His Majesty's Forbidden Temptat - Maisey Yates Page 0,24

you is the first sensible thing I’ve done in days.”

“And so you would run into the wood? You would never come back out.”

“You think you can survive the wood, but I can’t?”

“You think Lazarus and Dionysus can perish there but not you?”

“I guess my arrogance matches yours.”

“Do not be a fool,” he said again, his words carrying a veil of threat over them.

“If I’m a fool it’s because you chased me away. Perhaps you should reflect on that.”

It was a lie. And she spoke those words with no conviction, and she knew that he heard it.

“I think,” he said, his voice soft and deadly, “cara mia, that you were running away from yourself.”

And that was when she found herself being hauled toward him, and when his lips crashed down on hers it was like the whole mountain had fallen over the top of her.

His mouth was hot and firm and certain as it moved over hers. And she... She was lost.

She had shared pleasant, nice kisses with Dionysus that had felt nothing like being wrapped up in fire.

But that’s what this was. Licks of flame moving over her skin as he parted her lips and licked into her mouth.

She had never seen the attraction to kissing like this.

With all of yourself.

With the full weight of your body pressed against another person, and your lips parted, gaining them access to taste you. She had never understood why the scrape of someone’s teeth against her lips might be erotic. But it was. Everything about this was. And she realized then that she should have just gone straight into the Dark Wood, for she had a better chance of emerging unscathed than she did from this kiss.

But he was uncompromising.

He did not allow her to rethink. Not because he was holding her with his strength, but because he immobilized her, in thrall because of his mastery of her body.

She was cocooned in his arms. He was so big and hard and he lifted her up from the ground with no effort at all. One large palm was pressed between her shoulder blades, the other low on her back. And he kissed her. Like a beast.

Like a wolf.

Set on devouring her.

She couldn’t breathe. She was dizzy with it. With the slick glide of his tongue against hers and the heavy strength of his hands weighting her to the earth.

For if he wasn’t holding her she was sure she would fly apart into a million pieces and be lost as a mist in the air. There was salvation in this devouring, and she could not explain it any more than she could understand it. But she could feel it.

Oh, she could feel it.

And then, as suddenly as he had caught her up, he set her back down onto the ground. The rejection was startling. Verging on terrifying. For somehow, the world had been tilted on its axis and she didn’t know who she was when she wasn’t in Alex’s arms.

Alex.

Alex, who had always felt like a dark, forbidding figure in the corner of her world. But the lens had shifted now and he felt like the center of it. No less dark, no less forbidding. But more tempting than the wood itself.

“You,” he said, his voice low. “You have tempted me for far too long. And it is unacceptable. I am not tempted. I do not deviate from the path.”

He turned away from her then, and walked back toward the palace, leaving her standing there, shattered.

He had been tempted by her?

He had been tempted by her. Those words echoed inside of her like dark magic.

He had wanted her. All those years when he had been disapproving? She could remember when he had come after her one night, there had been a dinner party, and she and Dionysus had been laughing at the end of the table. She knew that Alex had disapproved of their behavior, found them disruptive. Treating them like naughty children rather than the young adults they’d been. She had been annoyed with him, as she always was. And her annoyance with Alex always felt large. It was never simple.

It always seemed to take up every available space inside of her, then expand.

There was something about Alex that always did that to her.

And she could remember him cornering her in a corridor, his dark eyes blazing with black fire.

That is not the behavior of a princess.

And is this but the behavior of a future king?

You should show me more respect.

You should give it.

Earn