The Future King's Bride (The Royal House of Cacciatore 3)

‘We’ll have to run!’ said Millie, but suddenly she felt a strange sense of excitement. The dull, formal lunch had become something else. He wanted to see her beloved horses, and this was where she felt at home. But it is more than just that, Millie, and you know it is. She shook her head, as if she could shake away the troublesome thoughts. ‘Come on!’

Laughing with a sudden recklessness which was alien to him, he ran behind her, dodging puddles and watching as the mud splattered droplets up her pale silk-covered legs. Tights? he wondered. Probably. She was too gauche and unworldly to pull on a pair of stockings. What was he doing here, and why was he allowing this to happen? This was craziness. Madness. He should stop it right now.

Yet all the time a feeling was growing deep inside him, a sense of the irrevocable about to happen, as though his fate was about to be sealed in a way in which he had least expected.

By the time they reached the stables Millie’s hair was plastered to her skull, and she turned to him, brushing cold droplets of rain away from her skin as if they were tears, not knowing and not caring what was the right thing to say any more.

‘Why didn’t you tell my mother we’d already met today?’

‘You know why.’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘Yes, you do. Just as you know what is going to happen next.’

She shook her head, trying to quell the glow of excitement, trying to pretend it wasn’t happening. ‘You’re talking in riddles!’

‘Why did you agree to bring me here, Millie?’ he questioned silkily.

‘Because you…because you wanted to look at the horses, didn’t you?’

In any other woman it would have been a coy question, but Gianferro knew she meant it. ‘No. You know very well what I wanted. What I want. What you want, too—if you can dare to admit it to yourself.’

Her eyes were like saucers as she saw the expression on his face and read the sensual intent there, so dark and so powerfully irresistible that she shook her head, willing it to go away even while she prayed it never would. ‘No,’ she breathed. ‘No. We mustn’t!’

‘But we have to—you know we do,’ he whispered. ‘For you will die unless we do.’ And so will I.

‘Gianferro!’

He pulled her into his arms and tumbled her down beneath him onto the spiky bed of a bale of hay, pushing back a strand of hair from her rain-wet face. For one long moment he stared down at her, ignoring the bewilderment in her eyes, before blotting out the world with the heady pressure of his kiss.

For Millie it was like jumping the highest jump in the world—she’d never felt such a heady blend of excitement and fear before. She could feel the muscular strength of his body, and his hands cupping her face, his lips grazing over hers.

‘Oh!’ It was a broken plea, a request for something she wasn’t aware she wanted, and as she made it he opened her lips with the seeking brush of his tongue. She gasped as it flicked inside her mouth. Fireworks exploded inside her head and she began to ache as she gripped onto him, drowning in the sweetness of it all, her body seeming to take on a life of its own as it pushed itself against the hard sinews of his. Dimly, she was aware of the heavy flowering of her breasts, and their sweet, prickling ache made her want him closer still.

With a terse exclamation he pulled himself away from her, his breathing ragged and unsteady as he stared into the sultry protest of her slick lips.

‘Why did you stop?’ she questioned, in a honeyed voice which sounded like a stranger’s.

‘Why?’ He gave a short laugh. ‘Why do you think?’ And then he read the uncertainty and the hunger in her big blue eyes and relented, his dark brows knitting together. ‘Have you ever kissed a man before, Millie?’

She stared at him. So he had guessed! ‘Not…not like that.’

The dark brows were elevated in lazy question. ‘And what way is that?’

She wanted to say With your tongue, but she couldn’t. It made it sound so anatomical. As if what h

ad just happened had been all about experimentation, and it had not been about that at all—more a great whooshing feeling which had swept her away and made her feel like…like…

She shook her head, as if that could make the mixed-up feelings go away. ‘Nothing.’

A sense of triumph began to bubble up inside him as he acknowledged just how inexperienced she was, and he pulled her back into his arms. ‘You kiss very beautifully,’ he said softly. ‘Very hard and very passionately.’ He traced the outline of her lips with the tip of his finger and they trembled beneath his touch. ‘But there are other ways to kiss a man too, and I shall show you them all. I shall teach you well, dear Millie.’

His words seemed to bring her to her senses, and she pulled herself away from him. He did not stop her. What the hell was he suggesting? What had he lured her into, and why had she let him? Distractedly, she tugged strands of hay from her hair and cast them down on the stable floor as she stared at him.

‘You won’t do anything of the sort!’ she spat out, her voice shaking with emotion. ‘What kind of man do you think you are?’ And what kind of woman was she? ‘You’re going to marry my sister!’

He shook his head. ‘No,’ he said heavily. ‘I am not.’