Total pages in book: 29
Estimated words: 27560 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 138(@200wpm)___ 110(@250wpm)___ 92(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 27560 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 138(@200wpm)___ 110(@250wpm)___ 92(@300wpm)
I put a hand on his knee. “Tell me.”
I want to know everything in this man’s head. I want to know all of his deepest thoughts and greatest fears. He’s my favorite book, the one I want to reread again and again until I know every line by heart.
“You’ve told me what you don’t like about your life, about the lack of freedom and the inability to do the things you want. But what do you like about it? Is there anything you love?”
I don’t have to think long or hard to answer his question. “I love that I get to help so many of our kingdom’s citizens. I love that I get to do so much social work. I love getting to paint in the tower, especially on those afternoons when the sun hits just right and everything in the room is bathed in a golden glow. Oh, and ballroom dancing! That’s probably one of my favorite things.”
“Ballroom dancing,” he repeats, a dark expression comes over his face. “With other men.”
I like that possessive glint in his eye, the way he looks like he would kill another man for glancing in my direction.
I didn’t realize how possessive he is or how much that would turn me on. The expression on his face is making my panties damp.
“I could teach you how to ballroom dance.” I’ve never danced with anyone that makes me feel the way Rafe does. Something tells me that dancing with him will be different. Intimate. Special.
“You want to ballroom dance with me.” I can’t tell if the idea pleases him or upsets him. But it’s too late to take the suggestion back now, so I shrug. “If you don’t want to…”
He grabs my hip and squeezes it. “Teach me.”
“We don’t have any music.”
He pulls his phone out and passes it to me with the music app open.
I select a soft song that’s easy to learn to waltz to and tell him to close his eyes. “Hum along with me.”
He does what I say and pretty soon our humming is synced to the song. “Do you hear that rhythm? The slow one…two…three of it.”
When I open my eyes, I find him staring down at me with a look of awe and wonder on his face, like maybe he’s seeing the whole universe in a glance. I hope that’s true. I hope Rafael is as madly in love with me as I am with him.
“I got it, sweetheart.” His voice is honey and sin, a deliciously tantalizing sound that has me wanting to pull him back onto the sleeping bags for another round of naked fun even as my heart warms at the pet name. “Now show me.”
I position his body, pleased when he automatically grips me so tightly that his fingerprints are likely to be on my skin tomorrow. I want to always have his marks on me from the hickey that he sucked on the side of my neck to the beard burn between my thighs. I want the whole world to know that I belong to him. That he’s marked me as his own.
He pulls me flush against his body, and I feel his arousal between us. He groans softly. “Fuck, being near your soft curves is heaven.”
He stumbles through the song once and as we get to the end he says, “Again.”
But by the third time we’ve gone through it, the steps are coming easier. Even though he’s not a fluid dancer, he seems to be finding the rhythm of it.
“With more practice we’ll make a proper dancer out of you yet,” I tell him and lean up to give him a long kiss. I can’t help it. There’s something about this man. I always want to be touching him and kissing him just as much as he wants to always be touching and kissing me.
When I pull away, he doesn’t look happy at all. Pain in his gaze. “Do you think we could be together, even though I’m not your prince?”
“You’ll always be mine, prince or not.” As soon as I say the words, I realize how true they are. If the monarchy rejects him, they’ll be rejecting me too. We’re one and what happens to him now happens to me.
His gaze drops back to my lips. I’m pretty sure he’s going to ravage me again right here. But there are still a million things I want to learn about my man. “Can you tell me about the nightmares?”
I’m guessing that he has them, given how restless he was in the sleeping bag last night. He spoke at one point in his sleep, about a man coming for him in the dark but I couldn’t make out the rest of what he was saying. It was too garbled.
He sighs and looks away, staring out at the lake. “I had them since I was a kid. Always this orange glow with a feeling of doom, like I couldn’t breathe.”