I hear my breath in my ears.

Rome lowers my hood. Bright lights make me squint. I peer around to see a large kitchen fit to create banquets, fitted with triple ovens, twin stone tops, a walk-in fridge, and a long, wide shiny steel island bench for preparation. This space is so clean, it sparkles.

When I feel his hands on my shoulders, I inhale quickly. His knuckles caress the skin at my collarbone as he slides my cloak off my shoulders. He lays it to the side.

Vulnerable like this, I hug myself. The material of my white night gown is thin and slightly translucent. It’s the same one that every Silk Girl wears to sleep in.

Rome lifts me to sit on the island bench, my legs dangling, toes just free of the hem of my skirting.

Warmth pools in my belly and makes me squirm.

He moves close.

My mind blurs as he stands, an intimidating wall of muscles, only a head taller than me now.

And I’m not sure I like it. I’m scared of being this close to his lips. Lips that snarl and hurt me, but that I want to touch with mine.

I look at him. Study him.

It’s bright in here so I can identify the different blues in his gaze and understand his state of mind from his deliciously dishevelled hair and large black irises— he is wearing all his remorse on the outside right now.

I like seeing him.

The real him—Rome.

Concerned eyes move over me, stopping at my shoulder. He lifts my arm, inspecting the entire length, then the other. He brushes his finger over a small grass wound from when he dropped me. “My temper is a problem. My sister…” He sighs roughly, changing the course of his sentence. “This will not happen again.”

His stare is paralysing when he lifts his hand to my lips and traces the curves. I part my mouth to let him explore the flesh. His fingers are warm, firm, demanding.

“I like your lips,” he states, then sweeps my hair over my shoulders, exposing my bare neck. “And your throat.”

“Because you want to strangle it?” I ask, sad, throwing his own nasty threats back at him before he can do it himself. Warn me. How awful he is. I know. I saw.

He drops his hand.

Picks up mine and places them on his bare abdomen.

Shit.

He’s like a rock—course and unforgiving.

I stroke the rippling muscles as they respond to my touch as if his inner beast presses back, demanding more gentle attention. He grips the counter on either side of my hips, his knuckles turning white as he leans in. Caging me. It feels intimate in an emotional way—a wholesome way.

Like he just wants to be stroked in privacy with me.

“No,” he says, his voice deep. “Not because I want to strangle it.” He leans down and presses his lips to my pulse.

And. I. Almost. Explode.

The warmth from his mouth currents across my skin, rising hairs and tightening my nipples.

He groans at my response to his soft, barely-there kiss.

I close my eyes.

More.

Touch me.

Touch me.

My body starts to vibrate, burn, and my core pulses.

I rock my hips into the space between us, lifting my chin and inviting more of his mouth.

He accepts. Dragging his lips upward from my throat to my chin, where his teeth trail along my jawline.

I part my knees and shuffle forward to the edge, wanting his body to fill the inches of space between us. Before my backside can slide off, he presses his hips to catch me, his hard length meeting the soft, warm delta between my thighs.

He grinds against me, his abdominals bunching beneath my fingertips as he applies pressure to that spot—that spot. Yes.

I drop my head back further as his lips roam around my neck, down to my collarbone.

He nips it.

Drops to my heaving chest.

He skates his lips over my hard nipples, tormenting the aching beads with very little attention. I wonder if that is for him or me—the light touch.

Will he combust if he does more?

I will combust if he doesn’t.

“Please, my king.” I don’t know what I am asking for. I do. And I don’t. “Make it stop.”

A groan leaves him, his shattering resolve thickening the air. I pant its heavy, dark essence into my lungs as he releases the counter to position my feet on top.

My hands leave his abdomen as I lean backward, placing them behind me to brace my torso on an angle. I don’t know what he is doing. It—are we going to do it here?

We can’t.

It’s against the rules.

I thrust my hips in the air and his mouth hovers over my dress as he slides down to my breasts, taking his time. He kisses my nipple. The subtle stimulation reaches inside me and draws out a moan.

He continues leisurely over my stomach, stopping between my legs, where he nuzzles the place that yearns for attention—pressure. He mouths me over my dress, and I shudder from hundreds of tiny electric shocks.

“What are you doing with your mouth?”

This was not in my studies.

“My king?”

Between one confused thought and another, Rome has pushed my skirting to bunch at my hips.

Between my ‘no, this isn’t right,’ and my, ‘please make the need stop,’ he has torn my knickers down the centre and snapped the threads at each leg, stuffing the tatted remains of it into his front pocket.

My brain turns to mush.

With me exposed and weeping with demand, he straightens. Groaning under some kind of restraint, he stares at me open for him. All for him.

I can feel the wetness between my thighs cooling in the air and know that he can see it.

I pant as his hungry gaze penetrates the slit between my thighs, its heat driving in deep. So deep, I almost feel him, what he wants, what he’ll do.

“I’m going to keep you,” he declares, tracing a thin scar on my inner thigh leftover from Iris’s attack months ago.

One of his hands wraps around my upper leg, holding me, while two thick fingers touch the swelling valley between my lips, sliding up and down with ease.

I blush from my ears to my toes.

“You blush really pretty for me, little creature. Mm. I have thought about this pussy,” he tells me, moving his fingers in the warmth from my entrance, then lower, to a place that should not be touched. Ever. But he explores the outside of every inch between my thighs. “I couldn’t have even imagined this. And I imagined it a lot. So, so fucking sweet.”

He uses his thumb and forefinger to open my lips.

I close my eyes, unable to watch him staring so intensely at me there.

“Your hymen is perfect.” The warm tip of his finger slides around something strange and sensitive inside me, as though mapping the dimensions. “I don’t want to ruin this, but fuck. Fuck. I have to taste you.”

He moves. I hear it.

Then his hot mouth is on me, lips open and sucking at my centre while his thick tongue flattens and laps at me.

That does it. I drop to my back on a throaty cry, my legs spasming and shaking.

“Mine,” I hear the word rumble through me.

The overwhelming size of Rome, in comparison to me, has my pelvis pinned to the counter under his weight.

And the pressure.

Yes.

The pressure is everywhere I need it.

"Fuck. I've wanted my tongue inside you since that first day in the parlour."

Writhing, I reach for his hair and tug on it, pulling him away and pushing him down. “Is this— Is this normal?”

He reaches up with his other hand and wraps it around my throat, bracketing me to the counter and sending me a message—'Nothing will stop me.’

He uses his thick tongue to part the folds of skin that protect the place I've barely ever touched and never seen.

I open my mouth, moaning, my eyes squeezed shut, veiling the reality of where we are and what he's doing so inappropriately with my body. And how I want more of it. I'm insatiable with need for him.