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Or maybe what this was, he thought, was her teasing him. Something no one else dared.

It seemed as if the space between them shrunk, even as time seemed to stretch out the longer they looked at each other. This was perhaps too comfortable, he thought. He might have made a mistake.

So he stood then, and ushered her back to that archway between their bedrooms.

“I think it’s a job well done,” he told her, sounding sterner than was strictly necessary. Because he wanted to get himself back on solid footing. “Whatever expectations anyone might have had about today, I feel certain that we’ve exceeded them.”

“Not boring at all,” she said, clearly teasing him this time.

He could tell by the way her dark eyes sparkled, like there were galaxies there. And all focused on him.

Then she closed the distance between them and kissed him once again.

Saviero had made his position clear. He had told her what had to happen, and he had intended that tonight would stay as close to platonic as possible. Just to show her that there were other things that this marriage could give her. To suggest to her that there was more to him, to her, to them, to the life they needed to build together, than the easy sex and endless parties she’d spent years partaking in.

But her mouth on his was the same glory it had been before. And she tasted even better than he remembered.

He thought that he could allow it, a sweet little kiss to cap off this day.

After all, he had shown her Christmas magic. Maybe this was part of it.

Except the kiss caught fire.

The ignition was swift and decisive. One moment, it was sweet, a simple kiss, and then the next it was a full inferno.

He found himself backing her against the nearest wall, his mouth taking and claiming, and it was far too difficult—far more difficult than he wanted to admit—to pull his mouth from hers.

There was no part of him that wanted to.

But he did. He looked down at her, and shook his head. “I already told you, this is not how it is going to go between us.”

Cesca did the most amazing thing then. She didn’t argue. She didn’t call him boring again.

She slid her hands up to cup his face between her palms. She fixed her gaze to his.

“Please,” she said, and there was no mockery there. No arch wit or even anything that sounded like teasing. She sounded…vulnerable. Open. Honest. He watched her swallow, as if that was as shocking to her as it was to him. She let out a little sigh. “Please, Saviero.”

And he could resist almost anything, he discovered, except the Queen of Liandero, his beautiful Cesca, coming as close to begging as he’d ever heard her.

CHAPTER SEVEN

CESCA SAW THE exact moment he caved.

The exact moment that stern, almost resigned expression of his shifted and the fire she could see in those blue eyes of his—and feel inside her—took hold.

He reached up and put his hands over hers, then gently pulled them away from his face.

And for a moment, all she could feel was her pulse. But the thing was, she could feel it everywhere. In her temples. Her neck. Her fingertips.

In her breasts. Behind her knees.

And most of all, most critically, she could feel it like thunder between her legs.

Deep in her core, where she ached for him in a way she wasn’t sure she had ever ached for anything.

None of this made the slightest bit of sense to her, but she was all right with that. Maybe she would find a way to be all right with anything if it came with all that intense blue regard.

“I don’t know what it means,” she managed to tell him, though it seemed much harder to speak than it should have done. “The way you say you like these things. Is it… Props and whips and chains and…?”