“Of course not. I did not mean that. I meant her.”
Damien had a sudden vision of Penelope beneath him on a bed, her hair loose on the pillow, her eyes heavy with passion. He would lick her swollen breasts as they rose to his mouth, take one taut peak in his teeth.
“‘Tis tempting, Petri,” he said. “But I cannot circumvent the rituals. The prophecy depends on them.” And he would not break the prophecy, no matter what. “Besides, Sasha would kill me.”
“When did you grow interested in following rules, Highness?” Petri asked. “And obeying Sasha’s whims? He’s gone a little mad over this prophecy, I think.”
“He has,” Damien agreed. “But he survived my father’s dungeon by believing that magic would bring me back to him. I did return for him, and so now he is convinced that the prophecy made it happen. His entire life centers on this damned prophecy.”
The prophecy said that Damien would marry the princess and bear a child who would be the glory of Nvengaria. Nvengaria would be united behind Damien and the princess, and the sorrows that had plagued the country under Damien’s father would be erased.
If he sired the child before the betrothal, it would be illegitimate and not accepted as the next prince or princess, and the prophecy would be broken. He had been very close to laying Penelope down in that meadow today and taking her. He’d throbbed with need, and she’d not fought him.
Thank goodness Sasha had shouted at them just in time. Had Sasha planned that? Or was the prophecy working, putting Sasha in the right place at the right time to prevent the child from being sired too soon?
He was either growing as mad as Sasha, or…
Damien had never believed in magic, but his people did. Damien had arrived home months ago, after a long and treacherous journey, to a chilly welcome. Damien’s father had been feared and hated; Nvengaria had suffered under his long reign. Grand Duke Alexander, head of the Council of Dukes, had ruled from behind the throne the year Damien’s father spent dying. He had effectively taken over, dissolving the Imperial Prince’s power.
Alexander, a man Damien’s own age with cold blue eyes in a dark, handsome face, had calmly and ruthlessly blocked every one of Damien’s attempts to step into his father’s shoes. Alexander had said point-blank that he wished Damien to rule as a puppet prince to Alexander’s dictation—or not at all.
The people of Nvengaria wanted a symbol to adore; very well, Damien could be it. Alexander and the Council would do everything else.
When Damien tried to have Alexander arrested for treason, however, the guards refused to obey him. Alexander had them in his hand. The palace guards and the military had loathed Damien’s father and were as happy as Alexander to see the end of rule by Imperial Prince.
However, there was a prophecy, Alexander had said. His eyes had remained ice-cold, the ruby he wore in his ear winking like a drop of blood. A test of the prince’s true right to rule. Fail that test, and…
The prophecy of the Imperial Prince finding the longlost princess descended from Prince Augustus of old, and reuniting the crown of Nvengaria was an ancient story that every child learned from the cradle. Nvengarians loved legends, the more ancient and ludicrous the better. They’d be ecstatic to learn that Damien would make it come true. And Nvengarians were just volatile enough that if he failed, they’d let their disappointment be known, violently.
Nedrak, head of the Council of Mages, said that the signs pointed to Damien as the prince to fulfill the prophecy. Nedrak was firmly under Alexander’s thumb, but his eyes had glittered with eagerness. He believed in the magic, too.
Word that Damien would fulfill the ancient prophecy had quickly spread. A mob soon surrounded the castle, a peaceful one, come to encourage Damien to ride off on the insane quest. Alexander had not smiled, he never did, but he managed to look pleased. Damien could not refuse, and Alexander knew it.
So Damien made a fair speech to the multitude from the balcony of the Imperial Prince’s castle, packed his bags, and traveled thousands of miles on the word of a nervous mage and a half-mad advisor to find the village of Little Marching, Oxfordshire.
He remembered the faces of his people when he had ridden out of Narato with his entourage, how the citizens had lined up to see him off in a fervor of cheering, their eyes shining with hope. Damien was the new Imperial Prince, he was following the prophecy, and everything would be put right again.
And so, he would do what Sasha told him and observe the rituals and pretend he believed it. He would drag Nvengaria out of the dust into which his father had ground it and save it from Alexander at any cost.
Neither he nor Alexander truly believed in the prophecy, but he had to admit that perhaps Sasha was not wrong about it. Events that had occurred since he’d left Nvengaria were nudging him toward belief. Something out there had pushed Damien unerringly to Penelope’s doorstep. And he’d tumbled immediately into love.
He came out of his thoughts to find Petri grinning at him.
“What are you smiling about?” Damien asked irritably.
Petri’s grin widened. He set down his glass and got to his feet. “I want to show you something.”
He rose and walked to Damien’s bed. As Damien watched, he moved the night table and swung open a door-sized panel in the wall beside it. “I found it when I checked the room. It is a passage behind the walls.”
Petri always searched Damien’s chambers even after the bodyguards did. Assassins liked to pop up and shoot things at Damien, so Petri went over every building carefully himself, not trusting anyone else to do the job properly. It was not a matter of if, but of when Alexander’s assassins would strike.
Damien got to his feet. “Where does it lead?”
“Not far. It runs behind the corridor and opens to a bedchamber at the end.”
Damien raised his brows. “Hmm, now, for what reason does a man build a house with a passage that leads secretly from one bedchamber to another?”
“I cannot imagine,” Petri said, eyes twinkling.
“Penelope’s great-grandfather must have been a rogue. To whose bedchamber does it lead?”
Petri grinned again. “Want to look?”
He held a candle at the ready. The black square tapering to darkness made something deep within Damien shudder, but he mastered himself.
Petri led him inside in silence, his lone candle making the passage bright. The low-ceilinged corridor ran straight, this wing of the house narrow and long.
A stone wall stopped their progress after about fifty feet, where the architect had decided to forget about the passage and get back to the business of building the house.
Petri gestured to their right, to wooden paneling that ran behind the chambers. A few feet above the floor was a small hinged panel, about six inches square.
In silence, Petri eased the panel open. Damien crouched down and put his eyes to it.
A night table half covered the hole, but he could see plenty. The room was a bedroom, a charming, girlish one. The bed had thin posts painted white, carving picked out in soft green, and was hung with green damask. A chair covered in the same fabric reposed by the fire, a comfortable seat for reading the stacks of books piled next to it, probably Penelope’s collection of fairy tales.
A writing table stood nearby, papers stacked neatly, the chair square in front of it as though she lined it up precisely when she finished at the desk every day. The thought made him smile.
Penelope herself sat at a dressing table as neat as her desk on the opposite side of the room. Facing an oval mirror, she brushed out her long hair, which crackled and shone, beautiful, long, and golden. Damien had touched it when he’d kissed her in the folly, warm silk spreading under his fingers, soft and smelling of the lavender in which she must rinse it.
She stared at her reflection as she slowly pulled the brush through her hair, as though her mind were miles away. She wore only a dressing gown, presumably over her night rail, the gold and green brocade almost a match of the chair and
bed hangings. Perhaps they were her favorite colors. Her hands were slim, holding the hairbrush gently, her movements graceful.
If Petri thought this would help ease Damien’s arousal, he was very much mistaken.
With a quiet smile, Petri pointed to the hinges of a larger door, similar to the one in Damien’s own room.
I ought to leave her alone, Damien thought. Let her get used to me and what she must do.
The trouble was, he had no time. If he’d had a year, he’d woo her gently, seducing her with words and gifts and small delights of kissing. Damien knew how to seduce. He’d become expert during his years of exile, when he’d learned to be the best player of all the games of the bedroom. He had learned that the only way to stay alive was to act the part of playboy prince, carefree and amusing, thinking of nothing more than the next woman in his bed.
Outwardly. Under the table, he had kept his hand in the affairs of European politics, forging ties toward the far-off day he would inherit his father’s kingdom. That day had come sooner than he’d imagined, but the ties had been in place.
His father had expected him to die in obscure poverty, if the assassins did not kill him, perhaps in some poetically dingy room in Paris or Rome. Instead, Damien had returned with wealth and influence behind him, a result of canny investments and years of working his fingers to the bone. In the end, it had paid off, letting him live in comfortable style.
Damien had until Midsummer’s Day to return to Nvengaria with Penelope. He did not have time for slow seduction; he had to be swift and sure, yet not let things happen too soon. It was enough to drive a grown prince mad.
The panel swung open into the passage. Damien moved the small piece of furniture and stepped around it into the room. Behind him, Petri obligingly closed the panel.
Penelope saw him in the mirror. The brush hesitated, hovering in the gold cloud of her hair. She did not cry out; she did not turn and demand to know what he thought he was doing. She simply watched him, her green eyes waiting.
Need sliced through him. Prophecy or no, this woman was beautiful. In dishabille, she was breathtaking. Her hair hung in a wave of dark gold, almost bronze-colored, to her hips. Lighter streaks roped through it, drawing his eye down its length.
He wanted to be naked and have that hair pouring over him. He wanted her to be naked and on top of him, the heat of her body blending with his as he made love to her in slow, sensual strokes. His breathing hurt him, and another part of him did, too.
Not yet, he admonished himself. She will be in my bed soon enough. She will yield. And then…
His mind whirled with and then.
She wanted him, too, he sensed that. She made none of the signals of the high-born women who’d wanted his seduction. No sly looks and come-hither smiles, no swish of hips or “accidental” lifting of skirts to bare silk-clad ankles.
Penelope simply wanted him with basic, primitive desire, the same that pounded through him. They were being pushed together by some invisible force, one that wanted them together no matter what. There was a mindlessness about the force—it did not care what else they felt, as long as they came together.
That mindless force made his feet move, taking him across the room to her, his hunger for her building in every step.
In the mirror, Penelope watched him come, her hairbrush still. He’d been handsome enough in his formal suit and cravat, she thought, but half-dressed, his shirt loose and open, he looked raw and barbaric. He might be a prince, but there was nothing civilized about him.
She sensed what she had when she’d seen him on horseback, a man in tune with wildness. Nvengarian rule was brutal, from what she’d read, much closer to England’s own medieval times than the modern-day monarchs more interested in fashion than in ruling.
Political debates in Nvengaria could end in a duel to the death with swords, right in the council chambers. Men dueled in England, of course, but with rules and a gloss of respectability about it. Nvengarians went about armed and fought each other with vigor at the drop of a hat.
Watching Damien, his hair loose on his shoulders, his handsome, chiseled face so different from an Englishman’s, she could well imagine him drawing a sword and plunging it into the chest of his enemy in the middle of the council hall.
He stopped behind her, tall in the mirror, the heat of his body brushing her back. The scent of brandy clung to him. Slowly, while she sat in mute contemplation, he gathered her hair in his hands, lifted it from her neck, and let it spill through his fingers.
Her hair falling on the back of her neck was cool and soft and erotic. He watched her in the mirror, his eyes intense.
He took the hairbrush from her and pulled it through her hair, watching the bristles furrow the gold. She closed her eyes, savoring the feeling as the brush moved from her scalp all the way to the ends of her hair.
He lifted her hair again, this time resting his hand on the nape of her neck, brushing the fine hairs there. Strong feeling shot through her. She felt her private places growing damp, and he’d only touched her neck, for heaven’s sake.
“I regret,” he said in a low voice, “that I caused you and your family pain. But my coming here was necessary.”
“To find your princess,” she murmured.
“To find you.”
He pulled the brush through her hair again, then let his fingertips drift over her skin, a gentle touch from a powerful man.
“You should not be in my bedchamber,” she pointed out.
He plied another stroke of the hairbrush, then leaned down and rested his cheek against hers. Unshaven bristles scraped her skin. “Tell me to go, then.”
She opened her mouth to send him away, then closed it. All the resolve and resistance she’d felt in the folly had gone.
“You cannot ask me, can you?” he asked. He was serious, not mocking.
“No.”
He set down the brush and slid his arms around her, palms resting just above her breasts. “It is the prophecy. It wants us to fall in love.”
“A prophecy is a prediction,” she said, puzzled. “It cannot want anything.”
Can it? His hands were hot through her thin dressing gown and night rail. She had the sudden urge to move his palms down to cup her breasts. Her face heated, but the wanting did not cease.
“This prophecy is old magic,” he said. “It was created hundreds of years ago when the line of Prince Augustus was lost. Maybe all that time changed it from mere words to something powerful. Perhaps it believes in itself so much that it forces us to believe in it.”
She watched him, her green-gold gaze meeting his blue one in the mirror. “I would say that was ridiculous, if I did not feel…”
“I know what you feel.” He glided his hands inside her dressing gown, smoothing the tops of her breasts beneath her night rail. “I feel the same. We need to be together. I do not believe the prophecy will let us turn aside.”
She dropped her gaze. She loved his hands on her, wanted them all over her. No, she needed them to be all over her, needed it in a kind of mindless frenzy.
Damien smiled to himself. This was dangerous, but he knew how to hold back. He could have her, maybe make her taste what was to come, without taking her too soon and breaking Sasha’s rules. He was adept; he could show her many things without being inside her.
His touch unnerved her, he saw, but she would not pull away and titter or pretend modesty. She had modesty, but not coyness. She’d kissed him well and good in the folly by the river, her mouth seeking, her desire strong.
He drew his fingers down the curve of her breast, feeling the nubs tighten and rise against the night rail. His blood stirred, the ferocity of his forefathers boiling to the surface. He wanted to drag her to the carpet and have at her. A ribbon trailing across her dressing table beckoned to him. A few games would not go amiss, either.
“I was betrothed twice,” she was saying.
He leaned down and traced the shell of her ear with his tongue. “I know. Miss Tavistock
told me.” A protective fire kindled inside him. “If you let me, I will duel with these gentlemen and punish them for hurting you.”
Her eyes widened, gold flecking the green. His ancestors raged some more within him, encouraging him to find these gentlemen and make them very, very sorry they’d made Penelope cry.
As though she sensed his violence stirring, she said quickly, “I cried off. I told them to go. They did not abandon me.”
“If they had been good to you, there would have been no need to tell them to go.”
She swallowed. “Mr. White—Reuben—I discovered by accident that he wanted a marriage of convenience. His convenience. I heard him speaking to his friend that with my dowry and family connections, he could pay his debts and set himself up well. Then he’d think nothing of returning to his mistresses. Both of them. The most beautiful women in London, he said. Nothing like his overly plump, dull-haired wife-to-be.”
She drew a sharp breath as she finished, as though she’d never meant to say those words aloud.
“Hmm,” he said. “I have changed my mind about sparing him, I think.”
Any man who looked at this woman and thought overly plump and dull-haired was blind and a fool.
Sword fodder.
“Where can I find this Mr. Reuben White?” He kissed her cheek and quietly slid the tape of her night rail through its knot. “I will have Petri bring him here, and I will have a chat with him.”
“Damien.”
His temperature soared. He liked his name on her lips. He liked the way her tongue touched her teeth on the D and how her lips closed on the M.
Say it again, love.
“It no longer matters,” she said. “What I meant to explain was that he wanted a marriage of convenience. Which is what you want.”
The lacing of the night rail loosened and he slid his fingers inside, finding the bare flesh of her bosom. His arousal, which had been plenty hard since he’d entered the room, lengthened and tightened still further.
He felt his control slipping. He should go.
Not yet. Let me stay here a little longer.