Sheikh's Princess Of Convenience. Dani Collins

reacted with a moan and mashed herself into him so hard her breasts hurt, but it felt good, too. The contact assuaged the tips that stung like bites. When he started to ease back, she whimpered and pressed her hand to the cloth covering his head, urging him to continue kissing her with this mad passion. She wanted to feel his hair, taste his skin, strip naked and know the weight of him over her.

      She wanted to know how that hard flesh that was pressing against her belly would feel stroking inside her.

      With an abrupt move and a ragged hiss of indrawn air, he pulled back. “Not here.”

      Had he read her mind? Her body?

      “My room,” she whispered, already plotting their discreet path through the halls of the palace.

      “Mine,” he stated. She couldn’t tell if it was a preference of location or if he was staking a claim on her. Either way, she let him take her hand and drag her from the garden toward the stairs that led up to the balcony outside the ballroom.

      She balked in the shadows at the bottom of the steps. “My lipstick. People will know.”

      “I thought you were ready to take control of your own life?”

      In the slant of light, she saw a mercilessness curl at the corner of his mouth. He pivoted them a few steps into the shadows beside the wall of the steps.

      She was more than ready to give herself to him, but this was her home. Her brother’s wedding. She was the Princess of Khalia. She was sober enough to know that she had to be discreet about having an affair, not parade it through the middle of a state ceremony.

      But as her would-be lover pressed her to the stones that had barely cooled in the hours since sundown, she forgot her misgivings. Her hands found the heat of his neck and she parted her lips, moaning as he kissed her again.

      He transported her to that place of magic they seemed to create between them.

      As she lost herself to his kiss again, he stroked her hip and thigh, urging her to pick up her knee and make space for him between her legs. Cool air grazed her skin as he shifted her skirt up, up and out of the way, touching—

      She gasped at the first contact of fingertips against the back of her thigh. Arrows of pleasure shot into her core, making her yearn so badly her eyes grew damp along with her underthings. She arched her neck as he trailed his mouth down her throat.

      It was exquisite and joyful and...

      Wait.

      He was hard where he pressed between her legs, but something was off.

      She touched the side of his face, urging him to lift his head. There was heat in his glittering eyes, but it was banked behind a cooler emotion. Something deliberate. His skin might have been flushed with arousal, but his expression was dispassionate.

      He wasn’t as involved as she was.

      Hurt and unease began to worm through her, but before she could fully react, she heard a gasp and a giggle above them. Someone said a pithy, “Get a room.”

      “That’s the princess!” a female voice hissed.

      “With who?” She knew that demanding masculine voice. She looked up to see several faces peering down at them over the wall of the balcony, one of them her brother’s. He did not look pleased.

      Did her lover release her leg to find a modicum of decorum? Not right away. Not before she caught a dark look of satisfaction in his hard features.

      Gaze solely on her, he very slowly eased his hold on her leg so his touch branded into her skin as she lowered her thigh. Humiliation pulsed in her throat, made all the more painful by the way he had gone from passionately excited to...this. Remote. Unaffected. Perhaps even satisfied by her public set down.

      Angry and embarrassed as she was, her abdomen still tightened in sensual loss as he drew away from their full-frontal contact, which only added to her mortification.

      “You were right,” he said. “We should have gone to your room.”

      She had no choice but to take refuge there. Alone and fast.