The Princess Finds Her Match

Her heart was still pounding. She sat up on the bed and took the glass of water from him gratefully. Anti-allergy medicine usually tapped into her subconscious and gave her nightmares.

“Did Wainwright hurt you?”

She must have called out his name. How did one answer that question?

Her hesitation made him more vehement. “Lexie, did he hurt you?”

“Just a broken wrist,” she answered in a matter-of-fact tone, refusing to meet his eyes.

She regretted telling him the minute it was out. She sensed his banked rage when he bit out in a tightly-controlled tone, “You call it just a broken wrist?”

“I managed to put a gash on his cheek with a broken wine bottle, so I think that made us even,” she said with some satisfaction. Too late, she had let slip out something she hadn’t even told Stefan all this time.

He was quiet for several minutes and Lexie risked a peek at him. In the soft moonlight flooding the room, his eyes were glinting with some fierce emotion. “Why have I never read any of this in the papers or the Internet?”

Lexie remembered sneaking into the royal apartments and finding everything in chaos. Her nonna had suffered from a heart attack and was brought to the hospital, her last image of her berating Lexie in her cool, controlled voice about her relationship with Peter being splashed all over the tabloids and the shame she had brought to her family. Stefan had gone with their nonna to the hospital. Julian, who had been staying with them for Stefan’s coronation, had been the one to spot her as she slunk back to her room. She had told him she had taken a bad fall, and he had summoned a doctor to the royal residence rather than bring her reeking of alcohol and disheveled to the hospital.

“You didn’t tell your brother?”

She shook her head. “He had enough on his hands. My parents had died weeks before. My grandmother died in the morning and his coronation was in a few days’ time.” She shrugged, “I was always a bit clumsy so Stefan believed my story about tripping on a rock.”

His tone was savage. “Wainwright took advantage of you.”

“I was a naïve fool,” her lips twisted wryly.

Nic remembered reading that Peter Wainwright had been fifteen years older than Lexie. He recalled a photo of a heartbreakingly young Lexie taken at the coronation. The local press blamed her for grandmother’s death. “It’s a very good thing Wainwright is dead or I’d have to kill him again.”

The air became charged with electric tension at the primitive protectiveness in his voice.

Lexie felt a sexual thrill skitter up her spine. She swallowed uncertainly, sensing a delicious, heady kind of danger in the room. She babbled on. “I would have done more damage, but he was screaming like a baby and that would have attracted attention−“

The last thing Lexie thought she heard was something in Spanish that she roughly translated as “So help me God” and “bloodthirsty witch” before his lips claimed hers in a searing kiss.

Lexie flopped back down on the bed as Nic’s delicious weight pushed her down. His open mouth was on hers and she reciprocated wholeheartedly, letting him in. Lexie clutched his hair, his shoulders, her legs accommodating his hips. They surfaced for air for a few seconds.

“Stop me, rojita,” he rasped in a tortured voice. “You and I…it’s not going to end well.”

All her life she tried to be proper. Every action was edited, calculated. Since Peter and the scandal, she had tried to be the perfect princess her family wanted. Nothing was spontaneous until she didn’t even know where the faking ended and her unedited self started. Not until that night in Las Vegas. Not until this man came into her life. And by God, she was not stopping what was going to happen even if her life depended on it.

“No fucking way,” she growled, shoving a startled Nic away. Unbalanced, he landed on his back with a grunt. Lexie quickly straddled him, but his hands on her waist held her firm. “All my life I was never given a choice. A princess never shows emotion. A princess should be an example. A princess is always polite, but with one foolish mistake, the whole world got front row tickets to my stupidity. To hell with any of them.” Her voice was harsh and she didn’t recognize it. “The only mistake I regret was walking away from you that morning. And this time I’m going to do something about it.” She enunciated each word clearly. “Tonight, I am going to fuck you.”