Page 33 of A Prince of Smoke and Mirrors (Billionaire Sanctuary: The Heir #1)

dirty

NICOLAI ROMANOV

Her fingers trailed down my abs, tickling as they bounced from one crest to the next, pink fingernails tickling over my skin and the black tattoo inked on my body.

And yes, I was absolutely tensing my stomach because that’s how you make those abs look good. I’d worked hard for them. I was absolutely showing off.

The fact that I was a bit dehydrated from overindulging in vodka the night before was an added bonus for making them stand out.

When I told her, “Don’t stop,” I meant it in every sense of the word.

Don’t stop touching me.

Go on, touch more.

Stay.

I should not have meant any of that.

Standing immobile while she trailed her pink fingernails down my torso, down my skin and that ill-advised tattoo, exploring me, was absolute torture, and I loved every second of it.

Yes, I had kinks. I was a wealthy man with too much idle time and more money than I could spend in a multitude of lifetimes. Nothing was rare. Nothing was off-limits.

Usual encounters had become mundane.

The rules became brittle, and I did not know where the boundaries were, if they even existed for men like me.

I liked to wrap my hand around their throats and hold their pulse, light pressure in just the right place, see their trepidation, and then let it go at the precise moment so I could watch them come undone so hard they screamed.

Yes, I liked to tie them up, see their limbs contort, hold them, see the secret parts of them open to me, and then watch their ecstasy, their manic orgasm as they cried out and writhed, still bound, still vulnerable.

Yes, I liked to watch women. I liked the visual. I liked the way their hands balled into fists and their feet clenched, the way they gasped and their skin flushed warm.

When they utterly lost control.

Maybe it was because they agreed to my kinks the first time to please me, because they thought I wanted it.

The next time, though, they asked for it. They retrieved the ropes from my drawer. They guided my hand to their throat.

Their eyes sparkled with anticipation.

I did everything I could get them to agree to, and I did anything to watch them lose their fucking minds.

I liked to watch women.

But I’d never suspected that somewhere deep in my many swirling, overlapping, driving perversions, that I had a virgin kink.

I’d always considered a virgin kink a little dirty, a little too close to taking advantage of someone who didn’t know what they were asking for.

Too close to unearned authority.

Akin to telling someone what to do for no reason other they didn’t know what they should want, so I could do whatever I wanted.

It was too easy to take advantage of a virgin, and I already skirted that line with women.

But Lexi wasn’t jaded like me and everyone around me those days. She would be—interested, excited even, wanting connection instead of needing something out of Cirque de Soliel just so she’d remember me.

Flashes of nights when I was a teen in the dormitories at boarding school sent shivers through me, back when we’d all been slinking around like unneutered cats and switching beds for the thrill of it, when sliding naked skin and blasts of endorphins had been the game.

A girl and I had indulged our first times together, and then there’d been other girls, too.

I didn’t want a high school girl now.

I wanted to be me in high school, that new-skinned me who’d skied like a fucking demon, fenced like pirate, and dove into alpine snow-fed lakes for the sheer joy of the icy rush.

That wild abandonment of mouths and hands and blasting pleasure, luxuriating as we slept naked and entwined, and the ease of falling for someone so hard that I couldn’t fucking breathe if she wasn’t with me felt right around the corner, so close I could almost catch it.

Being with Lexi felt like being that version of me.

A robotic voice sounded in my head, mocking me: Kink achievement unlocked.

I sighed. Just fucking great.

I had a new kink.

One that I absolutely, positively, could not indulge.

As soon as Lexi had offhandedly announced that a doctor could confirm she was a virgin, my desecrated, polluted, alcohol-poisoned body had found energetic reserves I hadn’t known existed.

I’d been rock hard in a second. My dick had been so over-swollen that it was nearly painful, the skin so tight it had felt sunburned under that cheap, scratchy hotel towel.

I had needed her more than coffee, more than food, more than water, more than air.

My hangover migraine had pounded like the metaphorical axe cleaving my skull from my heart slamming into my ribs, increasing my blood pressure until I’d damn-near had blood squirting out my ears.

And I couldn’t touch Lexi.

I couldn’t make love to this woman, even though she was my legal wife.

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.

Why a virgin kink, as my therapist might have asked, the school-appointed one after my father had been shot down in front of me. Why would a virgin be enticing to you?

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 I wanted her.

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.

Tsar Peter III Fyodorovich abdicated in favor of his ambitious, power-hungry wife, knowing she might assassinate him, and he died mysteriously less than a week later. He was remembered as a bumbling buffoon for his greed, jealousy, and loving his wife.

She was remembered as Catherine the Great.

Lexi’s fingertips rose, trickling upward in defiance of gravity and logic, tracing the whorls and spirals of my supposedly abstract, vaguely tribal tattoo, and crested along my trapezoids, reaching up my throat, and lingered on my jaw. Her fingers fanned out, cupping my cheek.

It was astonishingly intimate, mesmerizing, like I was the one who’d never been touched.

My eyes drifted shut as I tilted my head, leaning my jaw into her palm.

Her touch was comforting in a deep way that I hadn’t felt in a long, long time. She could touch me anywhere, anything sexual or depraved, and she’d cupped my cheek in her palm.

I almost fell to my fucking knees.

A discreet knock pattered at the bathroom door.

Lexi’s hands dropped.

The tension stringing me up like a marionette cut out, and my shoulders drooped.

Fuck it all.

A man’s voice said, “The cars are here.”

Ueli always had the worst fucking timing. “We’ll be right out.”

I looked away from the door and back to Lexi, who was cringing against the opposite wall of the minuscule bathroom, her fingers clutched to her chest like she’d grabbed a hot stove.

“He’s going to think we were doing something in here,” she said.