Masked (Royally Hot 2)

She laughed as I stepped out into the corridor, knowing that when I returned, she would be gone. Patara was the only person I trusted to leave on her own accord. She was the only person that had ever earned such trust.

She might have been queen now, but we grew up in hell together. And as for being my stepmother, she’d been playing that role a fucking lot longer than since she married my father. Four years older than me, she was the only person that ever showed me a sliver of kindness in the years between my mother’s death and the day I was brought to Ironhaven Castle as the bastard prince.

Winding my way down through rarely used corridors and forgotten staircases, I headed inexorably toward my prize. I knew where she was going, the beauty at the gates, delivering her milk pail to the kitchen.

Never had such a need to be near someone boiled up inside of me. My leather britches tented as a throb that started down deep in my center worked its way through my body to my thickening cock. There was no precedent for the way my body was responding. Never had I harbored the unbridled lust that most men struggle to contain. I understood beauty, yet it never touched me more than the acknowledgment that it existed.

No woman ever elicited the sort of reaction that burned through me right now. And I was loathe to suppress it now that it was here.

Nobody saw me moving through the castle. Patara was right, I was less careful when I was out in the world, but here within the stone walls, I was skilled. I’d learned long ago how to become invisible. Despite my size, I was good at it. There were shadows everywhere if you knew how to use them, and even in the best-guarded courtyard, there were blind spots to be exploited. Within a week of coming to Aramoor, I’d mentally mapped out the entire castle and its grounds, and how to traverse any path unseen.

Even so, I never left my chambers unmasked unless I was headed out to the woods to move in the darkness for a few hours pretending I was free.

It was a comfort to me not to have to see my face when I passed a mirror outside of my chambers where I forbade them, not to feel exposed when talking to Patara or the other few guards or servants that may address me directly. My scars and cuts were more a reminder of my lineage than the color of my eyes or the shape of my nose.

Seconds turned to eternities as I wound through the stone halls until I took the last turn toward where I was sure she was headed.

Fuck, yes. There she was, her hands now holding an empty pail as she left the storage pantry of the kitchen, and that painful grinding feeling returned, only this time it centered itself in my chest where my heart used to be.

Her eyes were like rich molasses, hair like a mid-night sun awakening me. But, fuck, it was her smile that ruined me.

She was humming and smiling as she moved alone, her empty pail swaying in her hands. There was a little skip in her step that made the top flesh of her tits bounce as she moved and I was wrecked. Her green dress told me she was something above a lowly pauper, but far from aristocracy. A tenant farmer’s daughter or niece possibly…not a wife. No fucking way, that thought turned me cold.

As I followed her down the darkened corridor, slipping from shadow to shadow in total silence, I watched the way her ass moved beneath the green dress, drank in the way her hips swayed.

The mere sight of her had me hard, engorged, beastlike. My ravenous thoughts of her tiny body squirming and bucking under my monstrous frame spun into depravity. My fingers twitched, then curled into fists as I bit back the instinct to drag her against the wall and claim her in the dark, damp corridor before she could go back out into the world.

No, I couldn’t stand the thought of her out there, alone, without me watching. What if another man laid claim to her when she left? What if one had already?

My red rage returned, scorching, burning me from inside. If anyone else ever touched her, my wrath would know no bounds.

And that’s when it happened.

She spun, her smile and skip gone, glaring into the darkness. “Who’s there?” Her voice like starlight quavered as she spoke and the heated rush of my blood felt like fire in my veins and rose heat on my skin reminding me for the first time in forever that I was alive. “Is—is someone there?”

I stood, stock-still, barely daring to breathe, sudden understanding flooding my brain, knowing I had been utterly silent and invisible to her.