“I won’t,” she denied.
Of course she did.
He would fight her anyway. Fight her and win.
“Oh, but you will. And I will greatly enjoy earning the word ‘yes’ from your pretty lips. Just as I’ll enjoy being deep inside you, making you mine, watching you come undone for me.” Maxim bowed, the blood thundering in his veins. “Until next we meet, spitfire.”
He turned away from her and all the temptation she presented. Turned his back upon the unmade bed where he had nearly fucked her in the mound of pillows. And with each step that took him farther from Lady Tansy, Maxim’s determination to have her rose until it became insurmountable.
He had never accepted defeat in all his forty years of life, and he didn’t intend to begin now.
Tansy waitedon a chaise longue for what felt like a lifetime, drowning in a vast sea of guilt and longing. The two made for a devilish combination. Long after King Maximilian had left her, he had been all Tansy had been able to think about.
The memory of his lips on hers, bringing her to life.
The delicious weight of his big, masculine body covering Tansy’s, pinning her to the bed.
The rigidity of him, pressing in demanding fashion between her legs where she had ached for him—where she still ached for him.
The torment of it all threatened to swallow her whole.
But then there was the sharp, stinging anguish of the betrayal she had committed against the princess. It mattered not that Princess Anastasia harbored no tender feelings for the king. He was still the man who would be her husband. And Tansy had kissed him. Not just kissed him—she had lain with him, and in the princess’s bed, no less. Had felt him intimately aligned with her. Worst of all, had he not broken the spell of lust he’d cast over her by asking her to be his mistress, she would have allowed him anything.
Would have given herself to him.
She shut her eyes miserably against the flickering candlelight, which itself seemed a recrimination.
Until the subtle scraping at the window alerted her to the return of Princess Anastasia.
Relief washed over her—relief that the princess was safe. Concern, too, over where she had been. But there remained the sickening guilt as well.
“You were gone for hours,” she observed quietly.
The princess sighed. “I thought you would be abed by now.”
“As well I should have been,” she said, thinking of other things she should have done and hating herself all the more. “As should you.”
Princess Anastasia cleared her throat. “You know why I was gone.”
Tansy rose from the chaise longue, moving across the chamber in the princess’s direction. “Your original purpose should not have required all evening and half the hours of the morning,” she reminded her quietly, fearing that the worst had happened and that Princess Anastasia had given herself to Archer Tierney.
She didn’t like to consider the reason for her concern, that she was every bit as much nettled by the realization that Princess Anastasia would betray the king as by the danger her friend so openly courted with her rash behavior.
If her uncle were to discover what she was doing…
Tansy shuddered, not wanting to consider the repercussions.
The princess opened the fastening of her cloak, giving Tansy the opportunity to sweep it away, grateful for the distraction from her whirling thoughts. Calm, mindless tasks and duty supplanted the guilt and worries for a moment.
“He served me dinner,” Princess Anastasia said then. “I hadn’t realized how very hungry I was after largely refusing the trays sent to me.”
The worries instantly returned, for Tansy recognized a lie when she heard one.
“For seven hours?” she asked softly. “Pray, Your Royal Highness, do not mistake me for a fool.”
“I would never think you a fool,” the princess said, her gaze searching as she reached for Tansy’s arm. “Something is amiss. What is it?”
Was her guilt written upon her face, then?
