“You’re going to destroy me,” Emrys declared.
“What do you suppose we can do with this?” She ground against him.
“It’s looking like we’re going to have to send these pants out for cleaning.”
Caitlyn reached back, touching his hair as she continued to rub herself against him. After a moment, he grabbed her around the waist and pulled her to the side, where she laughed and kissed him.
“Okay, okay. Let me find another way to torture you.”
Caitlyn unbuttoned his pants with one hand as they kissed eagerly. Then, she slipped down onto the soft rug by the bed and jerked his pants down.
“I am starving,” she declared.
She freed his erection from his briefs and held the thick length of it in her hand. She met his eyes before giving it a kiss on the head, and then swirled her tongue around the tip. Emrys groaned and clutched the bedspread. Her lips wrapped around the shaft, and she made her way down with a series of wet sucks. Impatiently, he reached behind her head and grabbed her hair. There was a twinge deep in her own groin, and she squeezed his thighs as she took more of him in.
Humming determinedly, Caitlyn milked his shaft in long sucks and fondled his balls with one hand. That only made him grab her harder and let out what sounded like a growl. She repressed a laugh and squeezed him harder. He cried out. She dragged her teeth very gently down the length of his shaft. Emrys was shuddering now.
Soon Caitlyn was engulfing his entire organ, sucking it greedily, and massaging his balls. His feet lifted upward, pressing his toes into the rug, and he let out a roar. Come flooded into her mouth, and she drank every thick, sticky drop of it. When he’d finished, sagging back against the bed, she patted his thighs and sat back on her heels. Caitlyn looked up with a smirk as she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.
“Come here,” Emrys ordered.
She obeyed, rising and lying beside him. Emrys pressed a kiss to her forehead and tugged his briefs back into place before pulling her flush to his chest. Caitlyn curled into him, taking in the smell of him, his warmth, and the simple energy he exuded. With a yawn, she thought maybe they could just stay here forever, enjoying one another and making love in as many ways and as many places as they could imagine.
There was a rap on the door, and Emrys groaned.
“You’d better get that.”
“Do you still have an appetite after that?” he teased.
“Feed your princess to be,” Caitlyn ordered.
Emrys chuckled and went into the living room to open the door. Two men came in wheeling large carts laden with plates of eggs over steak, fat slices of tomato, thick yogurt with little slices of orange in it, loaves of olive bread with side dishes of peppered kopanistí cheese, and cut fruit sprinkled with spices.
Three other men set their table quickly and disappeared with bows, but not before Emrys gave them a hefty tip. After he’d closed the door behind them, he pulled a chair out for Caitlyn.
“After you, my princess.”
***
Since it was the off-season, most of the beaches and restaurants weren’t crowded. It was the time that Emrys liked to visit here best. Fewer prying eyes, less competition for venues. He was especially pleased to have the small off-season staff of their hotel to themselves.
In the mornings, they went out to enjoy the temperate weather. Emrys enjoyed each of Caitlyn’s floating summer dresses, each bikini that hugged her soft curves. She was a vision lately, though he had always appreciated her figure and style. Walking along the beach, he tucked her strawberry blonde hair behind her ear and took her hand. He was so lucky to have her with him.
How long could he keep her by his side? They hadn’t spoken any more about her leaving, but the reality was that he would be back on set in a few weeks. He wasn’t sure how to get her to stay and wait for him, and if she went home, she might second guess this entire thing they had together and not come back. He needed something to intervene. He had already offered her a permanent spot in the royal family, and she had turned him down.
The only people on the beach were a mile or more away. Emrys pulled Caitlyn to his side and looked into her eyes. She smiled, the breeze lifting her hair slightly and billowing the hem of her dress, and squeezed his hands in her own. Their lips met and her hands moved up his back and held onto him tightly. He wrapped his arm around her and took her to the edge of the water. She sat, digging her toes into the wet sand and letting the cool water wash over her feet.
It was an excellent day to just exist.
But the next day proved otherwise. Caitlyn got a call from her friend Melinda, who had taken a picture of a tabloid on the stands in America, and by the time Emrys had gotten out of the shower, Caitlyn had found the article online and read the whole of it: “Who’s that GIRL? Fiancée Furious with Her Playboy Prince!”
They’d gotten so many things wrong. For starters, the pictures that the tabloid had taken of them together on the beach were labeled as the Playboy Prince and his Mystery Girl. Her face was away from the camera, true, but there had been no reason to assume that Emrys was cheating on his fiancée. But assume they did, and the single article multiplied over the course of the day; each new one delighted in recounting Emrys’s more public affairs of the past five years and before. One magazine had even dug up a picture of Caitlyn from France and commented that she was a part of Emrys’s chubby-chaser phase.
This paucity of journalistic ethics didn’t faze Emrys, but Caitlyn was new to being the target of such tactics, and even though he’d asked her to avoid reading any of them, she seemed to encounter a new one every hour. They were all over Facebook, too, it seemed. Eventually, she gave him her phone and locked herself in the bathroom, sobbing.
“Cait, this is ridiculous. They’re reporting my cheating on you with you!” He sat by the door and laid his head against the wall. “The rest of it—I wasn’t with you then. Many of them I dated to force myself to get over you, and Miranda didn’t mind because she didn’t want to marry me in the first place.”
He leaned his head against the door and listened intently. Her breathing was still shaky, and she didn’t answer him.