DELANEY HAD STUDIED poetry in high school like everybody else. She wasn’t any kind of expert on the subject. But one thing she did know was that no poem she’d ever read for English class had exploded inside her like this.
It was different from that kiss her first afternoon here.
Better. Wilder.
He kissed her and he kissed her, his hard mouth making her feel fluttery, everywhere. Parts of her that shouldn’t have fluttered at all couldn’t seem to stop. Maybe she was the flutter. And maybe she didn’t care. She felt reckless and sure as his hard mouth claimed hers again and again.
She meant to push him away, because surely she should want to push him away, but instead her hands got tangled on him. Lost somewhere in the sweep of his wide, hard chest. Her fingers curled around the lapels of the suit he wore, and she relished the fact that she could cling to something. Anything.
Because everything else was a storm of sensation. It pounded through her. It stole her away and redeemed her anew as his tongue stroked hers. It was all pulse and heartbeat, sensation and need.
She hadn’t known that a person could ache like this, filled with an almost pain for something she couldn’t even name. It felt like a prayer.
Delaney kept thinking, when she could think at all, that she hadn’t known what she was missing.
On and on he kissed her with what she could tell, even half out of her mind, was both consummate skill and an edgy sort of passion. Something in her recognized it. Thrilled to it.
Wanted it—and him—all the more.
Something in her cracked open, wider and wider with every touch of his tongue to hers.
As if this was her true homecoming. His hands on her neck. His mouth on hers. And the storm that she thought she’d be perfectly happy to see rage on forever as long as he kept kissing her like this.
Like he might die if he stopped.
His scent was all around her now. It was indefinably male and entirely him. She wondered if later, if she survived this, she would be unable to breathe without the scent careening through her.
And even imagining that made it better. The intensity seemed brighter.
She shuddered, low and long.
And for some reason, that made him laugh in much the same way.
For a moment, she remembered herself. Her goals—or the fact that she ought to have had goals these last two weeks. She should have demanded to be taken to meet her biological relative at the very least. But she hadn’t. Every day she’d meant to make that stand, but she hadn’t.
Maybe this was why. She could see only Cayetano, and beyond him, the stars.
She could only see him and ever since she’d laid eyes on him at the farm, he was all she wanted to see. Here, now, she could finally admit that.
This was what she wanted. Or no matter what Catherine had said to her about adventure, she would never have gotten in that car.
There were more complicated reasons she hadn’t forced the issue of meeting the Queen. That hadn’t changed.
But there was also this.
There was Cayetano.
And this magical, marvelous fire between them that burned hotter by the moment.
When he pulled her close again, then hauled her up even further so he could hold her in his arms, all she could do was melt.
This time, he kissed her with all the wondrous desperation from before. She met him with the same yearning, the same fire.
But this time, as their lips tangled, the hand that wasn’t gripping her and holding her to him...traveled.
Down her bared shoulder, then to the bodice of her dress, unerringly finding her breast and lifting it out. He broke off from the kiss again, but before she could think to protest the loss, he bent his head. Shifting her as he held her there—outside, where presumably anyone could see them if they had a view of his balcony, and why didn’t she care?—he bent his mouth to her breast instead.
And when his lips closed on her nipple, proud and taut, it was as if all the stars in the sky above her crashed into her.
She let her head fall back. Her hands were fists on his shoulders.
But Cayetano...slowed down.
He slowed down, and then, if she wasn’t mistaken and it was her own pounding heart, he growled.
Then he did it again, and there was no confusing it. It was a profoundly male sound. It seemed to crash through her like so many stars, but they all landed deeper. Lower.
And one by one, began to burn there, low in her belly.
She had the notion, intense and beautiful, that he was devouring her. Eating her alive where they stood.
His mouth kept working at her breasts, and she arched her back so she could better offer herself to him. So she could be certain that he didn’t miss a single part of her.
Because she would have sworn in this moment that she had been born for this.
For him.
She was so consumed with what he was doing that she almost missed the way his hand tracked lower, finding her hip and the outside of her thigh where the fabric of the dress parted. His mouth moved against her nipples, one and then the other, but his hand found the roundness of her bottom and squeezed tight.
That, too, was a storm.
Too many storms to name.
And then everything felt tinged with red, hectic and stunning at once, as that same hand reversed track, but this time beneath the skirt of her dress.
It seemed as if she couldn’t quite take in the sensation that moved through her. She couldn’t catalog it. She could only ride it out. His wonderful, devilish mouth. The arm that held her up and the hand that gripped her side. And below, his marvelously strong fingers as they traced a path—slowly, agonizingly, beautifully—up along the inside of her thigh.
She thought she might die when he finally reached the soft heat between her thighs.
But she didn’t. Delaney had never felt so alive.
Bristling with need, beautiful and impossibly lush—
Cayetano continued into her wet heat, circling the center of her need until she found herself making the strangest keening noises. Then, with a twist of his wrist, he plunged deep within.
His thumb found her outside while his finger stroked deep within. His mouth stayed busy at her breast. Everything was fire and a tugging wet heat, and then she had absolutely no choice.
No choice and no fight in her.
Delaney didn’t so much fall apart as fly.
She became stars, all of them at once, and it was hot and, oh, so bright.
It was him, Cayetano, in all his dark glory.
And she was certain of only one thing as she burst bright and then became so many torn apart pieces that she felt she was made of stars herself.
She would never be the same again.
But he gave her no time to contemplate what that might mean. She was dimly aware that he set her back on her feet. Even tucked her breasts back into place with a surprising gentleness, and then, without a single word from her—because she could hardly speak and wouldn’t know what to say—he ushered her back into his dining room. And seated her. So that they shared the corner of the table.
And by the time she blinked herself fully awake and aware again, the food was served.
Delaney hardly knew what to do with herself. She hadn’t noticed the servants’ arrival and was only dimly aware when they withdrew. And Cayetano seemed not to notice that she merely sat there, undone. Completely and totally undone. Or maybe he did notice, she amended a moment later, because he served her as well as him.
And everything on her plate made her mouth water, but how to concentrate on food? That wasn’t what she was hungry for.
She still felt as if everything in her was simmering along, coming closer and closer to a boil. Her body felt like it no longer belonged to her. As if the way he had touched her, so masterful, so certain, had altered her. Inside and out.
Her thoughts spooled out in her head like songs. Like a melody she couldn’t quite catch. The burnt gold of his eyes. What he’d said about her safety when she worried about his. That impossible storm he brewed in her, and how eagerly she’d leaped over an edge she had never known was there.
There had been no edges in Kansas. No cliffs.
She watched him eat in silence, the heat in her rising and rising, cresting toward that boil as her own body seemed to work against her—or maybe with her—
But when he looked over at her, his gaze was darker. Knowing. And that mouth of his that she’d now tasted and learned and craved...curved.
She felt as struck as if he’d hit her. She wanted to jump to her feet and announce what was so obvious to her. That she wasn’t the same woman who’d walked into this room feeling like a queen. That her entire being was different. That she had changed, profoundly, and how could he eat dinner?
This was yet another edge and she’d already gone hurtling off the side. He should have seen her, catapulting out into space.
Delaney thought she might explode. Or maybe she already had. Maybe that was the trouble. Maybe that was where all the commotion inside her came from.
Her problem was, she had no idea where it was going to go.
“I’ve never actually had sex,” she announced.
Which summed up everything and nothing. It was just awkward and embarrassing. When inside her, what she’d wanted to say was all elegance and lyricism.
She instantly wanted to snatch those words back, particularly when they seemed to land with such a loud thunk in the middle of the brightly tiled mosaic table.
But then again, perhaps not, because the heat in Cayetano’s mythic gaze...shifted.
And Delaney felt a different sort of warmth move through her, almost as if this bizarre night had turned...affectionate.
Don’t kid yourself, she lectured herself sternly. You know exactly what this man’s interest is in you.
“You have my condolences,” Cayetano said after a long moment that felt breathless to her. “That seems an unfortunate oversight.”
“If I had a boyfriend at all, it was the farm,” Delaney told him, still trying to find her feet beneath her. She was glad she was sitting down. “And besides, I never understood how my friends from high school were suddenly able to overlook the fact that the boys in our class when we were seventeen were the same boys in our class from when we were six. With much the same issues in the way of personal hygiene and questionable behavior.” She wrinkled up her nose. “It seemed like everyone had amnesia, but I didn’t.”
Cayetano did not comment on the dearth of acceptable suitors back home. Instead, he filled her wineglass with something rich and red, that smelled to her of currants and honey. The one other time she’d tried wine it had been from an illicit box at a high school friend’s bachelorette party, and it had been notable for its grittiness and sour taste. But when she pressed this glass to her lips, the kiss of his wine warmed her almost the way he did, leaving a kind of yearning on her tongue.
“I don’t drink much, either,” she said very solemnly over the rim of her glass. “So if this is an attempt to loosen me up, well... It’s going to work.”
“Excellent.”
His intense eyes crinkled in the corners and that made her feel as if she was turning cartwheels when she knew she was sitting still. He reached across the corner of the table that separated them and pulled on one of the tendrils that had fallen free from the rest of her hair, tied back in such a complicated arrangement it had taken all of her servants to make it work.
And she probably shouldn’t have allowed him to toy with her hair. Or with her. But she was still hot and molten between her legs. There were still all those sensations charging around inside of her. Her breasts were so oversensitized that she felt shooting streaks of electricity every time she breathed. So all she did was cup her wineglass between her hands, take another, deeper sip, and carry on talking.
“I expected to get married someday,” she told him. He was curling that strand of hair around and around his finger, tugging it slightly, and somehow that made everything between them just that little bit dizzy. “But all I cared about was the farm, you see. So it couldn’t be just anyone. It had to be another farmer, and how do you find a farmer who’s willing to farm your land, not his?”
Again, that lift at the corners of his eyes. As good as a belly laugh from another man. “I am afraid, little one, that I am not conversant on the intricacies of farmland dating in the American heartland.”
She registered his dry tone, and for some reason that made her laugh. “But don’t you see? I grant you, the scope is different. But at the end of the day, both you and I want to marry for land. You just think yours matters more.”
Cayetano stilled. This close, she could see an arrested sort of light dawn in his eyes. And it was so strange how actually reading him made all these various sensations inside her seem to pull tighter and tighter.
As if this was what she’d wanted from the start.
To know the impossibly beautiful man, sculpted to perfection, who never should have set foot on the farm. To know him in every way a person could know another.
He stared back at her for a long while. Then his gaze shuttered, and he shifted to pull one of her hands into his. It felt new and almost sacred to sit there, hushed like this. Hot. To watch as he bent his head, his gaze on their linked hands while his thumb made slow, sweet sweeps against her skin.
“You’re quite right,” he said, and when she felt a jolt deep inside her she realized that this was a surprise, too. That she’d expected him to argue. To rant and rave about history and Montaignes and false queens.
“I beg your pardon?”
He looked up then, his expression rueful. “I said you were right. You are. It is not for me to decide the importance of the things that matter to you. My understanding is that this farm of yours is being sold.”
Her throat was much too dry, suddenly. “It seems my mother found it a burden.”
“And you did not?”
Delaney sighed. She hadn’t been gone from Kansas long, she knew that. And yet still, the fact that she was gone at all made everything different. That was the thing about perspective, she supposed. You only recognized how little you’d had when you happened upon some.
“I would never have called it a burden,” she told him, and she was aware that she had never been this honest before. Not with anyone. Not even with herself, because it would have felt like a betrayal. “It’s just... That’s what love is, isn’t it? You put in the work because it’s worth it, because you love it. Not because it will ever love you back. You work the land because that’s what you do. Because you’re a farmer who lives on a farm. And nothing could ever change that, or so I thought, so it never occurred to me to think in terms of whether or not it made me happy. How can you know that you’re carrying a burden until you put it down and see how much it’s weighed all this time?”
Again, that arrested look. And she could see something, there on his face of stone, but it was gone in the next instant.
But she knew what she’d seen. For a moment he’d almost looked...raw.
“There’s absolutely no reason that you can’t hold on to that land if you wish it,” he said, roughly. His attention was on her linked hands again. “I will instruct my people to buy it tomorrow. It is easy enough to hire someone to tend to it.”
“But it’s not mine,” she said quietly. And then, though it hurt, “it was never mine. If my mother doesn’t want it, then it must belong instead to Princess Amalia.”
Cayetano let out a derisive sound. “There is no possibility on this earth that a spoiled princess like Amalia will ever wish to dirty her hands. And certainly not somewhere so far away from the beaches of Positano or St. Tropez.”
“Perhaps a princess would not.” Delaney kept her gaze trained on him. “But she’s not a princess, is she?”
And something seemed to swell between them. It wasn’t as simple as heat. She almost wanted to call it something else, something more like vulnerable—
But Cayetano made another noise, this one a deep rumble of need that seemed to lodge itself deep inside her. And then he was moving from his chair, sweeping her up from her seat and into his arms, pausing only to fuse his mouth to hers once more.
There was a part of her that wanted to protest, because she was sure that something momentous had happened here. And that if they only stayed right here, in this odd little moment where she was sure she could see parts of him he normally hid, they could make something kindle to life—
But his kiss was hard and hot, demanding her focus. Commanding her full attention.
She hardly knew what was happening when he began to move, carrying her out onto the balcony again. But he didn’t stop there. He continued walking, still holding her aloft, before shouldering his way in through a different set of doors.
His bedroom, she understood in a haze as he laid her down on the high, imposing bed, and settled himself half beside her and half on top of her.
And then he kissed her more. Deeper. Harder. In a way that made it clear that he’d been holding himself back before.
This was different. This was raw, unchained.
Beautiful, something in her whispered.
And he built the same storm, leading her even more quickly this time toward the same edge.
Delaney had some faint presence of mind as he helped her out of her dress, growling in deep male appreciation as he found her breasts, then slipped her panties from her hips. She was aware of every moment, of every part of her that he bared with his hands, then gazed at with such delicious possessiveness. He lavished her with heat and need, stirring her to a fever pitch. Then he tossed her over the side again, this time not waiting for her to shudder back to earth.
Instead he moved further south to settle himself between her legs.
That time she screamed when she flew apart, as the warlord ate her alive.
He rolled away from her then to strip out of his own clothes, and she felt almost uncomfortably torn. There was the spectacle of his beautiful male body, somehow even more glorious out of his clothes than in them. But at the same time, she couldn’t help thinking how mad this was. How unlike her.
Was she really about to do this thing that for twenty-four years had never been so much as the faintest blip on her radar?
Yes, he was beautiful. Yes, he seemed like more of a man to her than every other man she’d ever met, put together.
But this was so out of character.
He stood over her, there by the side of the bed, his eyes blazing and every line and muscle of his body held taut.
“You are already mine,” he told her, his voice low and dark, like a stirring deep inside her own soul. “You are the answer to prayer. The hope of a people. This is already so, little one. But tonight, you understand, the gift of your innocence and the fact you give it to me changes everything.”
“You’re too late,” she whispered, and it was odd that she had no sense of shame. No urge to cover herself when she had always been so modest. On the contrary, she felt wild with her own power and sat up, offering herself to him even more fully. “Everything is already changed. What’s one more thing?”
And finally, Cayetano laughed. He laughed and laughed, and she understood with a deep kind of shock, a wild sort of thrill, that she had known this man so short a time. Almost no time at all, and yet would do anything for that laughter.
Anything for him, something in her whispered.
But maybe she already knew that.
Or she never would have come here.
And she certainly never would have found herself naked with this man.
She felt as unsteady as she had on the plane, but this time, he was with her. This time, she could reach and touch him, and that made all the difference. She didn’t need ground beneath her feet, not when the burnt gold of his gaze seemed to cover her in all that molten heat.
As if she was made of the same stuff.
“I have already claimed you for my country, Delaney,” he growled at her. He moved over her then, climbing onto the bed and lowering himself so that he pressed her down, his flesh against hers, and it was extraordinary. He braced his hands on either side of her head, holding her face where he wanted it. “But tonight, little one, I also claim you for me.”
She felt him between her legs, huge and hard, and she caught her breath—whether to cheer or sob or laugh wildly herself, she would never know.
It was all molten and gold straight through.
Because with a twist of his hips he thrust himself deep. And she was soft and needy still, but yet she felt that sharp tug—
She gasped, but it was gone in an instant.
And his mouth was at her neck while he began to move, inexorable, inescapable, and so shockingly beautiful that she didn’t understand how anything could possibly feel this excruciatingly perfect—
But with every thrust of the hardest part of him deep into the heart of her heat, it got better.
When that should have been impossible.
She felt raw, exposed. And at the same time, closer to this man than she had ever been to another in her life.
He was inside her. But she felt as if she was inside him, too.
Cayetano held her against him, and she arched up so she could press herself against the wall of his chest. So she could take him deeper and deeper still. And the color of his eyes was as molten she felt—
And then everything was bright and too hot and shattering.
It went on forever.
But this time they broke apart together.
And it was a long while later when she found her way back to herself again, drowsy and inordinately pleased to find herself tucked up against his side. She could hear his breathing. His scent was all around her. She was delightfully warm though there were no covers over her.
It was only when she thought about looking for one that she realized he had never turned on a light when they’d come inside. That meant that she could lie there, his heavy arm around her and her head on his magnificent chest, and look out and see nothing but stars. Brilliant, beautiful.
As mysterious and unknowable as he was.
But even as she thought that a different sort of melody wound its way through her. Because everything was changed again. He was right about that. What had happened tonight had made too many things abundantly clear to her. But maybe because of that, something had occurred to her.
Because it was true, everything that had happened since he’d pulled up in the yard was out of character for Delaney Clark, farm girl from Kansas, who never had seen beyond the cornfields.
But that wasn’t who she was. Like it or not, she was a princess. One day she would be Queen.
His Queen.
When he shifted beside her, she turned to find that he was wide-awake, the burnt gold of his eyes simmering.
And before he could speak she reached over and traced a finger over that hard, starkly sensual mouth.
She couldn’t say what she wanted to say. What it hurt her not to say, with all her heart. It was too soon. Too new.
I love you, she wanted to shout. To cry. To sing.
But she couldn’t say it out loud. Not yet.
So she said the next best thing instead.
“I will marry you,” Delaney whispered. Not that he had been in any doubt, she knew that. But it was different for her to say it. And she could see the way it lit him up. She could feel the heavy male part of him stir against her. So she held his gaze, even as she reached her hand down to curl her fingers around that silken steel. She shuddered in anticipation, but held his gaze so there could be no mistake. “Cayetano, I will be your Queen.”