Chapter Seven #2
Climbing into the bed she’d never shared before, wearing long silk pyjamas with buttons running the length of the top, Alessia leaned her back against the headboard and reached for her book.
She always read in bed but tonight was painfully aware she was using her novel as a prop.
She imagined that, for Gabriel, sharing a bed with a woman was no big deal.
She wished it wasn’t a big deal for her too, but apart from the one night they’d shared, this was her first time and her nerves had grown so big that she wasn’t sure if they were causing the nausea rampaging in her stomach or if baby hormones were to blame.
When he finally left the bathroom, she took one look at him and her heart juddered, the ripples spreading through her like wildfire.
Wearing only a pair of snug black briefs that bulged at the front and accentuated the rugged athleticism of his physique, she doubted Adonis himself could have made a greater impact.
She’d seen him entirely naked, of course, but they’d spent that night entwined, and she’d seen him in shorts on the balcony that morning, but the balustrade had hidden much of him.
She hadn’t had the opportunity to take in everything about him with one sweep of her eyes.
All the disparate parts had come together and as he stalked to the bed, eyes softer.
..and yet more alive...than they’d been when she’d last looked into them, her most intimate parts became molten liquid, and all she could think was that he was the sexiest man to roam the earth or heavens.
The mattress made only the slightest movement as he slipped between the bedsheets but it was movement enough to stop her from breathing. His whispered words from the chapel garden rang in her ear again. ‘Tonight, I will give you something else to remember this day by.’
She gripped her book harder and pressed the top of her thighs together as if that could stop the pulsing heat that was spreading from down low in her pelvis.
The thuds of her heart were suddenly deafening.
She sensed his gaze turn to her. Alessia’s lungs squeezed so tightly there was no chance of getting air into them even if she could breathe.
This must be the moment that he reached for her and took her in his arms...
A hard scrub of his body had finally cleansed Gabriel of the unwelcome anger inflamed by Alessia’s stubborn insistence that she accompany him to Madrid.
Every time she left the castle it was under the flash of camera lenses.
He accepted that those flashes and having the press on her heels—having to smile politely and answer their questions—was something she considered a normal part of her life, but she had to accept too that it was not the kind of life he was willing to live.
He’d been upfront about it and it was not something he was prepared to compromise on.
But he did accept that he would have to get used to a degree of press intrusion, at least for a short period.
As Alessia had rightly pointed out, the moment their marriage was made public, the circus would begin.
That didn’t mean he had to feed the vultures.
A refusal to engage with them or give them anything remotely newsworthy would make the press quickly bore of him.
He doubted the press would ever bore with Alessia.
On top of being breathtakingly beautiful and photogenic, she was a style icon to millions.
She sold magazines and generated social media clicks by doing nothing but be herself, and, he had to admit, raised great awareness for the charities she patronised as a result.
Staring at her now, he could see from the rigid way she held herself, her clenched jaw and the whites of her knuckles where she held her book, that her anger still lingered.
And there was something else in her body language too, there in the tiny tremors of her body.
.. Alessia was as aware of him as he was of her.
Having had enough of the game of silence, Gabriel plucked the book from her hand, then leaned over her to place it on her antique bedside table. He caught the intake of her breath at the same moment the soft fruity scent of Alessia hit his senses.
Had any woman ever smelt so good? Not in his lifetime.
With his back propped against the velvet headboard, he kept his gaze on her until she finally turned her face and those amazing dark velvet eyes locked onto him.
‘Let me put your mind at ease,’ he said. ‘I don’t have a lover stashed in Madrid or anywhere. My last relationship ended months ago. I’m strictly monogamous.’
He was rewarded with continued silence.
‘And you?’ he prompted when she did nothing but gaze into his eyes as if searching for something. ‘Are you monogamous too?’
Her teeth grazed her bottom lip. ‘I suppose.’
Surprised at her equivocation, he raised a brow. ‘Suppose? Surely it’s a question that requires only a yes or no answer.’
‘Then... Yes.’
Something dark coiled inside him, as unexpected as it was disarming, but he controlled it. ‘You don’t look certain.’
‘I am.’
He stared hard into her brown eyes. His expertise at reading people meant Gabriel knew when someone was lying to him.
Alessa was not being truthful. He was certain of it.
Which begged the question of why she was lying.
As far as he was aware, she’d never been linked to a man so she was discreet in her affairs, probably conducting them all within the castle or in the homes of trusted friends.
When it came to cheating, though, he imagined things would get trickier.
There were tabloids he knew who would pay a small fortune for a story of Princess Alessia being a love cheat.
If she wasn’t a love cheat then why the hesitation about being monogamous?
Whatever the answer, the darkness thickened and coiled tighter, and tightened his vocal chords too, and it was a real struggle to keep his voice moderate.
‘I don’t care what you got up to in your past but I will not accept you taking lovers.
’ He bore his gaze into hers so there could be no misunderstanding.
‘You don’t wish to be humiliated by me travelling without you, and I will not suffer the humiliation of being cuckolded.
We’re married now which means it’s you and me, and only you and me. Is that clear?’
Alessia fought the very real urge to laugh. She was quite sure it would come out sounding hysterical.
What would he say if she told him the truth, that he’d been her first? Which incidentally meant he would also be her last.
But how could she tell him that now when she should have told him weeks ago, before things had gone too far between them?
How could he forgive her for it? If she hadn’t been so inexperienced she would have realised he hadn’t put a condom on, but as it was, she’d made the fatal assumption that he’d taken care of things while she’d been in a blissful bubble of sensual feeling.
If she’d told him she was a virgin then the subject of contraception would definitely have come up—one thing she knew about her new husband was that he did not leave anything to chance.
If she’d told him she was a virgin he would never have made love to her...
‘Are you not going to say anything?’ he asked curtly.
Pushing the bedsheets off her lap, she crossed her legs as she twisted to face him.
The Ice Man stared back at her, his handsome face expressionless, large hands folded loosely against his taut abdomen.
For the beat of a moment the temptation to drag her fingers through the dark hair covering his muscular chest and press down where his heart beat made her skin tingle.
‘What do you want me to say?’ she asked.
His eyes flashed, but other than that, his expression remained unreadable. ‘Whatever’s going on in your pretty head would be a start.’
She felt a flare of pleasure at the compliment.
‘Trust me, you don’t want to know what’s in my head.
’ She linked her fingers together to stop herself, again, from dragging them over his supremely masculine chest. ‘But let me put your mind at ease—I didn’t take my vows lightly.
I knew that making them meant I was committing myself to you for the rest of my life, and only you. ’
His nostrils flared. ‘Good.’
‘But so we are clear, I am now your wife but that doesn’t make me your possession.’
His wife...
‘I never said you were.’
‘I just wanted to make that clear.’
He leaned forwards, closer to her, a wry expression on his face. ‘You did.’
Alessia had no idea why the knots in her belly had loosened so much.
If she didn’t know better, she would say Gabriel had sounded jealous, but then she reminded herself that if he were, it would only be from a proprietorial sense and not from a place of emotion like her own bout of jealousy had come from that morning.
Grazing her bottom lip, she suddenly blurted out, ‘Do you really think I’m pretty?’
He stared at her as if she’d asked the most stupid question in the world. ‘Yes.’
‘Really?’
He pulled a cynical face. ‘I can’t be the first man to have told you that.’
‘Oh, I’ve been told I’m pretty by lots of people but I never know whether to believe them or not.
’ She shrugged. ‘My family are biased, and people like to ingratiate themselves with me. Then there are all the trolls out there who like to tell me that I’m pig ugly, so who knows what I should believe. ’
The cynicism vanished. ‘You have trolls?’
‘Everyone in the public eye has trolls.’ She tried not to sound too downbeat about it. If trolls were the worst thing she had to deal with in her privileged life then she had nothing to complain about. ‘Nowadays, it comes with the job.’
‘Who are these people?’
‘Mostly anonymous. It doesn’t matter.’
‘Of course it matters,’ Gabriel disputed roughly.
The thought of anyone sitting in front of their phone or computer and targeting Alessia for their poison.
.. He clasped her hand and leaned closer to her, staring straight into the velvet depths.
‘Anyone who tells you that you’re ugly needs to seek help because you’re more than pretty. You’re beautiful.’
She stilled, the only movement the widening of her eyes and the parting of her lips as she took a sharp intake of breath. A crawl of colour suffused her cheeks. ‘Do you really mean that?’ she whispered.
He drew even closer so the tips of their noses almost touched.
‘You’re beautiful,’ he repeated. ‘So beautiful that sometimes I look at you and think you must have been created by an enchantment.’ And then he did what he’d been aching to do for so long, and tilted his head, brushed his lips to hers and breathed her in.
For the longest time he did nothing but allow his senses to fill with the delicate scent of Alessia’s skin.
Then he kissed her, gentle sweeping movements that slowly deepened until their lips parted in unison and their tongues entwined in a private dance that sent sensation shooting through him like an electric current through his veins.
All these weeks, Alessia’s scent and taste had haunted him, memories so strong he’d come to believe he’d imagined just how intoxicating they were.
His memories hadn’t lied. Hooking an arm around her waist and pulling her to him, he fed himself on kisses that were as headily addictive and as potent as the strongest aphrodisiac could be.
With a soft sigh, she sank fully into him, returning his hunger with a ravenousness that only fed his burning arousal even more.
Tightly she wrapped her arms around his neck, hands and fingers clasping the back of his head, her perfect breasts pressed against his chest, as the passion that had caught them in its grips all those weeks ago cast its tendrils back around them.
From the first whisper of his breath against her lips, Alessia had been reduced to nothing but sensation.
The dark taste of Gabriel and the burning thrills of his touch raged through her flesh and veins, feeding the craving for him that she’d carried in every cell of her body since the night they’d. ..
‘No!’