If it’s Kimo…then I don’t know. It won’t be the first time he’s come to my room, both at home and abroad, and so far, I’ve been able to dodge what he so clearly wants. But I’m starting to wonder if my time dodging him is at an end.
I peer through the door’s peephole, beyond relieved to see the bright red of Vashti’s headwrap. I open the door after another quick swipe at my wet cheeks and hope it’s not too obvious that I was crying. But my scraped-up heart gives a lurching jolt.
Vashti isn’t alone.
Grim steps forward, filling the doorway with tuxedo, muscle, and sheer male potency—the last of which rolls off his carved body and glints promises from behind those dark eyes.
In one hand, he carries a bottle of vanilla rum.
“I brought you something, Your Majesty.” Grim’s voice is low, as always, speaking the Manaroan words with the same no-nonsense efficiency he used in English with Maxim and Lennix. But then his voice goes slow and warm and interested as he adds, “That is, if you’d still like it.”
There’s the tactful click of the hotel door, telling me that Vashti has made a quiet exit, leaving the two of us alone. Grim extends the bottle of rum, his hand so big that he doesn’t carry it by the neck, but by the girth of the bottle itself, his fingers meeting easily in the middle. I imagine that big hand palming my breast. Cupping me between the legs with impatient hunger.
I don’t think I can breathe.
“Your rum,” Grim says quietly.
I look down at the bottle and then up at him, my heart hammering hard against my ribs. An ache throbbing between my legs. Every part of my body is drawn to him, wants him.
Well, almost every part.
My head has its doubts. My head helpfully reminds me that I’ve been a fitful mess for the last two hours and that I was about to cry over the vanilla rum he’s holding so casually in his hand.
How dare he just swagger in here like this, like my invitation is something he can throw away and then pick back up like a flyer for a party?
“Why did you change your mind?” I ask, still tasting the dregs of my hurt from his rejection. I assume my most haughty and regal posture, and I pray tears aren’t clinging to my eyelashes as I demand, “You thought it would be novel to fuck a queen?”
“What makes you think I’ve never fucked a queen?”
He gives an answer so unexpected, so Grim, that I have no response. A small puff of surprised laughter is all I can manage under his steady, unblinking, un-joking stare.
He steps closer to me, so close that his shoes cage my bare feet in and close enough that I have to lean my head almost all the way back to look at his face.
“What if I told you,” he says, trapping my eyes with his. “That the novelty is not in fucking a queen, but in knowing one?”
Dammit.
That was the right thing to say. And with just a few sentences and the solemn glitter of his intense gaze, he’s melted away so much of the hurt I was feeling before he came.
“No popcorn?” I ask weakly, needing a distraction from all the things our bodies are saying without words.
“No popcorn.” He shakes his head. Holds my stare. “But I brought something else.”
“What?” The word barely makes it past my lips with no breath to support it.
“This.”
He slides his free hand into my hair, crad
ling the back of my head and fastening his lips onto mine.
If I thought Grim looked like sin incarnate, it’s nothing compared to how he feels. How his kiss feels. His lips are firm and demanding, slanting hungry and silky over mine. He licks at the seam of my lips, once, twice, and when I let him in, he gives a low, male purr of approval and pulls me even tighter to him.
The bottle of rum drops onto the carpet with a thud, and I’m hauled up into his arms. I wrap my legs around his waist as his hands slide under my bottom to keep me lifted to his lips.
He doesn’t just kiss me. He fucks my mouth with breathtaking decisiveness and hunger. This is the man he is, I think dizzily. He surveils, then he conquers. Strategy, then victory. Watching, then war. Even in this most intimate claiming, he’s a soldier. It’s heady, it’s pure delirium to have a man like Grim methodically but ruthlessly ravaging my mouth with his own.
Tonight, I’m his crusade, his to plunder, and I can tell from his fierce hold on me and the vanquishing flashes of his eyes that victory is the only outcome he’ll tolerate.