That kiss had stood between them from the beginning. He had unburdened himself, thinking her a stranger. But what if she’d been telling the truth and all she’d wanted was a simple kiss?
What if the truth was really that simple and that complicated?
Even as she pretended to be happy with her lot, that version of Eleni had been so vulnerably open.
I wanted to be someone else for one night.
And he’d taken it away from her. “I was angry that day. I had just found out what Monique had hidden from me. I came to the ball wanting to be anyone but myself. Women and deceit seemed to go hand in hand in my head that night.
“I knew the Princess of Drakon. Finding out that the enchantress I had just kissed was that princess was a shock. Like nothing was the same or sane in my life anymore. I don’t think I even realized how much I had begun to count on you. How much your presence meant.”
“You’re just saying that now.”
“No. There was always a quiet strength about you, even back then. No wonder you were the only one your father listened to, the only one who could calm his rages.”
A strange stillness came over her as he closed the door behind him and drenched them in darkness.
With the world and the day shut away, there was a damp chill in the barn. The setting sun sent tendrils of orange light through the rafters. The long line of her neck bared, she looked up at him, the golden flecks in her eyes becoming prominent in the shadows. He saw her swallow as he reached her, saw that flash of yearning before she blinked and shut it away.
Her arms tightened around her. “I came here to be alone.” Even when he’d been his snarliest, grumpiest self, she’d never used that tone on him. Like she had no use for him.
“So that you could grieve over...over him in private?”
The same thought would have sent him running in the opposite direction even a week ago. Today, he wanted to comfort her.
Gabriel Marquez comforting his wife over the loss of her lover. Surely the world had turned upside down?
“Yes, something like that.”
“You’re stuck with me, Princesa.” The words left his mouth and he realized he meant it. In more ways than one.
He lowered his huge body next to her on the same pile of hay and she instantly shifted. But she was limited by the wall on the other side and his thigh pressed against hers.
The sides of their bodies pressed, and then folded against each other, the soft whisper of it amplified in the dark. The scent of hay and damp earth filled his nostrils.
“Eleni...no one is worth your tears.”
“He is. I’ve known him for years. I’ve loved him for years. He never looked at me as if I would not measure up. And now I have to say goodbye.”
Bitterness mixed with grudging respect filled him. Every atom of his being revolted against having this discussion.
He had the emotional constitution of a car, a lover had once said to him and he’d only laughed and agreed. He’d never been possessive or jealous, for all his relationships had been transient.
Now he couldn’t even name the riot of feelings inside of him.
“So you’re admitting—” he half choked on the words “—that you’re in love with this...man?”
She moved in a blur in front of him, her eyes flashing catlike in the dark. “What? What the hell are you talking about?”
“Angelina told me how much you were grieving over the loss of an old friend. That you had been unbearably sad—”
“Angelina is talking about Black Shadow, my horse of six years.”
“Your horse?”
“Yes, my horse, you...you...unfeeling ass. My horse, who I’ve just found out is terminally ill. My horse who is my closest friend and companion. You actually think I was sitting here crying over some lost lover and that I would tell Angelina about it? What the hell is wrong with you?”
She didn’t give him a chance to respond, but came at him like a flash of lightning—dazzling and beautiful in one breath. Her hands thumped him in soft blows. Gabriel put his hands up, afraid of his petite wife hurting herself rather than him. In his overcompensation, he pushed her off the pile and she took him with her.
He landed on top of her on more hay, his heart lighter than it had been in days.
She hadn’t been moping over her lover. He wanted to shout it like a teenage boy who’d found out that the girl he liked liked him back. He felt a lightness he hadn’t felt even in his younger, carefree days.
Eleni let out a soft woof as his body pressed her down. “Get off me, you...you unfeeling giant.”
He laughed and shifted just enough to ensure he didn’t crush her.
She struggled to push him off, as if that were possible, and the slide and shift of her body under his sent his lust into overdrive.
Hell, he liked having her beneath him, all soft and glaring. Another wiggle and her legs separated and straddled him until his hardness nestled against the hottest and softest part of her.
Gabriel let out a filthy oath just as her soft groan filled the air. His hips flexed and rolled in an instinct old as time, his muscles burning with desire. “And if I don’t want to move?” He gripped her wrists and pulled them above him, forcing her to look at him. The move forced her upper body to arch toward him, those lush breasts to rub against his chest in the most decadent pleasure. “You have been tormenting me for three weeks, mia cariña. Have you any idea what unspent arousal of so many days does to a man?”
It felt as if all the air from the entire world had been ripped out. Leaving only the sensual haze for Eleni to subsist on. Gray eyes watched her as if she were the most delicious dessert that he intended to feast on.
His fingers gripped her wrists in a firm clasp yet gently for a man so big. For days, she had seen him around the suite, in various torturous states of undress, and she knew the power in his muscled frame.
For days and quite a few nights, when he had come to bed and the huge mattress dipped beneath his weight, she had wondered about what it would feel like to be the woman he focused that power on. To be the woman trapped beneath that powerful body.
Shivers had overtaken her at the game she’d been playing every time that gray gaze had swept over her, embers of dark desire in his eyes.
Now she knew.
He didn’t quite crush her to the ground but he was a divine, languorous weight on top of her body. Eleni licked her lips, twice, a deep, delicious ache building between her legs. Muscular thighs straddled hers and yet somehow, he kept his lower body away from her, after that first sizzling contact.
Her fingers wound around his upper arms, and she felt the taut clench of his thick muscles. “You’re the most aggravating man I’ve ever met. Tell me, what would you have done if I said yes, Gabriel? If I had truly been moping over my lover?”
He bent his head and the warmth of his breath caressed her trembling lips. She should say no, tell him that she was a real woman with feelings. Not a robot he could use when he needed a mother for his girl, and then ignore.
Holding her gaze, he slanted the angle and pressed his mouth against hers—full flush.
Soft and yet hard, his lips sent a shock that jerked her body into superawareness. Again and again, he did it—moved his lips over hers in a sensual rhythm so visceral that she shivered from the onslaught of it. The world outside the dark barn, the thread of her grief inside, everything fell away under the intense and growing ache within her.
She had waited years, no aeons, it seemed, for the stamp of his body. To be possessed by him.
“I would have reminded you that you promised your body to me, Princesa.” Only then did he press his hard body into hers. The weight and heat of his erection pressed against her mound and Eleni cried out loud, her body restless in her own skin. Instantly, her thighs created a cradle for him. A satisfied gleam appeared in his gray eyes. “I would have told you that you belonged to me.”
Eleni didn’t know if she was capable of voicing a question, of asking the same of him, demanding that he promise her the same. He didn’t give her the chance to find out. When he finished breathing his guttural promise, he dipped his tongue into her mouth in a long, erotic stroke and Eleni lost the last rational thought in her mind.
“Kiss me back, Princesa,” he commanded in that same arrogant tone.
Slowly, softly, Eleni opened her mouth and kissed him back.
The raspy slide of their mouths, the heated rush of their breaths, the shiver of hay around them—Eleni had never heard such sensuous sounds in her life. It felt as if every sense of hers was amplified a thousand times over. As if she were nothing but a conduit for sensations.
The strokes of his tongue and lips were maddeningly slow, silky, drawing out the feverish tremors of her body, longer and deeper. The gentleness of his mouth, of his body threw her. It was as if he wanted to savor every stroke of his mouth, hear every gasping hitch of her breath.
As he seduced her mouth with such skill, the barn was drenched in complete darkness. The last fingers of sunlight disappeared and the dark intensified the sensations weaving through her body.
With her hands crawling from his biceps to his shoulders, she dug her fingers into his steel-like shoulders. In answer, he stroked his tongue against hers.
Eleni gasped into his mouth.
She wanted to move; she wanted to touch him everywhere from the torturous prison he created with his own body, but he was so hard and solid over her that she didn’t stand a chance. “Gabriel,” she whispered, this time it was a plea for more, without doubt.