His Majesty's Forbidden Temptat - Maisey Yates Page 0,28

majority of his nights there.

She also talked with enough of her friends about first times to know that while every experience was different there were certain things to expect.

And nerves was one of them. But they all survived it.

And maybe this was simply... This was right.

Maybe this was what the royal family owed her.

Because she had been bound up in them for so many years, and maybe... Maybe she would decide to marry no one. Maybe she would decide to walk away with nothing and no money.

And maybe that would mean never returning to this place, never being here where she had felt so accepted. Her father had been happy here, and that had spilled over to her. Dionysus had been kind. The King had treated her like another child.

But Alex, the man who had made her feel like she might not be enough, wanted her. And maybe that was the ending she needed. Maybe this was the courage her heart needed.

To be big and fierce and bold.

She wanted to be.

She played at it in her own little world. Rescuing animals and heading up a charity that spoke to something in her heart, and made everything she did feel natural. Doing the things that mattered to her without having to put herself out there. But she could certainly exploit her position as Dionysus’s former fiancée. As the once-and-no-longer-future Princess of Liri.

Maybe she didn’t need her family’s money. Maybe she simply had to be bold enough to put herself forward.

Yes, she had rebelliously dug into her image, but she had still kept it to herself.

And perhaps the key to that lay on the other side of this mystery. On the other side of this man.

Dionysus had been a dynamic, and obvious, influence on her life. But Alex had always been there.

Alexius. Tall and broad and imposing and creating wide, sweeping feelings inside of her.

She had felt uncomfortable around him. Always. And when his lips had met hers yesterday she had to wonder exactly why.

If perhaps she didn’t truly understand the real reason she felt uncomfortable around him.

If it had never actually been fear.

No. It was fear. And the fear heightened inside of her as she stepped toward him.

It was fear. But it was something else as well.

She had never felt afraid of Dionysus.

But she had never felt this mounting, terrible excitement either.

Alex had given her a deep, trembling excitement over the years that had frightened her unto her core.

She could remember being on the beach with him in Italy. Him being angry at her for her swimsuit...

It all came back in a rush. What the undercurrent of that anger was.

And she’d touched him...

This was like standing on the edge of a cliff and trying to bring herself to jump off of it. Having to trust that somehow the bottom didn’t hold doom, but escape.

He turned suddenly. His dark eyes connected with hers, and she felt her nipples go tight. For she was exposed above the hips, hiding nothing from his sharp gaze.

And he was...

It was only a fleeting moment that she felt embarrassed over her own body, because then she was consumed with the look of his.

He was...

She had often thought of him as a mountain, and she was correct. His chest was broad and heavily muscled, covered with dark chest hair.

He was a man.

That word emblazoned itself on her mind, her soul.

He was not a boy. Not a young man her age. A man with strength and depth and vast experience. And he would not give quarter if she took a step toward him and then decided she was too frightened.

She knew. In that moment. She had to make a choice now, and there would be no reversing it. And so, with her heart pounding sickeningly in her ears, she took a single step toward Alexius. She took a single step toward courage.

CHAPTER SEVEN

SHE WAS A WITCH. There was no other explanation for it. He had been here in the baths, doing his best to scrub her from his skin, doing his best to scrub this unwanted desire from all that he was, and she had appeared. A siren in the water. Naked and glistening and far beyond the beauty he had ever allowed himself to imagine she might possess.

Her breasts were full and plump, rosy tipped and delicious.

Her waist nipped in gently, then sloped outward, rounding into luxurious hips that would be perfect for a man to hold on to. She was the embodiment of his temptation. Of his