Ariana had never found herself so thoroughly captivated.
He had done that for a whole month before Ari had lost her patience and approached him.
Are you my very own watchdog, Your Highness?
She cringed, remembering how outrageous she’d been.
His reply: You should not be drinking with strange men, Ms. Sakis.
And then he’d followed her to the party where she’d proceeded to get drunk. Taken her home to her little apartment she’d shared with three other girls.
No more exchanges except her increasingly reckless taunts to break his self-assurance over the next month.
Until the afternoon the verdict had come out about her parents’ deaths. There had been no doubt that her mother had deliberately caused the accident.
She’d taken her life and her husband’s, a day after he’d struck Ariana.
She’d been mindless with grief, desperate to run away from her own life. Andreas hadn’t asked her a single question that day, nor left her side. Like a shadow, he’d been at her back throughout the day and night as she’d flitted from the café to a party, from the party to a walk along the coast and then back to her apartment.
Finally, she had broken down into anguished sobs, finally, she had realized that she was now forever alone, a fate she’d wished for for so long. At her apartment, he had sat by her on the couch—not even their shadows touching, always so careful to not touch her even by accident—and he had started talking, uncaring of whether she was listening.
In that deep, gravelly voice of his that had been just a tether to hold on to at first.
He’d started with the reason for his stay in the little village, a question she’d asked of him countless times. Told her of how his trail had led him there.
It was the first time she’d heard of the story of the dragon and the warriors. For hours, he’d told her of his fascination with the history of Drakon and its centuries-old lore since he’d been a little boy. Of the painstaking years of research he’d put together in his free time, which was far too little and rare. Of his fierce determination to pin down the real truth behind the war the warriors had waged on the dragon.
And in the passion in his words that had been a revelation—when she’d relentlessly taunted him for being an uptight, dutiful, one-dimensional prince puffed up with his own privilege and power—Ariana had seen the man beneath the Crown Prince’s mantle. A historian, a weaver of words, a dreamer; a man that struggled to survive within the constraints of his birth and his position of power without even knowing it. A man who liked her, her company, her laughter, yet wouldn’t, or couldn’t put it in a simple sentence.
A man who could have the world at his feet and yet saw something worthwhile in her.
The realization that somehow the Crown Prince of Drakon, powerful and gorgeous, needed her just as much as she needed him, had reverberated through her.
As dawn had painted the sky a myriad of purples and pinks, his voice had slowly guided Ariana back to the world, to the life waiting for her.
Through her death, her mother had given her a gift. She had given Ariana her own life back.
With a fiercely alive feeling coursing through her veins, she had done what she’d been dying, but had been terrified, to do, until then. She had wiped her tears away roughly, kneeled between his long legs and pressed her mouth to his.
Her first kiss, she had decided so full of herself, would be the Crown Prince’s.
Of course, he hadn’t kissed her back as she’d mashed her lips against his. Tenderly, he’d clasped her jaw and pushed her back while she’d been burning with humiliation and thwarted desire, had guided her to her room, tucked her in, waited until she fell into a dreamless sleep.
The next morning, she’d woken up, brimming with a renewed verve for life and determined to have him, in whatever form she could.
Thee mou, she’d been playing with fire. Was it any wonder she’d been burned?
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