That persistent ache between her legs throbbed. She knew she ought to yank away from him and return to the haven of her bedroom, where she could not be tempted by this sinful devil.And yet, she couldn’t seem to sever the connection. She held herself impossibly still as the velvet, wet sweep of his tongue slowly turned her to flame.
He glanced up at her, his expression serious, his eyes intense. “You see, Eleanora? I can feel you tremble for me. Only think of how lovely my tongue would feel on your pearl again. And deep inside you.”
She didn’t want to think about that.
She couldn’tstopthinking about it. Her body remembered it all too well, and every part of her was crying out for more.
“No.” She shook her head firmly, hoping she could send those dreadful, wanton, best forgotten notions from her mind.
“Yes.” He gave her a soft, almost tender smile and kissed the sensitive skin of her inner wrist, his tongue flicking over the tracery of veins there. “Give yourself to me, Eleanora. Don’t you see how inevitable it is? Of course you do. It’s why you’ve come here tonight, against all your better judgment. It’s why your prim and proper ice melts for me.”
She wanted him. Ached for him. She’d never known such frenzied yearning was possible.
But that didn’t make it right. And it didn’t render her any more able to succumb to the decadent seduction he promised.
Just one more night, her reckless body whispered. She summoned her strength, ignoring it. Because one more would turn into another, and then another, and another until he had tired of her and cast her aside as he would inevitably do. He would return to his homeland and his court and the women who adored him, and he wouldn’t even remember her name. Whilst she would be heartbroken and alone, her life lying about her in ruins that no amount of effort could resurrect. She had seen it with Mama time and again. Every protector had left in the end, and there had been nothing left.
She shook her head. “I cannot, Your Royal Highness.”
“Nando,” he purred. “Say it.”
She had said it last night. She thought of him in those same, intimate terms. And she couldn’t deny she liked the way it felt on her tongue, the intimacy it implied.
Meow.
The sound was so abrupt and out of place that for a moment, Eleanora was convinced she had imagined it. But then it came again, the loud, undeniable call of a feline, followed by a trill.
She stiffened. “Is there a cat in here?”
His grin deepened until fine lines creased at the corners of his brilliant eyes, and he released his hold on her hand. “Of course there is. Why wouldn’t there be one?”
She stared at him, feeling oddly bereft without his touch, and wondered if he were truly and utterly mad after all. “Why do you have a feline in your chamber?”
As if on cue, a cat leapt to the back of a chair by the hearth, balancing precariously on the stuffed edge. The little fellow must have been curled up on the seat, which wasn’t visible to Eleanora from her current vantage point.
“He’s not just any cat,” Nando said smoothly, moving toward the cat in an unhurried gait. “He’s Benvolio.”
The prince made the declaration in the same manner she imagined he might make an announcement at court. As if it made complete and utter sense, and perhaps to him, it did. Her lips parted, but words were beyond her.
“Benvolio,” she managed to repeat. “After the character inRomeo and Juliet, I presume?”
He stopped at the back of the chair and ran the backs of his fingers over the gray-and-white cat’s head. “Ah, you are familiar with the tragedy, Miss Brett?”
Her mother had been an actress. Eleanora knew the lines of every role Mama had played by heart. She had helped her mother to rehearse, as a naïve child secretly in love with thesweeping emotion and the pageantry. The seedier side of her mother’s life had been unknown to her then, in those innocent days when the world had seemed a much brighter, happier place.
She had learned the truth soon enough. It was a lesson she would never forget.
Eleanora forced a smile. “Quite. It seems an odd name for a cat.”
“Does it? How strange. I took one look at him when we met in the streets and simply knew he was a Benvolio. Call it an instinct, if you will.”
The man was getting more preposterous by the moment.
“You met him in the streets?” she asked, the invitation to sin with him momentarily supplanted by the presence of a feline he had apparently taken under his wing.
He raised an imperious golden brow. “Where else is one expected to make the acquaintance of a cat?”
“In the bedchambers of dissolute princes,” Eleanora quipped before she could think better of it.
