SHE HAD BEEN a virgin. And he had taken her against a wall—no, a window—with absolutely no finesse.
Then he had left her standing there in a tattered dress, the bright streaks of blue a shocking contrast to that smooth, brown skin. Her small, high breasts and that dark thatch of curls at the apex of her thighs exposed, her hair a dark halo around her face.
Had left her standing there with the command that she join him in his bed tonight, when the fact of the matter was no one should come anywhere near him tonight. And he shouldn’t inflict himself on anyone.
What had been in his mind? Sending everyone away as he had? He had come into the ballroom, waiting for the surge of triumph to flood his veins. Waiting for a sense of completion. Waiting for his lips to form the words to an eloquent speech.
About dark ages rolling forward into the light. But instead he had cleared the room.
Instead, he had done what he seemed compelled to do from some dark place inside him that had purchase on his soul, that he seemed to have no control over, and that was to sabotage the moment. To break. To destroy.
And he still felt no relief. No sense of completion. Nothing but an end. A dark, blank end that offered him nothing but more emptiness. Like a chasm had opened inside him, one that had always been there, but one he now had to admit might always be.
His father was dead. That was supposed to be the key.
But now he couldn’t yell at the old man. Couldn’t scream at him and demand answers. Could never shout at him about the fact it was his fault Felipe’s mother was dead. How it was all his fault.
Felipe swallowed hard, trying to get a handle on himself, on his control. This control he had long prized so much. He should not have Briar come to his room. He should deal with his demons alone.
But he would have her again. Because there was no other choice. Because the hollow feeling inside him was threatening to consume him, and the only moment of peace he’d had since his father’s aide had come and announced the old man’s death had been when he was buried in Briar’s tight, welcoming heat.
It occurred to him as he flung open the doors to his chamber that she might not come. That she might go back to her room. Might hide from him.
She should. There was no question about that.
But if she did he would go after her.
There was also no question about that.
With shaking hands, he poured himself a glass of whiskey then stared down at the amber liquid. He was dangerous enough as it was. Unsteady, unstable. Disorderly. There was no greater sin in his father’s eyes and there never had been.
The thought made a smile curve his lips. He might have wasted some opportunities tonight, but he had rebelled in a rather spectacular fashion. His father had prized all that surface order. Never mind if beneath the surface everything was jagged and destroyed.
Destroying the ballroom appealed to that part of him that wanted to wound the old man still. That hoped his ghost had watched the whole thing.
He looked down at the glass. As on edge as he was he wasn’t entirely certain he should add alcohol to the equation. For Briar’s sake and for no other reason. And so, he tilted the glass to the side before cocking his arm back and flinging it against the wall.
“I imagine that’s a bit too disorderly for you as well, Father,” he said.
There was every chance the old man could hear him. That he was now haunting the halls like the malevolent spirit he had always been. It would be fitting. This palace was full of ghosts; Felipe had never thought differently, no matter that his father had tried to tell him otherwise.
He was failing again. Which seemed to be what he did. Failing at not being a horror to the woman he was intent on taking as his wife. But then, he wasn’t sure he was capable of being anything other than this. Anything other than the creature his father had set out to create.
He gripped the edge of the bar, lowering his head. He had to be different. He had to. If for no other reason than for Santa Milagro. His people had lived in darkness long enough.
Of course, he had no idea how he was supposed to remedy that when he feared he had no light inside him.
Then the door to his bedchamber opened and he lifted his head, turning it to look behind him. It was Briar. She was no longer wearing the shredded ball gown that he had left her in downstairs. She had changed into a long, flowing robe in a luminous pink that contrasted beautifully with her smooth, dark skin. She had washed her makeup off, leaving her looking young and freshly scrubbed. He had to wonder if she had been so eager to wash his touch from her body.
But she was here. And he felt almost certain she had brought some light in with her. Perhaps that was the key. Perhaps she was the key to more than he had originally imagined.
He ignored the slight twisting feeling in his chest that questioned this reasoning. That forced images of his mother to swim before his mind’s eye.
“You came,” he said.
“Yes,” she said, scanning the room slowly, her eyes falling to the broken glass and spilled alcohol on the floor. “Clearly you can’t be trusted around food at the moment.”
“I can’t be trusted around you, either,” he said, his tone hard. “And yet, here you are.”
She clasped her hands in front of her, wringing her fingers. “You asked me to come.”
“I confess, I thought I might have to go retrieve you from the depths of your room. I thought I might have frightened you.”
She lifted one elegant shoulder. “I’m not frightened of you.”
He narrowed his eyes. “Truthfully?”
She released her hold on her hands, one fluttering slightly as she made a dismissive gesture. “Well. I suppose I am afraid of you. But not enough to hide from you.”
“Is that because you’ve accepted your fate or because you find yourself fascinated by me?” The answer was important.
She frowned, a small dent growing between her eyebrows. “I think it took you stealing me away from the city for me to think I could do anything other than accept my fate, actually. And when I say that, it isn’t because my life was terrible. I don’t mean it in that way. It’s just that it seemed predetermined. Like the path had been set since the beginning of my life. And then you showed me that I had no idea. None at all. I didn’t know where I had started, and I had no idea what was out there, what was hunting me—so to speak. I would say that never in my life have I been at a point where I was more likely to accept the way things are than I am right now. And yet, here I am.”
Something shifted inside him, a rumble of satisfaction beginning in his chest, growing. “Perhaps because I was your first man?”
Color tinged her cheeks. “You could tell?”
“Yes.”
“And you did it anyway?” She tilted her head to the side, a strange expression on her face.
“It wasn’t forefront in my mind. It was afterward. If I had stopped and thought about it while it was happening, I would have realized. As it was, I didn’t put everything together until it was too late.”
She looked somewhat appeased by that. “Okay.”
“Does it matter to you?”
“I don’t know if it matters. Well, yes, it does. I wouldn’t like to think that it meant nothing to you. I have never wanted a man before. I wasn’t a virgin because I was waiting for anything. I mean, nothing moral. I wasn’t waiting for you, or some other mythological husband. I was just waiting for somebody that I wanted. I was waiting for the moment I didn’t want to say no. And that happened downstairs with you. I don’t know why. I just know that it was different. That it changed something in me. So yes, if it meant nothing to you I would find that painful.”
He felt a smile touch the corner of his lips. He walked toward her, closing the distance between them. Then he reached out, pressing his thumb against the center of her lower lip. “You want to be special to me, querida?”
She trembled beneath his touch, her dark eyes questioning. Searching. She wouldn’t find anything. Not in him. Nothing but more darkness. That endless, blank pit that existed in his chest. Selfishly, he wanted her answer to be yes. And yet, he knew that he should want nothing from her. And he should rejoice if she wanted nothing from him.
Still, he waited. And he hoped. A strange, costly thing for a man like himself. To reach for a flame, wondering if it was going to warm him, or if the action would simply snuff it out.
“That’s not so shocking, is it?” she asked, her voice hushed. “We... We were intimate with each other. Of course I want it to matter.”
“Intimate?” He could honestly say he had never considered sex intimate. It was a release. It was bodies, only bodies. And long ago he had determined to detach himself from his body when he needed it to be so. To be able to make it so he felt no pain while undergoing excruciating torture.
To feel nothing but pleasure when he was in the arms of a woman—no matter what he might feel inside.
A body was simply that. Fallible, temporary. Losing himself in someone else’s had never felt like anything more than pleasure.
And yet she called it intimacy. She had never wanted another man. Had never allowed another man to touch her. He was not sure if he knew how to make someone special to him, but it seemed that he might be special to her.
He was equally at a loss as to what he was supposed to do with that.
But it satisfied him. Satisfied something inside him he had not known existed until that very moment. It was the deepest kind of satisfaction, satiating him in a way his orgasm hadn’t even managed to.
“Yes,” she said, her voice soft. She lifted her hand, pressed it flat against his chest. “What we did was intimate. Something that you don’t share with just anyone.” She frowned. “Or do you?”
“I have,” he said, with no shame at all. “Desire exists to be satisfied.”
“I don’t think that’s true. I think what makes desire matter is that it can’t be satisfied in any time. What makes it so deep is that it’s reserved only for certain people. For certain moments.”
He wrapped his fingers around her wrist, held her hand more firmly against his chest. “As the woman who just confessed to having never felt it before? You say that, but what if it were another man to fire these feelings inside you? If it were to happen again, would you simply accept his advances as you did mine?” The thought was like acid, eating through his mind and sliding on down to his chest where it began to burn around the edges of the blackness there.
She shook her head. “No.”
“So that makes me important?” He tightened his hold on her. “That means I’m important to you.”
He never had been. Not to anyone. Not to his cruel, sadistic father or his broken, fragile mother. He wanted it. More desperately than he had ever wanted anything, and he didn’t care what that meant. Because he only understood want in a very singular way. Wanting was having as far as he was concerned. So he would have this. And he would feel no compunction about it.
“I said I would marry you,” she said, looking away from him. “But you never answered if I was important to you.”
“I said I would marry you,” he said, parroting her words back to her. “Do you see any other women around here wearing my ring?”
She shook her head.
“There’s your answer,” he said. And then, the phone in his pocket vibrated. He said a curse then took it out, looking at the screen.
It was Rafe. The bastard really did have lousy timing.
Why had he decided to have friends?
“We didn’t get a chance to speak tonight,” his friend said. “You threw everyone out of the palace.”
“I’m surprised you left without being forced,” he said to his friend, all the while keeping his eyes on Briar.
“Oh, Adam and I were forced,” Rafe returned. “Though Adam was forced by his bride, who felt that your wishes should be respected. Because she simply doesn’t know you well enough to know when you should be ignored.”
“And what’s your excuse?”
“I didn’t suppose, given the disadvantage of my lack of sight, that I should engage your royal guards in a fight.”
Felipe laughed. “Please. We both know you still had the advantage in the fight, Rafe.”
“True enough.”
“I assume that Adam was involved in this goodwill mission. You checking on my mental well-being.” He took that moment to look at Briar more fully, to allow his gaze to travel over her beautiful curves. To truly relish just how flimsy that nightgown she was wearing was. He needed this phone call to be short.
“Your father has passed away. It isn’t a small thing.”
“It’s better that he’s dead. It was a cruelty of fate that he drew breath for as long as he did. There are a very great number of people who die far too young and don’t deserve it.”
“They say the good die young,” Rafe pointed out.
“Then you and I are both safe.”
“We are that,” Rafe said, his tone hardening slightly. “We are that. I should be dead already. And likely would be if I were worthy of life.”
Rafe’s cynicism was one of the many reasons Felipe counted him a friend, when in general he found friendship to be pointless.
“Right now I’m grateful to be alive. I outlived that old bastard—” his gaze returned to Briar “—and I have a promising evening before me.”
“You’re with your fiancée, I assume,” Rafe said.
“Yes. So you’ll understand that I have to cut this call short.”
“A word of caution,” Rafe said. “This woman you have... I did a bit of research. And Adam described her to me. She is too soft for you, my friend. Far too young.”
“Very much,” Felipe returned, his eyes never leaving Briar, who was blushing beneath his frank appraisal. “She’s too innocent for me, as well.”
Her gaze sharpened, her mouth dropping open as she realized she was the topic of discussion. She, and her virginity.
“That’s even worse,” Rafe said. “You have to be careful with women like that.”
Felipe laughed. “Please. I spent my entire childhood at the mercy of a sadistic old man. I’m not in any danger.”
“That makes it even clearer to me that you might be. Men like you and me... We can’t be broken by the hard things. It’s the soft things. Believe me. I know of what I speak.”
Rafe had never given the details of how he lost his eyesight. All he and Adam knew was that there had been an accident. But Felipe had long suspected a woman had been involved in some capacity. This... This confirmed it. Except, Felipe had a difficult time imagining his friend falling prey to a woman, no matter how soft or beautiful she was.
“I’ll keep that in mind.” He hung up then. He wouldn’t be keeping it in mind. Not tonight. Tonight he wanted only one thing. And as he advanced on his beautiful fiancée, he could think only that she had much more to be afraid of than he did.
“You were talking about me,” she accused.
“Yes.”
“Who was it?”
“A friend.”
“You have friends?” Her eyes widened. If it wasn’t objectively such a surprising thing that he had friends, even to him, he might have been offended. Instead, he found himself amused.
“I do. Two of them. And to answer your question, yes, they have myriad issues. Definitely not normal.”
“I suppose I’m not normal, either.”
He wrapped his arm around her waist, drew her up against his chest. “I don’t need you to be normal. I need you to be mine.”
She looked at him, marveled at him as though he were some kind of curiosity. Something she had never seen before, and was trying to figure out. Then she lifted her hand, drawing her fingertips lightly across his cheek.
He growled, taking hold of her wrist again and holding her steady as he brought his lips down to hers. As he claimed a kiss that he needed more than his next breath.
And then, Rafe didn’t matter at all. Neither did the ghosts of his past. The ghost of his father that was likely rattling chains and wandering restlessly down the halls even now.
Nothing mattered but this. But her. But her beauty, her delicacy. The fact that he should stay away from her, because she would be so easily bruised, crushed like a delicate rose.
Perversely, he wanted it. Wanted to see the effect that he had on her. Wanted to ruin her. To make her his. Like he had wanted to ruin everything in this whole damn palace from the moment he had found out his father was dead. Disorder. That was what he wanted. Utter chaos. And he would be the king of it.
That drove him on. Spurred him to deepen the kiss. To crush his mouth against hers, to swallow the sounds she made, whether they were of pleasure or protestation, he wasn’t entirely sure. But he was consumed by this. Consumed by his need for her.
He knew nothing else, and that was a blessed relief. He opened his eyes, looked at his own hands, holding on to her face, at his sleeves. Those damn sleeves. He released his hold on her, wrenching his jacket off, then working at the buttons of his shirt before he cast it to the ground, as well.
He hadn’t been naked the last time they had been together. Hadn’t felt those soft, sweet hands pressed up against his skin. Well, he needed it now. Needed it more than he needed his next breath. And as much as he wanted her to be marked by him, he wanted the same in return.
“Touch me,” he demanded, his voice rough, a stranger’s voice. He had learned to conduct himself with the manner of a gentleman. Had learned how to be suave, how to be smooth. How to cover up the monster inside by pretending to be a man of impeccable manners.
That was gone now. Cast to the ground with his clothes. Shattered like the glass he had broken against the wall. She already knew. She knew he wasn’t that. That he never could be. Because he had shown her the truth. And she was still here. Said that she still wanted him. That she wanted to mean something to him.
Foolish girl. Inexperienced girl. She was everything that Rafe had said. Too soft. Too innocent. Too young.
But he was his father’s son.
He pushed that thought to the side. He didn’t want to examine it, not now. Couldn’t. There was no possibility of thought, not now.
His father was dead anyway. And all the duplicity he had lived under, the extreme control, the calculated air of not caring at all...it was dead with him.
He didn’t need it anymore.
He was king now. And he would do as he wished.
Inexperienced fingers brushed against his throat, moved down his chest. “Like you mean it,” he growled, his lips against hers as he issued the rough command.
Her touch grew firmer, a bit more confident, and she dragged her fingertips down his washboard-flat stomach, to the waistband of his pants. “Yes,” he said, the word rough and encouraging. “Like that.”
She fumbled with his belt, and he clung to her as she pushed his pants down his thighs, taking his underwear with it. Leaving him completely naked standing in front of her. He watched her expression closely, tried to read her thoughts. It seemed as though she didn’t know where to look, her dark eyes darting every which way as she examined his body.
“Have you never seen a naked man before?” Oh, he liked that. Liked this far too much. That he was corrupting her. That he was altering her in ways that were irreparable.
She shook her head. “I mean, in pictures.”
“You’ve never undressed anyone. Never touched them. Never watched a man get hard because of you.”
“No,” she said. “Until you I had never been kissed.”
Without being conscious of making the decision to do so, he found himself closing the distance between them. Growling as he took her into his arms and kissed her with all the uncivilized ferocity inside him.
She whimpered, her hands trapped between them, her palms resting on his chest. He was hard, throbbing and insistent against her body, and he knew that she could feel it. That she could feel just how affected he was by her. Just how much he wanted her. There was nothing civilized about this. But perhaps, just maybe, it was intimate. Because this was beyond him in a way that sexual desire had never been before.
This seemed to be tangled up in emotions in a way that the need for release never had been. And it had been so from the moment he had taken her downstairs. When he had turned that table over, ripping the mask of the civilized prince off and letting the monster free. He had done that. In front of her. For her. Almost because of her. It was as though she reduced his control in ways that he could scarcely understand. Ways he certainly had not given permission for.
But strangely, she didn’t seem to fear him. Didn’t seem to fear that at all.
None of it made sense. That she would be the one to see that side of him, and yet not be afraid. That he would be the one to make her desire for the first time, when he was little more than a villain to her. The man who had ripped her from her life and dragged her into this. Into his domain.
But he didn’t need sense. Not now.
“Now,” he said, the words pulled from him, “you have been kissed.”
She nodded, her kiss-swollen mouth soft, completely irresistible. And he leaned in to devour her again. It made no sense. That she was so receptive to this. To him. She should be disgusted by him. By the beast he had transformed into from the moment he had brought her back here to the palace. Or rather, from the moment he had revealed to her his intentions to take her back to his country.
But then he supposed that he should be disgusted by those things, as well. He wasn’t.
He needed her. Needed her to rule his country in the best way. And more than that, now he wanted her. Wanted her in his life, in his bed. Wanted to be inside her. He would not deny himself.
And so, he could feel no guilt.
“Shall I teach you something?”
She looked up at him, her dark eyes luminous. Then she licked her full lips. “Yes. Teach me.”