There was the sound of plastic rustling as he jammed it back in his pocket. “Sorry.”
“Oh, don’t apologize.” She dropped her hand, arm weak with an awful kind of adrenaline. “It’s preferable that you’re not planting heirs around the city.”
He paused. “What?”
“Nothing.” Moving away, she hunkered down on the less decorated bedroll, hating the reaction twisting inside her. This shouldn’t matter. He slept around—he always had. But proof of his wandering attention, within a minute of him asking her to speak his name, picked up her insides like a secret letter to him and shredded it into pieces.
He hadn’t moved. Denim, boots and rolled up sleeves. Strong shoulders, hard-earned muscle, and a face that only ever grew more breathtaking the longer she looked.
“I haven’t been with anyone in Kiraly,” he said.
Her eyes burned. She angled her face away from him. “Yeah, sure.”
“I’m serious. You must know.” He almost sounded desperate. “You monitor my every move.”
She couldn’t look at him—her head physically refused to lift. “Hard to monitor you when you slip security.” With a different woman wrapped around his waist each time, practically sucking the skin off his neck.
“You think I’ve been sneaking off to have sex?”
“I imagine it kills the mood to ask someone to sign a nondisclosure agreement,” she said, discovering that if she spoke at a regular volume, her voice didn’t shake. “So much hotter to put your reputation at risk and shirk protocol entirely.”
“First, that obviously sounds hotter,” he said, and she stiffened. “But second, that’s not why I’ve been slipping security.”
“Sure.” Damn this urge to cry. Her throat hurt; the muscles along her neck strained. “You carry condoms around for no reason.”
He didn’t answer immediately. He seemed to give time for the thought to occur to her; for her breath to suck in sharply and a flush to crawl up her neck. Oh, God. I’m going to sleep with him, aren’t I? Then he murmured, “There’s a reason for this one.”
“No.” She covered her face with her hands. They shook. “Stop right there.”
“I’m not trying to scare you.”
“I’m not scared.” She was overwhelmed—they’d never spoken openly about sex. Not between them, not like it was a possibility worth preparing for.
There was the sound of footsteps as he crossed the tent, followed by a light clunking as he set the food containers down. “I haven’t packed it for tonight. Frankie. I’ve carried one whenever I’m with you since we met. I get the feeling neither of us could pull back if we ever got started.” He paused. “Not that I don’t hope to use it, but I’m not here to seduce you.”
“I shouldn’t be in here,” she said, but didn’t move. “I’ll ask Peter.”
“Stay.” The soft swish of fabric betrayed he’d sat on the bedroll opposite her. “I’ve wanted you for years without acting on it. I’ll manage for another night.”
She didn’t answer; she couldn’t seem to draw her hands away from her face. Her fingertips trembled against her eyebrows.
“I have scared you,” he said quietly.
No—he’d tempted her. And that was far worse. Protection was literally in his pocket. One kiss, mouths clashing in a fevered rush of fucking finally, and there’d be no hazy-minded reason to stop. Just roll it on and slide straight in, because status and titles and futures would mean nothing against the inflamed reality of this man’s body in hers.
“You can’t want this with me,” she made herself say.
“Yet I do and that’s not changing.” Frustration hardened his words. “I’ve sworn you’ve always been attracted to me. Now I know you have—but you’ve avoided it because you don’t think you’re good enough for a prince.”
She shook her head. “I’m not.”
“You damn well are.”
“You’re asking too much of me.” Her darkest secrets—that was what it would take to convince him.
He blew out a breath and for a while, didn’t speak.
“Are you shy, Frankie?” he asked, the question gentle. “About this kind of thing?”
Her cheeks were hot; her palms were sweating. “What kind of thing?”
“Sex. Attraction. Intimacy.”
“The last one,” she admitted, because what difference did it make? “I never—it’s not something I do.” Clearly, since she needed the barrier of her hands against her face to even have this conversation.
“I’d like to be intimate with you.” The deep abrasion of his voice left her senses shivering. “I could show you how. I think you’d be good at it.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” she whispered.
“I want—” He broke off and there was the sound of his hat hitting the floor. “I care about you. You’re good enough for me and I want to be with you. Intimately. Sexually.” He paused. “Repeatedly.”
Her mind hazed at the hot loosening between her thighs.
“You don’t know how to be with someone,” she said. “Stay with someone.”
“I know how to stay with you.”
“As a friend.” Shaking her head, palms still raised, she said, “In Sage Haven, you had someone different in your bed every other week.”
“I—look, you confused me, okay?” His voice grew a little louder as he moved closer and his nearness rippled across her skin. “I didn’t know what you wanted. One minute I’d swear it was about to happen, that I’d spend the next month buried inside you to make up for lost time, and the next minute, you’d hardly look at me. You were never willing to talk about it, and as badly as I wanted—want—you to be the woman in my bed, I didn’t want you to think that I was waiting around expecting you to go there with me.”
Tipping her face down, she forced her hands into her lap. This was too real. Her skin stung. He was directly in front of her in a kind of earnest crouch, and she wasn’t sure she’d ever been asked to speak so honestly in her life.
“And let’s be fair,” he added, a slight edge creeping into his voice. “I wasn’t the only one who left the bar with other people. You’d choose a stranger instead of me.”
“Sometimes,” she said. But most of the time, she hadn’t invited those strangers upstairs. She’d just wanted Kris to drop the idea of her as anything more than a friend.
“I hated watching you leave with another guy.”
“I know.” God, the intensity of his stare across the bar on those nights. The hurt, the anger, the desire crackling in that blue gaze. “And I hated seeing you watching me leave.”
“Then why—”
“I’ve told you,” she snapped.
“Because I’m your prince?” The question was coarse. “That doesn’t matter to me. Who the hell cares that you’re not high born? I’ve spent my life shoveling horse shit. I want to be with you, and I’m done pretending. If status is the only reason you’ve got, then get over it.”