His thrusts increased as he drew her through the crisis, faster, more out of control. The veins in his neck were outlined as he tossed his head back and grunted her name. He withdrew and pulsed into his hand as he came. She drew him down, kissing him again, reveling in the feel of his heat around her. Reveling in this moment that had finally come and that she never wanted to end. Even though she knew there would be consequences to it.
Because there always were.
Dash felt like his nerves had all fired at once and were now overly sensitized. Every time Giabella stroked her fingers along his spine or pressed her mouth to his throat, he was wracked by another shiver of pleasure. Nothing had ever been like this before, not in all his years.
And yet as passion faded a fraction, the reality of what they’d done began to color the moments. He stared down at her, this woman in his arms and couldn’t help but see her as what she was. A queen. His employer.
His emotions overwhelmed him, and he rolled away from her, staring up at the ceiling above. He had made love to Giabella. And it was perfect and wonderful. But it had been a mistake. One he’d been fighting to avoid for so very long.
“Please don’t look that way,” she said softly, moving to her side and propping herself up on her elbow to look down at him.
“Look what way?” he asked.
She cocked her head. “You know me so well after all these years—please grant that I know you too, Dash. I can see all the trouble on your face. All the regret and worry about what just happened. You are strategizing your way out of it and away from me.”
“How can I not, Gia…Your Majesty?” he asked.
Now she sat up and her expression grew more pointed. “I think Gia or Giabella is more appropriate when you are talking to a woman you just bedded.”
He huffed out a breath. “We can’t pretend that you are only that, though, can we? You are too clever to disagree. I have done something…something I never should have done.”
She flinched and her head bent. She drew a few long breaths. “This is what I wanted. This is what I…” She looked at him now, held his gaze. “This is what I’ve always wanted, Dash. From the first moment I met you, everything else be damned.”
“Gia,” he whispered, moved beyond measure at that confession that stabbed into the very heart of him. The heart that loved her so completely. That she had felt anything similar for him all this time was beautiful and utterly heartbreaking all at once.
“We have to be honest now, don’t we?” she asked. “Or at least I must be. I wanted you and I still want you. And if this destroys all we’ve been to each other—”
“Queen and servant,” he said.
She shook her head. “Always more than that. You are my most constant friend and confidante. My most constant everything. This cannot make me lose that. Please tell me it hasn’t changed our future.”
He shut his eyes. Her words hung in his mind, rang in his ears. We have to be honest now. He’d been avoiding that honesty for days, weeks. And now that this amazing moment had happened between them, he knew he couldn’t do it anymore.
He sat up and cupped her face, sinking into the softness of her skin, the way her pupils dilated when he touched her. “I must tell you something,” he said softly. “I should have said it a while ago.”
Her lips parted and she straightened up. “What is it?”
“I…I’ve been offered a position by the king,” he admitted slowly. “In his new government, should the election go as we assume it will in a few weeks’ time. Not as a servant, but as an official advisor. A member of his…I don’t know what he’ll call it…circle of advisors? Cabinet?”
“Dash,” she murmured.
“I should have told you sooner,” he said. “But I didn’t know how. But when you speak about the future, I need you to know that. And that I…I would like to take the position.”
Giabella stared at Dash, stunned into silence. Her hands shook and her ears rang as she tried to process what he’d said. When he’d said he had to tell her something, she had foolishly thought, for one blinding moment, that it might be that he loved her. But it wasn’t that. It was this news that he was leaving her.
It felt like rejection, even though she knew in her heart that it wasn’t. It was a grand opportunity, one he had earned through good and faithful service, through having the best interest of their family and nation at heart.
But that didn’t change the abject terror that gripped her at the thought that she would lose him. And she would lose him. He wouldn’t serve as her secretary once he took an official government post. She couldn’t interfere with that.
But she had been thinking more and more about her future lately. And she might not know much, but she knew it didn’t include having such proximity to government. It set such a bad precedent, to tell the people that they were going to be free to choose, then load their government with the same family they had wished to be free from in the first place.
It felt like something Alistair would do.
“Giabella, please say something,” Dash said, getting to his feet and grabbing for his trousers. Putting a barrier between them that she hated.
She swallowed hard. “I think you would be very good in that sort of role,” she said. “And that you would be a fool not to take it.”
“Even if it means things would change?” he asked.
She slowly got to her feet, trying not to be so self-conscious about her nudity. It was hard when his gaze flitted down her and his eyes filled with renewed desire. “Things have changed already,” she said, taking his hand and lifting it to her heart. “We both know it.”
He nodded and touched her cheek with his other hand, tracing the line of her cheekbone with his index finger. “Yes, they have.”
“But I said it before and I’ll say it again: I wanted this, Dash.” She felt so vulnerable saying what she had to say next. “And if you are going to take a position, end our…our partnership soon…then this trip may be our only time to explore this thing that has bubbled between us for years.”
His brow wrinkled. “Are you…what are you saying?”
“You know what I’m saying,” she whispered. “I’m saying I want to do this again. Over and over again, with you. I want to pretend, for the next little while, that what we did is something that can be repeated. I want to be with you.”
He stared at her a beat, two, and she felt tears begin to sting her eyes.
“Please tell me I’m not a fool, that you want the same thing.”
She saw the fight on his face. How he was torn between duty and desire, torn between whatever he considered right versus what he plainly wanted. And she held her breath to see what side would win.
In the end, he flexed his hand against her skin, dragging it from her heart to cup her face. He leaned in and kissed her, slowly, deeply, gently as he backed her to the bed they had just vacated. “I want you, Gia,” he murmured as they fell across the mattress, his hands moving over her skin, his mouth claiming hers with hunger and purpose.
She pushed out everything else, all her fears and questions and sank into what this was. The rest could wait. She intended to savor every stolen moment.