Royal Affair. Laurie Paige

Max quickly showered and dried, then returned to the bedroom to dress. Stopping by the reading table, he lifted one perfect rose from the bouquet and sniffed the delicate perfume.

      He closed his eyes as memory poured through him. In an uncharacteristic gesture, he brought the flower to his lips, feeling the fragile coolness of its petals. A shudder went through him as the vast emptiness of his chambers assailed his heart. For that one night he hadn’t been alone….

      “You’re trembling,” he had said, drawing back a little from the kiss, reluctant to let go of the treasure of her mouth.

      “It’s…I don’t know what it is,” she’d admitted. “It’s all so strange. The night…the whole day…seems like a dream. Unreal.” She laid her hands against his chest. “And yet so real.”

      “I know.” He gazed deeply into her eyes, their blue depths so clear it was like looking into her innermost thoughts. He saw doubt and uncertainty, but also passion and intrigue. All the things that raged through him in undulating waves of desire. “I’ve never felt this way before, not about anyone.”

      “Nor have I,” she said, gazing at him with a worried frown on her beautiful face.

      He kissed her cheek, along her jaw, then behind her ear, careful of the tiny gold earrings she wore. Against his chest, he felt her breasts rise with a quickly drawn breath. A groan of need escaped him as the passion rose higher between them. Her arms crept around his neck as he drew her tight against him, unable to disguise the strength of his response to her.

      For a time he was content to hold and kiss her, to stroke her back, her arms, her sides. Then that wasn’t enough. He’d always made it a point never to become involved with anyone not of his set, women who knew the rules and expected only a night of pleasure with no promises.

      He wanted to make promises to this woman, he found. Words like forever danced on the tip of his tongue. He closed his eyes and tried to clear his mind.

      When she swayed against him in sweet surrender, rational thinking scattered like birds before a storm. He cupped her hips in both hands and rubbed against her, needing full body contact.

      “Beautiful princess, will you stay?” he asked, oddly humbled by the passion in her eyes and the sweet confusion in her trembling lips. “Say yes,” he urged, afraid she was going to say no.

      “I…I may not please you,” she whispered.

      A realization came to him. “Are you an untried rose, opening her petals for the first time?”

      White teeth sank into beguiling pink lips, kissed bare of makeup long ago. He hardly heard her answer.

      “Yes,” she finally said, pressing her face against his throat in sweet embarrassment.

      A tenderness, so strong it was almost an ache, spread through him. “I’ll be gentle,” he promised, “if you’re willing. If this is what you want.”

      An eternity passed between one heartbeat and another, then she lifted her head, met his eyes and nodded. She was brave, and she was his. His.

      Golden stardust seemed to shower them in magic. They were surrounded by it, then suffused with it as they kissed again. He touched her hair, her face, then her breasts, feeling the hard points of passion there at the tips.

      Without releasing her lips, he lifted her, then carried her to the bedroom. Although she was shy, there was no awkwardness between them as he undressed her, then himself.

      Once nude, he clasped her slender body to his, letting the full tactile sensation of skin against skin flow over them as they touched, chest, belly, thighs. When he stripped back the covers, they fell onto the sheets as one, laughter bubbling between them in that mysterious sharing of feelings that had happened nearly from the first moment they met.

      When he pressed lightly on her shoulder, she lay back and let him gaze his fill at her.

      “Breathtaking,” he murmured.

      “So are you,” she said with a little catch as her gaze ran over him.

      He wondered if he frightened her with his blatant male desire that couldn’t be hidden as easily as hers could. With the gentlest touch, he stroked from her shoulder, over her breast, down her abdomen and to her thigh. Then he paid homage to her breasts with his hands and his mouth.

      When he probed her belly button with his tongue, it made her laugh. He smiled at her, then went back to the exploration that tantalized them both to near madness. When he kissed along her thighs, first one, then the other, she gasped.

      Her eyes grew big when he glanced up, then nudged her legs apart, asking entry to the secret treasure that was hers to give or withhold.

      “Please,” he murmured, “I need to taste you.”

      When he’d brought her to the peak once, then twice, he finally heeded her little cries that he come to her.

      “At once,” she said. “Now. I want you. I want everything.”

      The red heat of desire shimmered between them. He observed the flush that caused her skin to glow as it swept up her chest and into her cheeks, telling him of her growing hunger and feeding his own until his mind was hazy with it.

      “I’ve never wanted a woman this way,” he whispered. “This much.”

      “How much?” she asked with such innocence it seared his heart.

      “With everything in me. As if the world would perish in one of your tender sighs if we didn’t share this. As if my life depended on this one moment. On you—”

      Max crushed the rose in his fist, jolted out of the lovely remembrance by the knowledge that his life had depended on her at that exact moment. Their passion had literally saved him from the assassins. Would he ever get a chance to tell her?

      “I must leave tomorrow,” she’d said when they had consummated the union and lay entwined in blissful contentment after he’d taken care of her with a warm washcloth and a towel tucked under her hips.

      He smiled now, recalling the blushes and her embarrassed protests, which he’d ignored.

      “No,” he’d said, the command of a king if she’d but known it.

      “I have to. I have a job to do.” She’d sighed plaintively.

      He’d tightened his arms around her. “I will follow you to the ends of the earth,” he’d vowed.

      Releasing the crushed rose, he dropped it into the wastebasket. The conspiracy had taken all his time and attention during the next six weeks. His presence as king, in deed if not yet in name, had been required. Now that the trial and sentencing were finished, he could think of other things, like finding his rose.

      Quickly dressing in jeans and a T-shirt, he grabbed the phone and punched in his security advisor’s private number.

      Chuck answered on the first ring.

      “Can you come to my quarters?” Max asked.

      “Be right there.”

      No sooner had he hung up, than a knock sounded on his door. “Come in.”

      Bartlett entered with a serving cart. On it were a coffee urn, two cups, two plates and a platter of muffins, plus another with a variety of fruit. He didn’t know how the man knew exactly when to arrive, but it had been this way since Max’s earliest memories in the palace.

      “Thanks, Bartlett. I’ll be going out for a hike in about an hour.”

      “Very good, sir.” The man left as quietly as he’d entered, leaving the door ajar and speaking to someone in the hall.

      Chuck Curland came inside and closed the door, then pulled the pocket doors from their hiding place and closed them, too. Two sets of doors had been built into all the king’s rooms when the palace was constructed to ensure privacy in conversation. Max, upon his