An annulment should be relatively easy if she remained demonstrably, medically, a virgin.
So maybe it wasn’t a virgin kink.
Maybe I was just a fucking masochist.
That particular perversion had never come up in therapy, but it tracked.
Whya virgin kink, as my therapist might have asked, the school-appointed one after my father had been shot down in front of me.Whywould a virgin be enticing toyou?
Forbidden fruit? There was nothing else I couldn’t have.
Because she was a prize no one else had won.
Because after I had her, no one else could ever have her again as a virgin. I would win her and then consume her.
Was this craving as sordid as that, seeing her as either a conquest or a trophy to hoard and then break?
That wasn’t me. That wasn’t how I thought.
Other men collect women. They possessed a woman’s body like pinning a still-fluttering butterfly to a specimen board.
I wanted to capture a woman’s body like I would win a war. I conquered every inch of her territory. I outflanked her, overwhelmed her, and subjugated her until she was mine. I ruled her every ecstatic writhe. I was the god-emporer she kneeled to.
And so it was best for Lexi that I couldn’t have her, that I must leave her unscathed.
I was descended directly from the richest, most powerful men in the world, certainly more wealthy than anyone who now existed. My ancestors had owned more of the Earth’s surface than anyone else ever has, our empire touching three oceans, and we’d owned the people who worked that land, too. We abused them, forcing them to labor on the farms and mines and give too much of the product to us. The wealth from their work on our land poured into our coffers, and we bought stupid, decadent riches with it.
Fucking Fabergé eggs.
This beautiful woman in front of me, who would have been a ripe apple to bite into and devour, was forbidden. I couldn’t buy her, couldn’t defeat her, no matter how much I wanted to.
And so Iwantedher.
That’s why when her fingers touched the waistband of my suit trousers, I didn’t even flinch.
If I hadn’t stopped myself, I would have leaned in, closing the scant distance between us to push her fingers past the fabric and touch my skin lower.
I would have lifted her ass and set her on the sink counter, kissed her senseless, and then fucked her against the wall so I could be balls-deep in her body.
I held the neutral mask over my face, keeping myself calm, collected.
Her fingertips were as light as rose petals brushing my flesh, and I closed my eyes to revel in the darkness and sensation.
“I shouldn’t.” Her cool hands brushed my ribs, brushed over that extravagant tattoo inked on my left side. “You won’t be able to control yourself.”
I blinked my eyes open and rolled them. “Lexi, I would never attack a woman, have never committed a crime against a woman,ever.And certainly never because she was merely touching me. I can control myself.”
Probably.
But I wasn’t an ordinary criminal, one who dabbled in felonies. My family had committed war crimes, crimes against humanity, and atrocities that should have been tried in the Hague.
I would never stoop to assault. My ancestors would have been aghast at the pettiness of it.
Shtupping a kitchen maid? A peasant? Yeah, probably.
But we were loyal to our wives.
Tsar Nicolas II, the last tsar before 1917, was faithful and devoted to his Empress, Alexandra, and their five children to a fault, a deadly fault. He hadn’t seen how his wife’s religious desperation to save their hemophiliac son was interpreted as insanity by the other nobles and used by revolutionaries as propaganda.
