The Once And Future Prince (Castaldini Crown 1)

She saw it then, on the far side of the village. A black cloud rising over the horizon. Then the first tongues of flame broke through the darkness of roiling smoke. God…it was huge…

Leandro got out his phone, called in a firefighting and emergency medical operation of mammoth proportions. Then he turned to her.

“I’ll organize the efforts. You go back to the castello. I’ll call you as soon as it’s under control.” Then he raced away.

She sat on her whinnying horse, stunned, until he almost disappeared. Then she was galloping after him, screaming for her horse to go faster. But nothing was fast enough. She reached the scene to see Leandro hurtle into the burning barn.

And the fire seemed to reach out and drag him in.

Twelve

S eeing Leandro walking into the fire made Phoebe realize.

She wouldn’t die without him. But she would die for him.

What followed was something she would always find difficult to remember. The terror and heat and suffocation. The exertion and smoke and screams. It was too much to take in, to process, to retain. So she kept her eyes fixed on her goal. Leandro.

She ran after him into the inferno, ran back out when the hellish heat almost fried off her skin. But she’d seen enough.

He was helping others. Children who were caught inside and kept climbing higher to escape the flames. Parents who’d run in only to be overwhelmed by smoke or set on fire. Others who’d followed to help and met the same fate. Only Leandro had protected himself so he’d be of use to those he was walking through the fire to rescue. He’d smothered himself in soaking wraps, was breathing through their barrier. His eyes were covered in sunglasses. She screamed for people to provide her with the same protection.

Then she walked into the fire after him.

Leandro had never known what terror was. He now knew.

It was seeing Phoebe with flames lashing out at her, dragging her into their incinerating arms. It was imagining her body consumed by their indiscriminate cruelty.

Terror had a taste, a texture. He retched on its foulness, shredded his sanity on its lacerating talons.

He roared his soul bloody as he waded through the inferno, gathering small bodies and hurtling to her, as she mirrored his actions. Then, in the depths of the macabre scene, everything stilled. Fright no longer drove him mad, desperation no longer paralyzed him. Instead they infused him with strength, to demolish obstacles, with clarity to do only what would see her safe.

He would see her safe. With his last breath.

Every breath felt like his last. Every shudder felt as if it would tear his muscles off his bones. His mind couldn’t process it still. It was over. There had been no loss of life, but injuries were varying in degrees. One was…bad. Horrific.

Not Phoebe. Not Phoebe.

There was only that thought, nothing beyond it as quakes intensified, reaction crashing down on him like a caved-in ceiling. Phoebe filled his arms, alive. Unscathed.

He’d had her checked for injury, then rechecked. Dread rode him. What if her injuries manifested later?

He was assured, over and over. And over again. She’d bolted out of hell with minor respiratory irritation. So had he.

He couldn’t stop crushing her to him. Terror still roared through him. Hide her. Keep her safe. He railed at her, for coming after him, for endangering herself. He’d never—never—get over the memory gouged into his psyche. Those minutes as he struggled to save her without abandoning the children he’d retrieved would be the bottomless mine of his nightmares.

But she hadn’t needed saving. She’d saved with him, helped him, survived with him. She was safe.

He clutched her to his chest, pushed open the door to her room, entered and walked to the bed, stared down at it. Saw flames raging across its crisp immaculateness. He folded her into him until they both gasped for breath.

Among the gasps there were whimpers. “That boy…he’s Alessandro’s age…oh, God, Leandro…”

The boy with the worst injuries. He held her harder, merged their quakes. “I’ll take care of him. For life. And all the victims and their families. I promise you.”

She nodded frantically against his heart, wound herself tighter around him. She believed him.

Then she was pushing at him, struggling against him. She wanted to regain autonomy, and he couldn’t bear the separation.

He bit down hard on his needs, gave in to hers. He unlocked himself, let her thrashing form spill from his hold.

She tackled him with all her strength, took him down on the bed. Writhed all over him, tore at his clothes, at his lips, sank her teeth into them, her nails into the flesh she exposed.

His response overtook his ability to register it. He blanked out. Catapulted into his first out-of-body experience. He saw himself tearing back at her, tackling her underneath him, nothing but a mass of instincts and frenzy.

He tore her sooty, damp clothes off her, madness deepening as she rewarded each rip with a fiercer cry, a more violent tug on his hair, a harder grind of her flesh against his hardness, a more blatant offering of herself to do with as his voracity dictated…

It hit him then, what he was doing. What she was seeking. He froze. Her cry was one of panic as she clenched around him.

But he’d come back into his mind. And he couldn’t do this. Not to her. Not to them.

He exerted all the gentle force he needed to unlock her from around him, felt things shattering inside him as he swayed up to his feet and tried to move to the other end of the room.

She was there before him, dragging him back. When he resisted her, she climbed onto him, stormed his resistance with her passion, the pressure of her urgency bursting his heart.

“You didn’t start this,” she panted. “You kept your promise, you don’t need to pull back. This is me coming to you.”

“Phoebe…” He caught her hands, turned his face away from the blatant need in hers, felt control slipping like the first boulders heralding the avalanche. “This is PTS talking. This isn’t how or why I want you to come to me.”

She wrestled her hands free and clutched his head, pulling him down, sobbing into his mouth. “Then I’ve been suffering from it for eight years. I walked away then and have been pulling back ever since, for all the damn wrong reasons. But there is no reason good enough not to take what I can have with you, to live this. Maybe it took thinking we’d both die to get over my stupid fears. So I’m human, sue me.”

“Phoebe, I want you so much, it scares me.”

“Just take me,” she cried. “I need you inside me…please…”