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  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.

  When he didn’t comply, when she could hear the silkily masculine laugh that fell from his mouth, she sank her fingers into his hair and pulled at the thick, rough swaths. Pushed his head toward her with her fingers.

  And dug her teeth into his lower lip, driven by an instinct she didn’t even know she possessed.

  Instantly, he exploded. His kisses became rougher; his tongue plunged deeper and faster into her mouth, imitating the very act of love with such erotic mastery that she was a puddle under him.

  The darkness made little of any doubts she would have felt at being naked in front of him when his large hands moved down and, with an economy of movement, undressed her completely.

  But when he went to his knees and began pulling his shirt out of his trousers, Eleni wished it weren’t so dark in the barn. Her eyes had acclimatized to the shadow and the outline of his body—wide, powerful shoulders, broad chest tapering to narrow hips and the muscular thighs—made her breath go awry.

  He was so gorgeously formed—a perfect male and he had chosen her—the short, curvy, diminutive Princess with unruly hair and very little to recommend her.

  Was it any wonder the media and the public had such a fascination with their marriage?

  When he came back to her and nudged her thighs apart, and then slid his hard body on top of hers, Eleni’s head went back in the prickly hay. His skin was like heated velvet, pressing her down.

  The rough rasp of hairy thighs against her smooth ones, the press of the hard band of his abdominal muscles against the soft ones in her belly, the silky slide of his chest against her sensitized breasts—a sob flung out of her from the depths of her soul.

  Abrasive palms roamed all over her body, learning her curves in the dark. The underside of her arms, the tight dip of her waist, the crease of her thigh—there wasn’t an inch of her he didn’t worship with his hands. There wasn’t an inch of her mouth he didn’t devour in long, slow kisses. “Eleni?”

  She made some unintelligible sound as his fingers lazily circled her nipple, painfully erect and crying for his attention. Sensations pierced her lower belly, as without any sign, his mouth closed over the hard nub.

  A cry that could tear through the rafters rippled out of her as she felt the silky slide of his tongue over her nipple and then the graze of his teeth.

  Incomprehensible sounds fell from her mouth as he continued to tease and torment her nipples alternately, as if he couldn’t keep his mouth away from them.

  A sheen of sweat coated her entire body, her sex damp and swelling. She’d never been so aware of every inch of her body, of every tremor and ripple that shook through her.

  “You respond to every touch as if you were an instrument, Princesa. You tremble to every touch, you cry in abandon...you have been driving me crazy since that ball.”

  Her back stiffened when his hand slid down her abdomen. Her cheeks overheated to dangerous levels when his fingers played with the curls there. Masculine demand glittered in every bold stroke, in every invasive touch.

  Eleni squeezed her eyes closed, knowing that he watched her. That her pleasure, her moans fueled his own. He took his sweet time, tracing the shape of every fold of her sex intimately, with one finger first and then the next, as if he were memorizing the shape of her down there. As if he had never explored another woman thoroughly before, quite like this.

  But of course he had. Every skillful stroke of his, every touch and slide of his lips—he already knew her body better than she did. Better she remember it this time as the most pleasurable, intimate experience of her life, rather than mistake it for emotional closeness.

  Rather than delude herself that Gabriel was overtaken by anything other than lust. Afflicted by anything other than a challenge to his pure masculine ego.

  Everything she used to convince herself that this was only lust disappeared when he pushed first one and then another finger into her core.

  Eleni jerked and locked her hips tight, feeling intensely vulnerable. His fingers were clever as they teased and stroked her, her folds swollen and wet.

  “Oh, please,” she begged. Was there no part of her he wouldn’t discover with intimate knowledge? “Can’t you just... I...just want...”

  “You just want what, Eleni?”

  “I want you inside of me. You don’t have to...” His finger hooked inside her wet opening and her eyes rolled back in her head. “Oh, God.”

  “But I would know your body, Princesa. I would know every gasp and moan of yours, I would learn what would drive you mindless with hunger for me, what would send you over the edge...”

  Her hands fisted around locks of hay, her entire body thrumming with a new tension. “You’re already doing that,” she said on the wave of a sob that filled her when his thumb pressed cleverly against the swollen flesh.

  Eleni called out and bucked her hips against his touch, desperate for more.

  He stopped immediately and she cursed him to hell and damnation, frustration curling her muscles.

  “Do you like this, Princesa?” he said, while he dragged his finger in and out, making her wetter and crazier.

  Again and again, he tortured her while Eleni lost sight of everything but the deep, visceral want of her body. She forgot the number of times he drove her toward release, and then left her, poised and threatening to shatter, on the edge.

  She didn’t know when, but at some point, she had given up even on begging him. Just when she had decided he was wreaking revenge on her for wicked reasons of his own, he pushed her legs wider apart.

  “That was for all the torment you gave me.” His voice was husky, low. “I need you desperately, Eleni. But this is the time to stop me if you don’t want this, Princesa. After this, you won’t belong to anyone but me.”

  She stared into his eyes and clasped his neck. She could only nod, words failing to come. Or the wrong words. Emotional words that she couldn’t sift through for her body was drowning in pleasure.

  He slid his hand over her hip, down her boneless thigh and opened her wide for him.

  Looking down at her, as if he were one of those conquering marauders that had attacked Drakon again and again, he nudged her opening with the head of his shaft.

  Blinking, Eleni fought the furious heat that seemed to combust her from within. Giving up any pretense to modesty, she moaned when he rubbed the full length of hims
elf against her, as if to drench himself in her wetness, and then, just when she thought this torture would never end, he entered her in one deep, soul-wrenching thrust that lodged him inside of her so deep that she didn’t know where she ended and he began.

  She cried out in shock more than pain, just as the intense pressure inside of her finally combusted and she came in a fierce clenching of her inner muscles.

  Hands clenched tightly around his naked back, nails digging into his velvet-rough skin, Eleni tried to make sense of everything that was happening to her.

  Her throat felt raw from her cry, her lower belly still clenching and releasing in deep spasms around Gabriel’s hard thickness, still getting used to the power and hard heat of him stretching her. Intimate and invasive, being taken by a man with such primitive, possessive need, how was she to keep this in context?

  How could she not weave dreams, how could she not tie herself to him forever when he—he did this to her? When it felt like she couldn’t breathe again, ever, she couldn’t live if he didn’t move inside of her? When the thought of him doing all these intimate things with another woman gouged through her very soul?

  Pain and pleasure intermingled, her foolish naïveté that she could share his bed, share his life and not lose a part of her splintered, bringing hot, scalding tears to her cheeks.

  And in the midst of the emotional and physical storm was the man lying on top of her and staring at her with a thunderstorm in his eyes. “You lied again, Princesa.”

  Eleni bit her lip to puncture the haze around her senses. Her hands roamed over his broad back, traced the deep indent of his spine, as if she couldn’t let go of him. A frantic desperation began in her as she realized how deeply Gabriel could hurt her, how enmeshed her life was already with his.

  “Stop touching me like that,” he said, his voice raised to a storm for the first time against her. The longing in his words resonated in the darkness of the barn, lust etching deep circles around his mouth.

  Eleni wriggled under him, trying for succor from the tension in her lower belly, for ease from the continual clenching of her muscles.

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “It was not a question you posed of me when we discussed our marriage. You had very little interest, actually, in anything remotely related to our conjugal life. You barely even kissed me at our wedding.”

  “You give the impression of a woman who knows her mind, Princesa. You said you had been celibate for a long time. You said you loved Spiros.”

  “You heard what you wanted to hear, Gabriel,” she said sounding husky and feeble.

  His silence was a deadweight on her chest. “If you’re worried that my heart will follow my virginity to you like some kind of bonus offer, please don’t. I decided long ago that it would only go to my husband, whoever that was. I couldn’t risk the scandal of an affair on top of being illegitimate. Not even for Spiros could I risk the name of the House of Drakos. So my virginity just became another boulder around my neck, another shackle in my fight to be a model daughter for my father.”

  The bite of his fingers against her hips tightened and she bit back a gasp. Tension thrummed in the hard angles of his face. His skin had a damp sheen, just like hers, and the corded muscles of his neck were so tight that she realized he remained still with a superhuman will.

  She sent her hands up his hair-roughened forearms, up his muscled biceps, toward his shoulders. She touched him everywhere and saw the play of tension in his face.

  Her heart hammered, waiting for him to push her away, waiting for the explosion she sensed building in him. She didn’t know where her boldness came from. But with his hard thickness inside of her, with him poised over her body, Eleni refused to let him go.

  She followed the line of his spine down to his buttocks and gripped them. Nudged her body deeper and up toward him.

  His snarl sent a spark of sensation down to her pelvis as did the involuntary, instinctual thrust of his narrow hips. “Hold on to me, Princesa.” He barely gave her time before his hands slid under her body. Rough fingers tilted her bottom up, and then he slid all the way out, and then thrust back in.

  Breath hissed through her mouth as he filled her utterly. He did it again and again, in slow, deep thrusts that had Eleni jerking on the hay, heart pumping double time.

  The friction he created in that angle was incredible, her body climbing up toward the peak greedily again. Every time he moved, the heat and pressure intensified until her climax burst upon her, in a shower of pleasure and sparks, stealing her very breath.

  She was still clutching the white-hot sensation narrowing down in her pelvis, breathing hard when he thrust faster and deeper.

  She felt the moment his own tension broke, the moment when he became as irrational as her in his want, felt his spine stiffen. His snarl of pleasure washed over as he climaxed inside of her.

  Her hands ached to hold him, but Eleni kept them by her side. That same sense of vulnerability attacked now that the moment was over. Reality came flooding in the form of hard voices approaching the barn, puncturing the magic of the moment.

  Pulling out of her, Gabriel dressed with a calm efficiency that made her skin cold. Or was it because the warmth of his body had deserted her?

  “Get dressed, Princesa,” he said, pulling her to her feet and holding her on her jellied legs before she found her balance.

  He picked up her clothes and helped her fasten the zipper on her dress. With the soreness between her legs, it took Eleni a few minutes to find her balance. For her heart to stop thumping loudly in her chest.

  For her mind to grasp the fact that they hadn’t used protection.

  She halted Gabriel when he’d have moved away and tried to find his features in the dark. “Gabriel? I...” Heat scoured her cheeks. “I forgot...we forgot. We didn’t use protection.”

  She felt his shock like a tangible entity in the dark. His distress like a stinging slap against her cheek. “Gabriel,” she said, reaching out with her fingers, “say something.”

  The clasp of his fingers around hers sent breath rushing through her lungs. Her legs tangled with his and she fell against his chest. Strong arms wound around her and held her, even as every cell in her braced for rejection. She felt his fingers slide up her nape into her hair, felt the whisper of his breath against her cheek.

  It didn’t matter that they were standing in pitch dark. She still felt far too vulnerable. One careless word from him could shatter her.

  “Then we will welcome the child. This is what you wanted, yes?”

  Shaking from head to toe, Eleni nodded. She had been prepared to be overwhelmed by Gabriel’s masculinity, but her imagination didn’t even come close to reality.

  She felt changed from within.

  His mouth touched her temple and then drifted down to take her mouth in a long, deep kiss. Bent over his arm, Eleni gave herself up to the languid strokes of his tongue, to the flutterings of desire even through the soreness of her core. A groan rose from the depths of her. Her legs made a space for him voluntarily, inviting him to do more. Waiting with bated breath for more.

  His laughter reverberated against her breasts, a silky, confident, utterly male sound. “I would like nothing more than to take you again, Princesa, but you would be sore.” Something in the tone of his voice set every hair on her body to alert. His grip tightened in her hair, a strange tenseness in his still frame. “Next time you meet a man in some corner of the palace,” he said, and she instantly stiffened against him, “or the next time a man drags you into some corner of the palace and kisses you, scream bloody murder. You’ll never see Spiros again. Is that clear, Eleni? You’ll not even spare him a thought in your head.”

  Even after everything they had just shared, it was clear he still didn’t trust her.

  CHAPTER NINE

  WITH GABRIEL IN Barcelona for a fortnight’s trip and Angelina busy with her tutor, Eleni spent the afternoons with Black Shadow.

  She was avoiding facing
the reality that was waiting for her in the form of a pregnancy test. Her breath sped up just at the thought, and Black Shadow whinnied, sensing her anxiety.

  Keeping her hands on his thick coat, she soothed him with a whisper. If only she could soothe herself so easily too.

  She’d longed for a baby of her own for so long yet the possibility of it now left her with panic.

  She wanted this baby, of course, with all her heart. A hundred possibilities, happy ones, crowded her every time she thought of holding a baby in her arms. Her and Gabriel’s baby. A younger brother or sister for Angelina.

  But with their relationship so fragile, so tenuous, she was scared that it would change him, change the way he saw them.

  He’d admitted to them being a real family. But she’d no idea if he’d said that in the heat of the moment or if he’d meant it.

  After that evening in the barn, he’d walked her back to her suite and bid her good-night with a lingering kiss. Had told her he had work to catch up on.

  When she’d gone to look for him the next morning, he’d already left the palace. Only a text message informed her that he was already en route to the airport heading to Barcelona on company business.

  She’d known as surely as the soreness between her legs that morning, the faint fingerprints on her hips from when he’d held her tightly that he was avoiding her.

  She’d been glad for the reprieve too. For she’d have never been able to act normal with him the next morning. If her life depended on it, she couldn’t have pretended that their encounter in the barn hadn’t changed her.

  Until she’d learned that at the same time she was mooning over him, Gabriel was in Barcelona with his ever-present lawyer friend, attending parties and generally making merry.

  Of course, the media had reported it.

  Has the real estate tycoon already lost interest in his new bride?

  It was a wake-up call from the fairy tale she’d begun to weave around them. Whether Gabriel had already gone back to his old habits or not, Eleni needed to face reality. Needed to remember that this was a convenient arrangement.