His Drakon Runaway Bride

скачать книгу бесплатно


He’d made her feel so secure that night—a feeling she’d never known. Like she could survive the bitterest grief if only she had his words, him by her side.

Except she hadn’t foreseen that what had attracted him to her would be what he would despise in the end.

“Challenging everything I had ever believed in,” Andreas said, pulling her back into the now, a strange glitter in those dark eyes, “about myself, about the world, about my place in the world.

“You were this skinny, reckless seventeen-year-old and the first person I had ever met in my life who...”

“Who what?” she whispered, desperate for more. Even knowing that this self-indulgence would only lead to pain.

“Who didn’t care how powerful, educated, or accomplished I was. With you, I was...” she’d never seen him lost for words, yet right then, she was sure he was choosing them carefully “...just Andreas for the first time.”

They were words Ariana had never heard him say before. Almost regretful. A little wistful. They gouged open a longing she’d shut away.

Tears filled her throat. She wanted to pound at him for never saying those things to her then, for never telling her... No. Ruthlessly, she pulled herself to the present. They would have never survived, she needed to hold on to that.

He slowly disentangled himself from her, pushed away a lock of hair that had fallen onto her jaw. Small touches. Calculated touches. Her skin prickled. “I will make you a promise, Ari.”

She scowled, more angry with herself than with him. “It won’t be without some hidden motive.”

And this time, he really smiled. The flash of his even white teeth against his darkly olive skin was breathtaking.

Unlike him, patience had never been her strong suit. “What is it, your promise?”

“I will not touch you until you come to me. I will not take you, agape mou, until you beg me to take you. Until you crawl into my bed and ask me to be inside you.

“Taking you when you can’t breathe for wanting me...it is unlike any high I’ve known.”

Ariana jerked away from him, slumberous warmth pooling low in her belly. A throbbing between her legs. “Like I did the last time.”

A flare of heat darkened those impossible black eyes. It was all there in them—the log cabin at the foot of the mountains, the storm that had been raging outside for a week, the huge king bed with soft-as-sin sheets and Andreas and she stuck inside, with their supplies dwindling every day and the fire between them raging higher with every moment.

The knowledge that she had turned eighteen four weeks earlier was explosive in that silent cabin; that they had both been ignoring King Theos’s summons; the knowledge that her dare in trapping the Crown Prince, who seemed to be made of stone and rock like the mountains around them, far too dangerous when she’d seen the evidence of his attraction to her finally in those first few days in the cabin.

Until the day he had decided that he was going to give in.

Sparks filled her body at the memory of that decadent night. It was the night she had begun to understand the uptight, arrogant Crown Prince, to realize what she’d thrown herself into. But it had been too late.

She’d already fallen in love with him.

Her fingers shaking to hold the duvet, Ariana pushed out the breath lodged in her chest. Barely a few hours with him and she was on fire. She cleared her hoarse throat.

“Why?”

He shrugged. “To level the field a little.”

“This is exactly what you wanted when you kidnapped me—me at your mercy.”

“Yes, but having you at my mercy when you have no fight in you...” he made a bored sound “...that is not the Ariana I want. What fun is tormenting you when you have no say in it?

“This way, I will know that when I’m inside you this time, you have surrendered despite the little self-preservation it seems you have developed.”

Thee mou, it was impossible. The man she had married would have never been open to a challenge like that, much less taunt her with it. He would have never given the reins of anything to her hands. Much less his revenge scheme. Or the simple matter of when they’d have sex.