as you do,” she said, with a sideways glance at him, and he had a sudden image of what it might be like with this woman at his side forever, on the throne and in his bed—this warrior queen he had never expected would grow to be so strong. And yet he loved it. Her.
He shrugged. “You have an affinity for tedious meetings, day after day, with puffed-up, pompous men?” he asked mildly. Not his Lara, he thought. She would shred them with her sharp tongue, and he would laugh in admiration, and whole decades of careful diplomacy would go up in smoke. “Men who will insult you and berate you, who you cannot treat as you would like to do? This calls to you?”
She let out a sigh. “No,” she said after a long moment. “Not really.”
“Because, Princess, though your charms are many indeed, I do not count among them a particular gift for the diplomatic arts.” He smiled when her gaze sharpened on his. “This is not a flaw. You are too honest for politics. One of us should be.”
He could feel the tension rise between them then, that tautening of the air, that narrowing of focus until he knew nothing but her face. The swell of her lips. The shine of temper in her gaze. The sweep and fall of her black curls.
He knew her so well now. He could see the way the color washed across her face, and knew it would be the same all over her body. She would pinken as her body readied itself for him. Were he to reach for her under the table, he would find her hot and wet beneath his hands. He felt himself harden. He could not seem to get enough of her, no matter how often they sated each other. No matter how easily she came apart in his hands.
“I am no longer a princess,” she said, her voice husky, a gleam of awareness in her magnificent eyes. “And you never use my name.”
“I use your name,” he contradicted her, smiling slightly, “in certain circumstances.” He did not have to spell those circumstances out. Her flush deepened, as they both remembered the last time he’d called out her name, sometime before the dawn, when he’d been so deep inside of her he would have been happy to die there. She made him feel like a man, he realized. Not the soldier he had been, not the King he was now, but a man.
“There is more to life than sex,” she said, and he saw a darkness pass through her eyes—some kind of shadow. But she blinked, and it was gone.
“Apparently not for you,” he said lazily. “Apparently, you are bored with everything that happens outside our bed. One solution would be to make sure you never leave it.”
“Promises, promises,” she chided him, a gleam in her eyes. “Who would run the country if we spent all our time in bed?”
The man was insatiable, Lara thought.
And what was so astonishing was that she, who had always enjoyed the company of men but had certainly never felt compelled by them, was too.
He had her in the suites of hotels where they stayed while on royal engagements, her back up against the wall, his hand and mouth busy beneath her skirts. He seduced her on a speedboat as they made their way to one of the more remote clans, only accessible across a system of mountain lakes. There was no place he did not look at her with that dark passion, that promise, alive in his gray eyes. And no place where she did not immediately respond, no matter how inappropriate it might be.
It was lust, she told herself. And unexpected chemistry.
And she was no better.
She climbed astride him in the backseat of the plush limousine as the motorcade wove through the twisting streets of the capital city, rocking them both into bliss before a command appearance at the city opera. She had taken it upon herself to explore him in every room she could discover in the old castle—behind doors, on ancient chairs, under the fierce and disapproving glares of her ancestors high above in their glowering state portraits.
It was only lust, she thought. And lust was fine. Lust was allowed. Lust would fade. Though she could not help but note, every now and again as the summer wore on, that the more she touched him, the more she tasted him, the less she worried about the ways in