“Reflecting.”
“On?”
“Responsibility.”
“How boring. I’m surprised I didn’t find you drunk and facedown in that pool.”
The severity in his expression didn’t ease. His hold on her arm sent glittering sensations through her bloodstream. She ought to shake him off. What would people think if they returned together? Nothing good, that was certain.
Such a remarkable man, though. One she really didn’t want to share with a party full of beautiful women. She wanted him to be hers. To look on her with adoration and desire.
His expression in the moonlight was cool and decidedly intent. Ruthless, even. But there was hunger buried deep beneath his layers of control. Avid male need that she had seen often enough to recognize it. His narrowed eyes focused on her mouth, telling her his speculation was along the same lines as her own.
“Don’t you want to throw caution to the wind sometimes? I do.” She flipped her hair behind her shoulder again. Look at me. Want me. “Malak gets away with it all the time. I’m tired of being the good girl.”
“Are you?” Something in his silky tone and the way he flicked his gaze down her front wound around her like ribbons, exciting and wicked. Tightening and binding, compressing her breaths, yet making her feel free.
“Am I tired? Or a good girl? I’m both.” She thought of her charity work, her carefully cultivated image of kindness and purity, her endless striving to earn her mother’s approval and her stalwart presence beside the men in her life as they took their own self-destructive paths.
All her life, she had tried to be like her mother. They had all thought Queen Namani so perfect, but she hadn’t been. Why should Galila live up to something that was an illusion? Live up to the expectations of a woman who not only hadn’t held herself to such high standards after all but was also dead.
“I’m ready to do what I want.” She pressed herself to his front and lifted her mouth.
“I don’t take advantage of inebriated women,” he said, but with a glance toward the light of the party. His cheeks hollowed, giving his profile a chillingly ruthless appearance. His hands on her arms tightened in some internal struggle.
“I’m not that drunk,” she dismissed in a sultry voice. She was low on inhibition, certainly, but more intoxicated by the excitement he made her feel.
They were in a faraway, unlit corner of the garden, where the scent of roses and herbs, orange blossom and frangipani coated the air, making it feel thick as a blanket around her.
“Kiss me,” she demanded when he hesitated.
His hands almost began to push her away, but he only held her like that, staring into her uplifted face. For three heartbeats that shook the entire world, they stood like that, as he debated and came to a decision.
With a muttered imprecation, he circled his arms around her. His fingers dove into her hair, tilting back her head as his mouth came down to cover hers.
For another pulse of time, that was all it was. One mouth against another while the universe seemed to open itself, leaving her utterly vulnerable yet transfixed by the vast beauty of it.
With a harsh noise in his throat, he dragged his lips across hers. Instantly they were engulfed in a kiss that was beyond anything she had ever experienced. Intimate and passionate. Hot and damp and demanding. A statement of possession but with a quality that swept her into abandoning herself willingly. Joyfully.
The texture of his tongue met her own, boldly erotic. She reacted with a moan and mashed herself into him so hard her breasts hurt, but it felt good, too. The contact assuaged the tips that stung like bites. When he started to ease back, she whimpered and pressed her hand to the cloth covering his head, urging him to continue kissing her with this mad passion. She wanted to feel his hair, taste his skin, strip naked and know the weight of him over her.
She wanted to know how that hard flesh that was pressing against her belly would feel stroking inside her.
With an abrupt move and a ragged hiss of indrawn air, he pulled back. “Not here.”
Had he read her mind? Her body?
“My room,” she whispered, already plotting their discreet path through the halls of the palace.
“Mine,” he stated. She couldn’t tell if it was a preference of location or if he was staking a claim on her. Either way, she let him take her hand and drag her from the garden toward the stairs that led up to the balcony outside the ballroom.
She balked in the shadows at the bottom of the steps. “My lipstick. People will know.”
“I thought you were ready to take control of your own life?”
In the slant of light, she saw a mercilessness curl at the corner of his mouth. He pivoted them a few steps into the shadows beside the wall of the steps.
She was more than ready to give herself to him, but this was her home. Her brother’s wedding. She was the Princess of Khalia. She was sober enough to know that she had to be discreet about having an affair, not parade it through the middle of a state ceremony.
But as her would-be lover pressed her to the stones that had barely cooled in the hours since sundown, she forgot her misgivings. Her hands found the heat of his neck and she parted her lips, moaning as he kissed her again.
He transported her to that place of magic they seemed to create between them.
As she lost herself to his kiss again, he stroked her hip and thigh, urging her to pick up her knee and make space for him between her legs. Cool air grazed her skin as he shifted her skirt up, up and out of the way, touching—
She gasped at the first contact of fingertips against the back of her thigh. Arrows of pleasure shot into her core, making her yearn so badly her eyes grew damp along with her underthings. She arched her neck as he trailed his mouth down her throat.
It was exquisite and joyful and...
Wait.
He was hard where he pressed between her legs, but something was off.
She touched the side of his face, urging him to lift his head. There was heat in his glittering eyes, but it was banked behind a cooler emotion. Something deliberate. His skin might have been flushed with arousal, but his expression was dispassionate.
He wasn’t as involved as she was.
Hurt and unease began to worm through her, but before she could fully react, she heard a gasp and a giggle above them. Someone said a pithy, “Get a room.”
“That’s the princess!” a female voice hissed.
“With who?” She knew that demanding masculine voice. She looked up to see several faces peering down at them over the wall of the balcony, one of them her brother’s. He did not look pleased.
Did her lover release her leg to find a modicum of decorum? Not right away. Not before she caught a dark look of satisfaction in his hard features.
Gaze
