“Ari? What’s wrong?” His voice was husky and sleep-mussed. Like he had sounded after sex.
“Nothing...is wrong.” The sheets slithered around him as he blinked and moved to his side, his eyes still adjusting to the darkness. “I...didn’t mean to disturb you. Go back to sleep.”
Desperate to escape, Ariana wiggled in his grip, but it tightened. She gasped when his arms went under her shoulders and tugged her onto the bed.
His dark face hovered over hers, his sleek, taut body propped on his elbows, his breath hitting her nose in soft strokes. Not even out of breath as he watched her like that, his body a heated canopy over hers.
“It is hard enough to sleep knowing you are in the next suite, finally, after all these months. You should know better than to taunt me in my own bed.”
Her hands rose to his shoulders to push him off. Hard and tense, he was like velvet-covered rock under her questing fingers. Heat swirled and pooled in her lower belly and she shook from head to toe. Standing on the edge of the abyss. Waiting to fall.
That faded picture of her, hidden away in a book he hadn’t showed to the world, beckoned like a beacon.
Their eyes met and held in the dense dark, that connection, always so strong between them, tangible again. Oh, but with his legendary self-control in play, he did not kiss her. He would not break his promise. Would not give in until she asked. She could see the desire in his glowing eyes, in the flaring of his patrician nose.
“Ask me to kiss you.” Clipped and serrated. On edge. Only the Crown Prince of Drakon could make a request sound like an arrogant command. His body was tense, his breath, because she knew him so well, a little shy of normal. “Diavole. Ask me to kiss you, Ari.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
ARIANA LICKED HER LIPS, longing cleaving her in half.
This, him. This fire that he invoked with a single look. It was all she’d been missing in her life.
“Kiss me,” she said simply, throwing herself off the cliff.
His arms on either side of her head, his fingers digging into her hair tight, he slanted his mouth over hers. Tiny, numerous frissons shook through her body at that first contact. Firm and supremely male, his lips touched her in a soft, silken, barely there caress that was nowhere near enough.
A taste of whiskey and him. Fingers tracing his collarbone, Ariana shook all over.
Another butterfly-soft brush, there and gone again.
A sweep of his tongue over the seam, and then nothing.
Slow kisses. Soft kisses. Testing the suppleness of her lips. Tempting to steal her breath. Again and again. Over and over.
Her body bucked off the bed, seeking more, needing more. “Please, Andreas,” she whispered half sobbing, every nerve ending taut with hunger.
A taunting smile breaking out on his mouth, Andreas moved to his side, and threw a muscled leg over hers. Rock-hard thigh pressed hers into the bed, a languorous weight that her body craved. “I’ve forgotten how much it pleases me when you say please.”
“I have forgotten how much I hated you in bed.”
“I have had two years to imagine this, Ariana. You’ve had days.” Pure devil glinted in his wide smile. “Now that you’re here, I intend to take my time.”
His arms sidled under her as if she were a featherweight, tugging her onto her side. A long finger traced a lazy trail along the neckline of her loose T-shirt. Her breasts were thrust up, the upper curves visible through the hanging neckline. Up and down, until the pulse at her neck throbbed violently.
Anticipation was fire in every muscle every time his finger skated the edge of one curve. Thee mou, he’d adored her breasts. Worshipped them. So much so that she had once orgasmed just with his mouth on them.
The memory slid over skin like a silky caress. Fired nerve endings.
His finger hovered over the upper curve of one breast, his breath a harsh whisper. “Your body has changed.”
A profound ache twisted through her. All she could do was nod.. Even as fear whispered over her spine, she needed this intimacy. Craved it for so long. Here, in the dark, the world shut away, maybe she’d find the man she’d fallen in love with.
Jet-black eyes held hers, possessive and powerful. “It turns me on even more.” She saw the edge of that hunger in his eyes, the deep grooves of need around his mouth. “Although, nothing could turn me on faster than seeing how eager you always were.”
She lifted her hands to his face. With the pad of her thumb, she traced the long curve of his lower lip. A stern, stiff line until he smiled. Or kissed. “And you were never desperate enough.”
He frowned, but Ariana had had enough of the power play. She needed to know if it was as magical as it had been back then. She needed to know if this heat between them was worth burning herself all over again.
Sending her seeking fingers into his hair, she tugged his arrogant head down. Breath rushing in and out, she licked that sensual lower lip with the tip of her tongue. His growl reverberated from his hard chest. Without waiting, she opened her mouth over his and dragged it from one end to the other. Another growl, a warning. She didn’t heed it. She kissed him again and again, until heat sparked where their lips touched, until she was out of breath. Until her lips stung.
Until the need to shatter that control was a scream in her blood. She dragged that lower lip between her teeth and then flicked her tongue over it. The curse he spewed was a balm over her heated skin. In a fraction of a second, she was pushed onto her back and his mouth crushed hers.
Her upper lip banged against her teeth. Her scalp prickled at how tightly he gripped her with one hand, while the other clasped her jaw, holding her still for his assault.
Spotlights filled her vision as the taste of him exploded through her body. There were no more games, no more teasing. Angling his head, he deepened the pressure until the heat of their fused mouths was enough to scald them both.
With a stark groan, she opened her mouth. He swooped in. The slide of his tongue as it chased hers was so erotic that her toes dug into the sheets. Again and again, he devoured her mouth, his wicked tongue dipping in and out with a frenetic rhythm that her body recognized. Craved.
His hands gripped her hair tight, his mouth opening and closing over hers, sucking and nipping, until she was trembling with a fever beneath him.
Until the taste of him was forever embedded in her.
She had no control over herself, no will of her own. She was begging with her body, her hips thrusting into empty air. His hands moved down to her shoulders, between her heavy breasts and then down to her abdomen. Again and again, up and down, touching, marking, staking a claim, while he ravished her mouth. Stroking her body higher and higher, promising her that cataclysm, enslaving her will.
“Tell me you need more, little wife.” His tongue traced the rim of her ear in a silken stroke that had her clutching her thighs tight. The tip of it moved behind her ear, before his teeth caught her lobe. “Tell me where you want my hands and my mouth.” A wicked, wild promise in a deep, husky voice she barely recognized as his.
His hand lay palm down on her chest, the tips of his long fingers touching her neck. Her heart thundered against this palm. Her breasts swelled, begging to be cupped in those powerful hands. Her nipples ached to be sucked into that mouth.
And he missed nothing.
His gaze flicked down toward the tight tips of her breasts visible through the thin fabric of her top, the trembling of her body, the tight clutch of her thighs. Naked satisfaction lined the angles of his gorgeous face. “Ask me to be inside you, Ari. Dio, my mouth, my hands, whatever you want, wherever you want.”
Her entire body was screaming her need for him, her desire evident in her shallow breaths. And yet, for the devil in him, it was not enough.
He moved his hand down her stomach, down her pelvis until it rested over her mound. Her hips jerked against his fingers resting against the covered lips of her sex. Wetness drenched her panties, a fact he knew. For a dark strip of color scoured his sharp cheekbones.
“Ask me, Ariana.” His voice fell to a whisper. His lashes fell and rose slowly. His breath a soft hiss in the dark. “I will do it with pleasure.”
How was it that he gave her the power and yet it was Ari that was falling?
His body next to her was a fortress of need, yet controlled with that ironclad will. Ariana pushed her hip into him. He jerked back, his fingers digging into her hips. Arresting her movements. But too late.
She had felt the evidence of his desire. Her breath slowed, the faint tremor in his powerful shoulders telling her how on edge he was.
Only his control was better. Over his body, over his mind, always. He would never let himself lose that will.
She hadn’t seen that back then. She hadn’t realized that it pervaded every part of his life. Hadn’t understood that for the Crown Prince of Drakon losing control of himself in bed was akin to giving Ariana a real place in his life. That it would mean him needing Ariana and not just the other way around.
The more she’d asked him for his attention, his time, the more he’d distanced himself. As if he didn’t know what to do with her. As if she didn’t fit in the neat box he’d made for her.
Needing her meant giving her power over himself, over his emotions.
And he was doing it again. He was compartmentalizing her because she made him feel.
Why had King Theos been so worried about him? Andreas’s heart was stone.