She barely had a chance to register the hot, angry glitter in his dark eyes before he closed the distance between them, his mouth crashing down onto hers.
The force of him pushing her back against the wall shifted her hand, her palm sliding over his hardness before coming to rest on his flat stomach, crushed between their bodies as he angled his head and slipped his tongue between her lips.
He proved then what he’d said before. He had the power. She could do nothing, not in this moment. Nothing but simply surrender to the heat coursing through her, to the electrical current crackling over her skin with a kind of intensity she’d never even imagined existed.
His hands were firm and sure on her hips, his body pinning her to the wall as he sought restitution for her attempt at claiming control.
He shifted, grabbing hold of her wrists, freeing her trapped hands for just a moment before lifting them, pinning them back against the wall and pressing his body more completely against hers. “You want a fight?” He growled the words against her mouth. “I can give you a fight, Princess. We don’t have to do this the easy way.” He angled his head, parting his lips from hers, kissing her neck. She shivered, fear and arousal warring for pride of place inside her. “But if you want to test me, you have to be prepared for the results. I do not know what manner of man you have been exposed to in the past, but I am not one that can be easily manipulated.”
He rocked his hips against hers, showing her full evidence of the effect she was having on his body. She should be angry, disgusted. Instead, she felt all the more powerful. She hadn’t hurt him, but she had succeeded in making him react. She not only enraged him; she turned him on. She had spent so much of her life being ignored that eliciting such a powerful response from such a man gratified her in ways she never could have anticipated.
She didn’t know a kiss could be so many different things. That it could serve so many purposes. That it could make her feel hot, cold, afraid, enraptured. But it did. It was everything, and nothing she should ever have allowed to happen between them.
But it had happened. And it was too late to stop it. She wasn’t even sure she wanted to stop it.
Her heart was thundering so hard she was afraid it might crack through her chest, before attempting to beat straight through his.
She was furious. With him, with this. She wanted to punish him. Wanted to make him pay. For making her feel helpless. Even when she had been captive in the palace in Tirimia, she thought there was hope. But here, she wasn’t kept in bondage and chains, wasn’t made to stay put with threats. Here, she was simply stripped of options. Shown how small she was in the vast context of the palace, of a country she didn’t know. She couldn’t go back to her own country, and Andres knew that. Couldn’t return to the only home she knew for fear of the safety of her protectors.
He had made her famous now. Putting a ring on her finger and parading her in front of all those people. Had stolen her anonymity. And beyond that, she had no money, no clothes beyond the far too formal princess wardrobe that had been procured for her upon arrival in Petras.
She wanted him to understand that helplessness. To feel it too.
If he was going to take her choices from her, then she would make certain he felt the weight of that. She would be a millstone around his neck. His punishment.
She flexed her hips against his, pushing back, changing the angle of her head and leaning in, claiming his mouth with her own before biting his lower lip. He growled, pressing her hands more firmly against the wall, deepening the kiss, consuming her as if she were the dessert they were missing in the ballroom.
She had spent very little time imagining what it would be like to be kissed. She had craved kind smiles and closeness more than anything physical. But she had thought about it a small amount. And when she had, it had been gauzy. Soft. She had imagined slow, gentle touching. Something sweet and slow-building. She had expected to feel a kiss only on her lips.
She had not expected this explosion. Had not expected a knot of emotion and need that she couldn’t even begin to untangle. Had not expected to feel the kiss in every part of herself, over her skin, beneath it, in the deepest, most secret parts of herself.