Until now. Kyriakos held her gaze. “But I am going to need you to show me exactly what you mean when you say that the two of you slept together, and what sort of sex you think you had. Because I am very much of the opinion that you had none at all.”