Page 45 of The Royal Curse

“Your Highness, if you want to direct the journey, then with all possible respect, you need to either pay attention to the decisions being made or at least ask when you—”

“I’m sorry, forget I—never mind,” I said, shoving up out of my chair and making for the door, flustered and with sudden prickles in my eyelids. Pathetic, gods I was pathetic. “I’m certain you made the right decision. Whatever decision you made.”

Swift footsteps rang out behind me as I put my hand on the latch. Before I could open it, Andreas had caught me by the upper arm and spun me around, stepping so close he put a foot between mine and crowded me against the door.

He leaned down, bracing his other elbow on the wall beside me and caging me in. I couldn’t look away. Gods, those eyes. I vaguely recalled trying to convince myself they weren’t beautiful when we first met, since I’d been sulking and determined not to see anything good in him. Now, I couldn’t imagine anything more gorgeous than those coppery flecks, the dark intensity of his gaze, and the firm set of his jaw and mouth to complete the picture.

“Your Highness,” he said softly, and then sighed and shook his head. “Niko.”

Something twisted in my chest, something painful and beautiful. Tilting my head up and falling into his kiss felt like the most natural thing in the world. The hand on my arm slid around until it rested between my shoulder blades, fingers splayed, drawing me closer.

Andreas’s tongue flicked my lower lip as he pulled back, one last taste.

“Niko,” he said again, and my knees almost buckled. I slumped back. Andreas moved with me, hand trapped between me and the door. Gods, I ached for him again. It’d only been—a lot less than forty hours and however many minutes. “Do you want to hear what the plan is?”

I nodded, not trusting myself to speak. Yes, I did, and wrapping my arms around him and spreading my legs and possibly accidentally disposing of what was left of our wardrobes—which I wanted even more than an explanation—probably wouldn’t be the best move at the moment, seeing as we were in a semi-public place with half the village drinking ale in the taproom on the other side of the door.

“Carlo and Dario are going to get a look at the bridge for themselves, just to make sure, and then they’re going to ride further north, where there may be a ferryman with a boat capable of getting us all across despite the flooding.”

He paused as if waiting for some sensible and intelligent comment from me. Well, he’d be waiting a long fucking time. My cock had stirred almost to half-mast, my hole practically hurt it felt so fucking empty, and every second that I spent breathing in his heat and rich scent made me more lightheaded. I nodded slightly.

“All right,” Andreas went on. “I’ll take that as approval. But it means we’ll be here for a few days waiting for them. I know it’s cutting it close for how much time we have left to make it to your meeting. But there’s no point in riding out in this weather and on these roads without any certain route.”

A few more days. Here, in this inn, with Andreas. And nothing whatsoever to do.

Oh, gods. That wouldn’t be a recipe for trouble at all.

It was time to admit it to myself: if I wanted to last four hours, let alone forty, I’d need to barricade myself in my room with Andreas outside it, tie myself to the bed, and knock myself over the head with a wine bottle.

The way his eyes kept flicking to my lips suggested he might be in similar straits.

And now I couldn’t think about anything except barricading the bedroom door and drinking the wine, only with Andreas on my side of the door, and as for the other part…

“Whatever you’re thinking, stop,” Andreas said harshly. “Just the look it’s putting on your face is going to fucking kill me.”

Gods.Hewas going to fucking killme, because now I knew that the only thing more unbearably attractive than Andreas in full, commanding control was Andreas as desperate for me as I was for him.

I could tease him.

If I dared.

I smirked up at him, fluttered my eyelashes, and said, “If you really want to know, I was—”

“I don’t, because we’re not even really alone—”

“—thinking about you tying me to the bed in our room.”

Andreas stuttered into silence, his mouth dropping open. The hand on my back went rigid, the fingers digging in.

“You were thinking,” he said, leaning down so slowly that the urge to bolt and run gathered in prickles of sweat at the base of my spine, “of me tying you to the bed. With anything in particular, Your Highness? For any particular purpose?”

I knew him well enough by now to recognize his purposefully mild tone, the way he was trying to sound unaffected. But that rasp to his voice gave him away. That and the way his chest had started to rise and fall like he’d been in a footrace. If I tilted my hips forward a tiny bit—oh, gods, yes, he was hard, so long and hard that he was about to lose another pair of trousers. My cock brushed his. I had to bite back a groan.

“If you want me to use that, tell me,” he said firmly.

Another flutter of my eyelashes, since it seemed to either annoy him or make him want me, or possibly both at once. “Tell you what?”

Andreas’s eyes widened. “Oh, for—fuck,” he growled, and yanked me into his arms, bending me back over one of them, everything whirling around me, and crushing his mouth over mine.

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