She’d seen many high-resolution photos and hours of footage of him throughout the years. She’d had film-quality memories. She’d thought graphic effects had touched up his assets, that memories had been exaggerated by the distortion of passion and inexperience.
They’d been misleading, all right. And mercifully so.
The brunt of the reality of him had shut down her mind, possessed her instincts. Mate, they’d whimpered. She’d seen herself flying to him, seen him storming to her, felt him snatching her in mid-flight, crushing her in his assuagement.
She’d stumbled out of that alternate reality, reeling. She remembered, vaguely, what had hurtled out of her mouth. Survival. Like someone lashing out with flailing arms at a black hole.
Then he’d stalked to her, and with each step, she’d withdrawn into herself to ward off his incursion. But damn him, he’d kept coming, invading her senses, snatching her responses from her self-control’s white-knuckled grip. Then he’d spoken. Teased. Taunted. Pushed and pulled. Until the last anchor of her restraint snapped like an overextended string. She could swear she’d heard that final twang echo throughout her body. And she’d let him have it.
It was as if she’d let him have exactly what he’d been wishing for. The pleasure flashing across his face singed her, the tension roiling through his body resounded inside hers, spiking when every verbal slash hit home. It was as if she were chafing the exact spot he needed scratched, the very nerve cluster he wanted stimulated.
Who knew he was into S-M. The verbal kind. Maybe the physical, too. No wonder her “yes, Leandro” persona had been so…peripheral to him.
She thought she’d expended all her angst in that tirade. But with Leandro all but licking his lips for an encore, another was coming on.
“Now, to elaborate on what I said as I first came in…” She stopped. Her voice sounded as it once had at the end of the stamina-testing ecstasy sessions he’d exposed her to. She gulped. “Even if you redeem yourself in some huge way, I think it’ll remain inexcusable that you’re playing games when your kingdom’s future is at stake…”
“Former kingdom.”
His indolent words thrilled behind her breastbone. “What?” He leaned closer. Sucked whatever air was left from the universe. “I’m an American now.” She grimaced. “Oh, please.”
Mockery intensified the emerald of his eyes. “Want to see my passport?”
She waved. “You’ll always be Castaldinian.”
The wings of his dense, perfectly formed eyebrows rose in mock interest. “Really? A whole kingdom disagreed for eight years. I don’t have one official tie to the place.”
“Like it or not, you are one.”
He turned his lip down in a perfect parody of a petulant little boy. Yeah. Sure. As if. “I have no say?”
She shook her head. “None.”
“I wonder how you have worked this out.”
“You don’t have a say in your genes, do you? Same thing.”
“Oh, but we do rise above our programming.”
“And you transcended your Castaldinian origins?”
“I was actually culled out of the Castaldinian pool. But I’ve adapted well to life as another species, thank you for caring.”
“Oh, please.”
He leaned back, the seat dipping under his shifting weight, exacerbating her imbalance. He spread his daunting body in a pretense of relaxation, giving her a more complete demonstration of his upgrades. And her effect on him. “You know, the way you keep saying ‘please’…anyone would think you’re inviting more ‘juvenile, infringing, lascivious allusions.’”
His words had the effect of quick-drying concrete. “Okay. It seems we won’t get anything of any value said or done before we indulge your need to harp about the past and drag out the sordid details. Fine. Go ahead. Get it out of your system.”
His gaze seemed to scald her body, to scrape it naked.
“There are…things I can’t get out of my system. Certainly not by…talking. As for other baggage from that phase in my life, don’t worry about it. I channeled any lingering resentment into my work. Whatever remains, I take care of with extreme sports. And punching bags.”
“And turning your back on your kingdom when it needs you.”
A laugh cracked out of his depths, loaded with astonishment and amusement. And virility. “That would be a great outlet. If I were into an eye for an eye.”
“Only it would be a limb—or a life, or even a nation’s worth of either—for an eye, in this situation.”
A chuckle rumbled in his chest, revving up the itchy feeling in hers to an ache. “You think I’m that vital? Very inconsistent of you, when you already said how inconsequential I am.”
“That was a personal opinion,” she mumbled, furious with herself, with him, at the responses he kept yanking from her.
His gaze grew more baiting as he rubbed a languid hand over his chest, drawing her stare to the beauty and power of the first, the breadth and hardness of the second. “Off the record, eh?”
She did her level best to present him with her neutral look. “Do make it on. Your head must be swollen from all the buttkissing you get. Consider my opinion a deflating agent.”
His laughter boomed again. Her heart ricocheted in her rib cage. “Ah, Phoebe, I’m having my head measured first thing in the morning.” He sobered a bit, his grin becoming an X-rated health hazard. “So why try to convince such an irredeemable egomaniac to take the reins of a kingdom?”
She swallowed. “I’m an emissary, as you said. I’m not here to put forward my convictions but rather my employer’s case.”
“Even if you suspect he’s senile and is turning the kingdom over to the one person who’ll drive it into the sea?”
“King Benedetto isn’t senile by a long shot.”
“How else do you explain his change of heart?”
“I am sure he has his reasons.”
“So he hasn’t shared them with you? You’re the little foot solider with need-to-know info you’ll never need to know?”
“One thing I do know is that his heart has always been with you. I believe having to cut you off nearly cut it out.”
He threw his awesome head back with a hoot of delight. “I didn’t see that coming.”
Her throat constricted as the rain-straight silk of his hair cascaded back to frame his head to maximum effect. “What?”
“Appealing to the insecure little boy inside me who craves his hero’s approval, his validation.”
God help her, she actually snorted. “The day I believe there’s an insecure little boy inside you is the day I believe I’ll sprout wings if I cluck hard enough.”
His laughter was louder this time, lasted longer. Spread more damage. “Ah, Phoebe, you know me too well. How about the vindictive little boy inside me, then? Who wants to see the object of his hero worship groveling, admitting how much he’s wronged him, and how the guilt of his transgressions has never given him a moment’s peace?”
She stilled. His eyes lost the crinkle of amusement as he stared back at her. And she saw it.