‘To my room?’ Her fingers pinched into his shoulders as he exited the lounge. ‘You can’t dismiss me and send me to my room because you don’t like what I’m saying. I have a right to know what happens next—’
Thrusting open the suite door, he stalked towards the bed and lowered her onto the edge of the mattress. ‘Get dressed and wait for me.’
He turned, pushing from his mind the image of a naked Charlotte waiting for him on this bed. It tugged at him...the idle notion of wishing he could be a man—nothing more than primitive need—and finishing what they’d started and finding ignorance in her body.
But he wasn’t just a man. He was the son of a king. A crown prince. A crown prince who had surrendered to his baser instincts and proved his father right.
‘I don’t understand,’ Charlotte called after him.
He couldn’t say what made him stop. What made him turn around. But he did. And the sight of her—vulnerable and confused—almost broke him. He’d done that to her. Taken his pleasure and thrown her into a world so unlike her own.
He closed his eyes. ‘Please, qalbi,’ he said, because he was not averse to the word. He knew the power of it, and he saw it in her eyes and in her silence as she recognised his need for her to obey. As he had obeyed her. He had torn those panties straight from her body to give her the release she craved.
Yet his was a different plea.
He needed a moment to reconcile himself to what was to happen. What he had to do to be the King he’d spent almost a decade becoming.
He opened his eyes. ‘You’re not meant to understand,’ he said, ‘but you will.’
‘When?’
‘Soon,’ he promised. ‘Get dressed and wait for me.’
Closing the door behind him, he moved towards his own suite with an ease he didn’t feel.
He’d demanded his night of revenge, and he’d been so close to victory.
But at what cost?