Temporarily His Princess

Nine

“The ordeal is finally over.”

Tremors drenched Glory at Vincenzo’s deep purr.

It came from the darkness that enveloped the doorway of her hideaway.

At midnight, as per tradition, Vincenzo’s friends had held him back while she’d been “spirited” away by hers. It was supposed to whet the groom’s appetites even further, searching for his bride in the castle, until he caught her and carried her back to their marital quarters.

The ladies had deserted her somewhere she’d never been in the castle what felt like an hour ago.

She’d felt like someone in a movie who’d been suddenly left behind somewhere mysterious and otherworldly, filled with whispers of temptation beckoning to an unknown fate.

She’d felt his approach long before she’d heard his voice. She now felt his eyes on her as she stood in the dancing light of a flame-lit brass lantern. Her heart no longer had distinct beats, buzzing like a hummingbird’s wings, failing to pump blood to her vitals. The world started to blotch crimson….

His voice brought her jackknifing back to focus. “While being forced to share you with every single person I’ve known in my life, I’ve been pretending sanity and civilization for the crowd and the cameras. Now the wait is over.”

He appeared as if separating from the darkness, a piece of its endlessness taking the form of the epitome of manhood. The need radiating from him violently strummed her, the reverberations deepening her paralysis.

She could only hurl herself at him, climb him, tear him out of his clothes and devour him in her mind.

Then he was there, against her, pressing her into the wall. Her cry echoed in the almost empty chamber as he ground himself against her. Moans and groans filled her head, high and deep, the sounds of suffering. He was in agony, too. His flesh burned her with his torment.

“Ti voglio tanto…tanto, Gloriosa mia.”

Her nod was frantic. “I want you too much, too…. Take me to our room….” She didn’t know where that was. Another tradition of the nobility around here. The groom picked the quarters for his bride and prepared them for pampering and pleasuring her. Just imagining it made her plead, “Please, Vincenzo…now.”

He roared as she sank her teeth in his neck to stress her plea. He snatched her off her feet, hurtled with her through the now-deserted winding corridors of his fairy-tale domain.

Doors opened into a place set up like an erotic dream. The vast chamber opened onto a semicircular balcony with wide-open ten-foot doors. The balmy sea breeze wafted in with the scent of jasmine and sandalwood incense, making sheer white curtains dance like gossamer spirits. The flames of a hundred candles undulated like fiery beings. A bed bigger than any she’d thought possible occupied the far end of the room. It was spread in satin the color of her eyes and covered in white and gold rose petals.

But instead of taking her there and putting an end to the torment, he only put her down on her feet.

She stood swaying with the loss of his support and watched him move to stand framed against the moonlit balcony door, her Roman god come to life.

Before she could ask why he’d walked away, his voice cascaded over her, intertwining with the music of the night. “Though I’m dying to end our suffering, there’s one thing I want to do first. A wedding night ritual that used to be done here before modernism took over and people started taking too many shortcuts, even in passion. Something I never thought I’d have the chance to do, but always wished I could.”

She groaned, louder inwardly. Not another thing to prolong her waiting! “What’s that ritual?”

“A striptease. Of sorts.”

Okay. Sounded good. Exactly what she wanted to do. Though she wasn’t sure her system could withstand watching him strip at this point.

“It has rules, though.”

Not so good. He expected her to follow rules, or do anything that required coherence now?

“Would you hurry up and say what those rules are before I liquefy completely?”

His chuckle was pure male pride. “We play a game. The winner gets to dictate the intimacies we share, until the other wins a next one.”

“And the rules of the game, dammit?”

His laughter deepened. He loved watching her come apart. “Each says the most audacious thing that has ever crossed their mind about the other, confessing every uninhibited fantasy. According to the enormity of each confession, we shed one or more pieces of clothing.”

Now, that wasn’t good at all. She wasn’t ready to expose her most private yearnings.

Which was stupid, when she was begging him to expose her to every intimacy he could think of.

But it was one thing for him to do it, for her to revel in having it done to her, another to put her needs into words. She’d been hoping he’d give her what she needed with nothing but surrender on her part, as he’d always done.

But that was exactly what this was about. Making her own her needs heard. Taking pride in them and responsibility for them. An opportunity to be on equal footing with him, at least in this.

And that wasn’t bad. Also, she could see he believed he’d win without breaking a sweat, that he would have her writhing in submission before he was through.

He probably would. Didn’t mean she’d make it easy for him, or that she would go down without a fight. Dictating intimacies was a hefty prize. Just the idea of having him doing her sensual bidding was worth any risk.

She took the first one. “The first time I saw you, before you ushered me into your office for my interview, you were in your meeting room among all those stuffy suits. All I could think as I shook your hand was whether you tasted as incredible as you smelled. I wanted to know if you looked even more heart-stopping in the throes of pleasure. I wanted to tell the others to get out so I could find out, right there and then. My fantasy went even further, that if they didn’t leave, I wouldn’t stop, even if it meant giving them a show.”

His eyes had darkened with her every word, becoming obsidian pools. His lips belied his eyes’ ferocity, spreading wider with approval as he clapped, lazily, sensuously. “I thought you’d balk. Well done.”

He took off his sash and slid his cape off his shoulders in an arc, aborting its momentum with a tug that spooled it around his forearm before he let it pool to the ground.

“Taking off pieces of clothing should be simultaneous.”

She jerked from her mesmerized gawking, fumbling with her train, almost tearing it off in her haste.

Then it was his turn. “The moment you walked into the room that first day and looked at me with those incredible eyes, I wanted to push you back on my desk, whether anyone remained in my office or not, spread your silky legs and devour you to a screaming orgasm before I even knew who you were.”

The fire in her loins was spreading, consuming her, flowing down her thighs. And all he’d done was expose her to his visual and verbal desire and make her confess hers.

He prowled toward her, giving her a hormone-roaring show of contained power and inbred poise as he slipped off his jacket. By the time it thudded to the ground in his wake, she’d torn off her veil, tumbling her chignon in disarray.

“When you showed up on my doorstep that night,” she panted, “I thought it would be the first and last time I had you alone. I fantasized about seizing the opportunity, dragging you in, tearing you out of your clothes and losing my mind all over you, even if you fired me for it.”

He unbuttoned his shirt, exposing his Herculean torso and abdomen, shrugged the shirt off then yanked off his boots and socks. “All those licentious thoughts when you were a virgin, too.”

As she bent to take off her stilettos, a warning finger stopped her. She straightened, swaying in place. “Being a virgin made my fantasies even more licentious. I had no expectations or experience to water them down.”

His zipper slid down with a smooth hiss that made her start to shake in earnest.

He let his pants fall then kicked them aside. “Whatever happened to the fantasies after you experienced me?”

Her zipper was undone in a far less assured fashion. Her dress peeled off her swollen breasts under its own weight, sighing in a rustling mass around her ankles. She struggled not to stumble as she stepped out of it.

She stood facing him, in her white lace thong, jewelry and four-inch stilettos, her gaze glued to the erection stretching his boxers.

“They ended.” At his frown, she elaborated, “I realized they were actually modest, almost pathetic. You surpassed any fantasy I was creative enough to have.”

A shock wave of lust blasted off of him.

Her lips trembled in triumph. “Do I win?”

His chest was heaving now. “All those years, I fantasized about going back for you, dragging you away wherever I found you, taking you somewhere where there was only us, only ever us. I would be in my lab, or in a board meeting or at a summit and I’d sit and plan everything I’d do to you touch by touch. I planned whole nights of arousing you and taking you to the edge again and again until you were begging me to take you over it, to do anything and everything to you, with you. I mapped out the number of orgasms I’d give you, their variations and method before I had mercy on you, took you, rode you until I drained your magnificent body of every spark of sensation it was capable of. Then I planned how to keep you in my power, how to have you beg to be my pleasure slave, and a slave to my pleasure.”

“Vincenzo, pietà…have mercy now…you win.” She stumbled the last steps between them, crushed her breasts against his hard chest, assuaging the pain, accumulating more. “Now dictate. Any intimacy. And just do it.”

He grabbed her head in both hands. “I always started our intimacies as the hunter, the seeker. Even when you did anything to me, it was at my request, my prodding. But I always fantasized that you’d take the initiative, do anything you want to me. This is what I dictate. That you show me your desire, Gloria mia.” His hands stabbed into her hair, pulling her away by its tether, demand vehement in his eyes. “Do it.”

*

Vincenzo watched Glory as she pulled away. Her eyes were eclipsed with hunger as she started demonstrating her fantasies.

She touched him all over, explored and owned and worshipped him, in strokes and caresses, in suckles and kisses, in nips and kneads—his chest and abdomen, his arms and hands, his neck and face—telling him how she’d always wanted to do that, every second of every day, how she’d thought nothing, real or imagined, touched him in beauty, in wonder.

He reveled in feeling his mind unravel with her every touch and confession, in feeling her craving cocooning him, claiming him. Then, without warning, she dropped before him, wrapping her arms around his thighs, burrowing her face into his erection.

His eyes glazed over at the sight of her as she knelt before him. The ripe swell of her buttocks, the graceful curve of her back, the gleaming luxury of her hair, her unbridled expression as she drew deep of his feel and scent, as she pulled his boxers down. His engorgement rebounded against his belly, throbbing, straining.

Then she was showing him in glorious sight and sound and touch. And words. Feverish, explicit, uncensored words, confessing all. Exposing the true extent of her desire.

His body hovered on the edge of detonation with every touch, yet plateaued in the most agonizing arousal he’d ever experienced. He felt his life depended on, and was threatened by, prolonging this. His groans merged as her hands owned and explored him, her breath on his flesh a furnace blast, her tongue as it swirled and lapped the flow of his desire a sweep of insanity. Then she engulfed all she could of him, poured delight and delirium all over him. And his mind snapped.

“Enough.”

Then she was hauled over his shoulders, gasping and moaning as he hurtled across the room. Her teeth sank into his shoulder blade, unleashing a roar from his depths as he swung her over and down on the bed. He stood back for one more fractured heartbeat, looking down at her, a goddess of abandon and decadence lying open and maddened with need among the petals, her satiny firmness sparkling in his kingdom’s treasures, trembling arms outstretched, bidding him come lose his mind. He first rid her of jewels, leaving only the ring, then he lost the last shred of the civilized man and let the beast claw its way out of his skin.

He came down on top of her, yanked her thighs apart and crushed her beneath him. She surged back into him, grinding herself against him, her legs spreading wider, her fingers and nails digging into him, her litany of “don’t wait, don’t wait, fill me, fill me” completing his descent into oblivion.

Incoherent, he gripped her buttocks, tilted her, bore down on her, then, in one forceful stroke, he plunged inside her, invading her to her recesses. She engulfed him back on a piercing scream, consuming him in her vise of pure molten pleasure.

His bellow rocked him, and her beneath him. “Glory…at last.”

Her head thrashed, tossing her hair among the petals, her back a steep arch, her voice a pulse of fever. “Yes, Vincenzo, yes…take me, take me back, take all of me…”

But before he did, he rested his forehead on hers, overcome by the enormity of being inside her again. She arched beneath him, taking him all the way to her womb, her eyes streaming, making him feel she’d taken him all the way to her heart like he’d once believed she had.

On a fervent prayer that it was true, he withdrew all the way out of her then thrust back, fierce and full.

Then he rode her. And rode her. To the escalating rhythm of her satin screams, his frenzied rumbles echoing them. It could have been a minute or an hour as the pleasure, the intimacy, rose and deepened. Then, with relief and regret, both of them extreme, he felt his body hurtling to completion. Needing her pleasure first, he held back until her almost unbearable tightness clamped down on his length, pouring a surplus of red-hot welcome over his flesh as she convulsed beneath him, her orgasm tearing through her, wrenching her core around him.

Seeing her lost to the pleasure he’d given her hurled him after her into the abyss of ecstasy. His buttocks convulsed into her cradle as he poured himself inside her, surge after surge of blinding, scorching pleasure. Her convulsions spiked with every splash of his seed, her cries were stifled against his shoulder as she mashed herself into him. He felt her heart boom out of control along with his as the paroxysm of release wiped out existence around them….

*

“Dio, siete incredibile.”

Glory thought this had to be the most wonderful sound in existence. Vincenzo cooing to her. That he was telling her she was incredible didn’t hurt, either.

She hadn’t slept, not for a second. The first time had also been like that, leaving her with the experience still expanding inside her, awake but in the stasis of stunned satisfaction.

She tried to open her eyes, but they wouldn’t cooperate. They were swollen. Just like every inch of her, inside and out. From Vincenzo’s ferocious possession, and her fierce response. A numb hand flew to her head, surprised it was still there. He’d almost blown it off with pleasure, discharging the accumulated frustrations and cravings of six years in one annihilating detonation.

And he’d only managed to whet her appetite sharper. She wanted him again, even more than before. Her addiction was fully resurrected and would keep intensifying. Until it ended again.

But now it was just starting. She wanted every second of it before she had to relinquish it all again.

Succeeding in opening her eyes at last, she found him propped over his elbow, draped half over her, his eyes smoldering down at her. “Dio, what have you done to yourself? How could you be even more beautiful than before? How could you give me even more pleasure?”

“Look who’s talking.” She dragged his head down to her, twisting beneath him, bringing him fully on top of her.

He started to kiss her, caress her, but she was too inflamed. She clamped her legs around his waist, thrusting herself against his intact arousal.

He eased her down, unlocked her legs and rose between her splayed thighs, probing her with a finger, then two. Her flesh clamped around their delicious invasion, but it was him she needed inside her. She was flowing for him. He attempted to soothe her frenzy, clearly wanting to take it slower this time. She wouldn’t survive slower. Her heartbeats felt as if they’d race each other to a standstill.

“Just take me, Vincenzo,” she cried, undulating beneath him, her breasts turgid and aching, her core on fire. “I’ve needed you inside me for so long…so long…and having you once only made me want more….”

“After six endless years without this, without you, you’ll have more, as much as you can survive.” He bore her down into the mattress, driving air from her lungs. “Now I take my fill of you. And you take your fill of me. Take it all, Gloria mia.”

And he plunged inside her.

Her scream was stifled with that first craved invasion, that elemental feeling of his potency filling her, like a burning dawn, scorching everything away as it spread. He kept plunging deeper, feeling as if he’d never bottom out. Then he did, nudging against what felt like the center of her being. He relented at her scream, resting against the opening of her womb and stilling inside her, overfilling her, inundating her with sensations both agonizing and sublime.

Then the need for him to conquer her rose. Her legs clamped around his back; her heels dug into his buttocks, urging him on; her fractured moans begged for everything, insane for the assuagement of his full power and possession. And he answered, drowning her in a mouth-mating as he drove her beyond ecstasy, beyond her limits, winding that coil of need inside her tighter and tighter with each thrust.

Then he groaned for her to come for him and all the tension spiked and splintered, lashing out through her system in shock waves of excruciating gratification. His tongue filled her, absorbing her cries of pleasure as he filled her with his own, jet after jet of fuel over her fire.

He kissed her all through the descent, rumbling her name again and again, throbbing inside her until the tide receded and cell-deep bliss dragged her into its still, silent realm.

*

Glory had been awake for a while now.

She kept her eyes closed, regulating her breathing even as her heart stumbled.

From the flickering dimness illuminating her closed lids, she knew it was night again. Twenty-four hours or more had passed since Vincenzo had carried her into this chamber of pleasures. He had said he wasn’t coming up for air for at least that long. And he’d kept his promise. How he’d kept it.

After the first two times he’d made love to her, he’d carried her to the adjoining bathroom, an amalgam of old Castaldinian design and cutting-edge luxury. By the time he’d carried her back to bed, he’d melted her into too many orgasms to count. Then they’d spent hours reviving every sensual bond they’d formed years ago. He claimed they’d never loosened their hold over him.

Then he’d let her have him at her mercy as she fulfilled her fantasy of losing her mind all over him. Riding him to the most explosive release in her life was the last thing she remembered before waking up minutes ago.

There was a problem, though. She’d woken up so many times, too many, from abandoned nights to feel him wrapped around her like that. Then she’d opened her eyes and he’d dissolved into the emptiness of reality. She was afraid if she opened her eyes now, he might disappear again.

“Gloria mia?”

She’d heard him crooning her name in her waking dreams before. Logically speaking, everything that had culminated in their wedding night had to be some lovelorn hallucination….

Every nerve in her body fired in unison as the hand cupping her breast started caressing it to the fullness of need again.

Okay. None of her tormenting phantasms had felt that real. That good. That meant that even if it made no sense whatsoever, Vincenzo was really wrapped around her after a night of magic beyond her wildest fantasies.

Then his silk-covered leg drove between hers, pressing just where she needed. He must have sensed she was awake. Or her heart must have been shaking the whole bed.

No use pretending to be asleep now.

She opened her eyes. The best sight in existence filled her vision. Vincenzo. His every line thrown into relief by stark shadows and the illumination of the gibbous moon pouring from the open window. But it was his expression that had her on the verge of crushing herself against him and weeping.

She must be seeing what she longed to see. Or she was superimposing what she felt on him. He couldn’t be looking at her as if he couldn’t believe she was in his arms again. As if he was afraid to blink and miss one nuance of her, one second with her. As if he loved her. As if he’d always loved her.

As if responding to her need to escape the impossible yearnings, his expression shifted to another kind of passion as he weighed and kneaded her breast. “I think I will fulfill my fantasy, after all. I’ll keep you here as my pleasure slave.” She moaned, arched, pressed her breast harder into his big palm. Something elemental rumbled in his gut. “The way you respond to my every word and touch is pure magic. What you do to me by just existing is beyond even that.”

Her hips moved to yield to the erection that she was still stunned she could accommodate. Her moan grew louder as he expanded and hardened even more. “It’s only fair that I turn you inside out like you do me.”

Indulgence smoldered in his eyes. “So we’re even.”

“Not unless we play musical slaves.”

“After what you did to me last night, I might cheat and let you sit on the chair every time. I’ll let you sit anywhere you want, as many times and as long as you want.”

“Oh, I want. I want, Vincenzo.”

Unable to bear the emptiness inside her that only he could fill, she tried to drag him over and inside her. He resisted her, slid down her body, looking up as she twisted in his hold.

“I have a six-year hunger that I need to appease, gloriosa mia. Surrender to me, let me take my fill.”

And she collapsed, could do nothing but submit to his will and let him take everything he wanted, let him drive her to madness, over and over until he’d drained her dry of reason. Of worries. Of anything that wasn’t him.

*

When next she woke, it was night again, and she was alone.

Before dismay could register, the door creaked open and in Vincenzo walked with a huge, piled tray in his hands. In a molded gray shirt and pants, he looked like a god come down to earth to mess with mortals’ wills and jeopardize their souls.

His smile was indulgence itself as he put the tray aside to pull her up to a sitting position. The sheet fell off, exposing her breasts. As if he couldn’t help it, he bent and saluted each nipple with soft pulls, soothing the soreness she’d literally pummeled him to inflict on her.

He pulled back reluctantly. “No more temptation, princess.” He chuckled at her pout. “I’d do nothing but service and pleasure Your Royal Voluptuousness nonstop, but I have to refuel you so you can withstand the week ahead.”

She sighed her pleasure as she sifted her fingers through the thick, silky depths of his hair. “I’ve been holding up pretty well for the past two days. What’s so different about the week ahead?”

“First, for the past two days you haven’t even left this room. You have been mostly flat on your back—or belly—and apart from a couple of memorable instances, I’ve been doing all the work.” She smacked him playfully, giggling, her body priming itself again at the memory of all the “work” he’d done. “But I’m going to demand more of your participation over the next week, as it’s all the time I have for our honeymoon. My post back in New York starts next week.”

Her heart plummeted. That soon?

She must have looked as crestfallen as she felt. He smoothed her tousled bangs out of her eyes, his tone urgent. “I’ll only work by day. The nights, I’m all yours.”

She smiled, hating that she’d made him feel bad for having to work. “It’s okay. I need to get back to work myself.”

His eyes flared with possessiveness as he slid the sheet totally off her. “During the days only, Gloriosa mia. The nights are mine.”

She nodded dreamily as she squeezed her breasts and thighs together to mitigate their aching throb. “Yes.”

His eyes glazed over as he pushed her thighs apart, sliding two fingers between her soaked folds. “And afternoons and lunch breaks and whenever I can squeeze you in.”

Her legs fell apart, inviting his fingers inside; her breasts jutted for him to squeeze away. “Oh, yes.”

Her response tore away any intentions to prioritize food as he fell on her breasts again, suckling, his fingers plunging inside her, pumping. She poured fuel on his fervor, kneading his erection, sinking her teeth into his shoulders.

“Dio, Gloria mia, you make me insane….”

His growl was driven as he descended over her, pushed her flat on her back, impacting her with his full weight and rising between her spread legs only enough to free himself.

Then, without preliminaries, he drove into her, tearing a shriek from her depths. He rammed inside her in a furious rhythm, plunging deeper with every thrust, growling like a beast. The expansion inside her around his girth and length, the feeling of being totally dominated and mastered, had her sobbing, pleasure twisting tighter inside her until she feared she’d unravel once it snapped.

He rose on outstretched arms. “Look at us, Gloria mia, look what I’m doing to you, look how you’re taking me….”

She looked, and the sight of the daunting column of flesh disappearing inside her, spreading her, joining them, made her thrash at the carnality of it, the beauty.

Then the tightness was quickening inside her, the familiar crescendo, her flesh fluttering around his girth.

He felt it, fell on her breasts, suckling hard, biting, triggering her. “Come for me, gloriosa, come all over me. Finish me with your pleasure as I finish you.”

Everything snapped inside her like a high-voltage cable, writhing and lashing out and wreaking devastation. He drove the deepest he’d ever been inside her, roaring as he rested against her womb and razed her in the ecstasy of his release.

But feeling his seed splashing her intimate walls, filling her, branding her, spread regret along with the pleasure. Regret that his seed wouldn’t take root. She’d made sure it wouldn’t.

He collapsed on top of her, his breathing as harsh as hers. She wrapped herself tighter around him, relishing his weight. Without him covering her like this, anchoring her in the aftermath of devastation, she felt she might dissipate….

He drew up, supporting his weight on one elbow, fusing them in the evidence of their mutual satisfaction, his other hand securing her head for a deep, luxurious kiss.

The moment he felt her quickening beneath him again, he rumbled a self-deprecating laugh, then groaned as he separated their bodies. “Have mercy, bellissima. Now it’s I who needs to refuel. I’m not a spry teenager anymore.”

Her gaze clung to his undiminished manhood. “Are you kidding me? I’ve been wondering if you’ve hooked yourself to your inexhaustible energy source.”

“I am hooked, all right, on a perpetually renewable source of passionate madness whose name is but a description of her.” Before she could lunge at him, he jumped up, stuffing himself with difficulty into his pants. “We’re refueling. Then I’m taking you sailing. We’ll continue this session on board. Ever made love rocking to the undulations of a tranquil sea?”

Before she said no, since he hadn’t taken her sailing before, jealousy sank into her gut.

He grinned. “Neither have I. Another fantasy I’ll fulfill. I wrote a list of one hundred and ten items while you slept. I intend to make serious headway into all of them during the next week.”

Her tension deflated. He hadn’t done it before. He hadn’t done so many things, but he wanted to do them all with her. Because she was the only one who made him want them. Just like he was the only one who made her want everything and anything.

She arched sensuously, smoothing her hands down her breasts, her tummy, delighting in the soreness inside and out. “I thought we were going to take turns playing out fantasies.”

He tugged her up by the hand, this time making sure not to come too close and be snared back. “Incantatrice mia, I just played one of yours now. Taking you with no foreplay, just rough domination and explosive satisfaction.”

So he could read her like a hundred-foot billboard.

He brought back the tray, placed it across her thighs and bent for one last kiss before he withdrew quickly, making her bite him in her effort to cling.

He laved her bite with a wince of enjoyment. “Eat something else for now, amore mio. I have to go prepare the rest of the day, then the week. I promise your fantasies are going to be heavily featured and meticulously taken care of.”

With one last wink, he turned and strode out.

She watched him go, everything on pause.

Had he said amore mio?

My love?