Page 38 of Reign
I can’t seem to focus on anything except the fact that this man exists and somehow once existed like this for me. I’m in awe of him. The impossible, helpless marvel of seeing a man built likea blade come apart above me, and realizing he had once let me witness it.
His eyes crack open and find mine.“You’re staring again,”he rasps, voice so fucked out and hoarse, it scrapes down my spine.
“Can you blame me?”I say, my own voice broken and breathless.“You look like a sin that forgot how to be forgiven.”
The second those words hit him, he seems to splinter. His rhythm stutters, his mouth parts, and his eyes go dark and wide.
“You undo me, Nikolaj.”
Then the dream breaks apart around the image of him, and I wake up hard, confused, and breathing like I’ve been running for miles.
The ceiling of my bedroom at Saint Helena swims into focus above me, pale in the early gray light leaking through the curtains.
For a second, I don’t know where I am. All I feel is the weight pressing down on me, the ache low in my gut, my painfully hard cock pressed against the sheets, and Vincenzo’s taste lingering on my lips.
“Fuck,” I mutter, voice rough from sleep.
I drag a hand over my face and stare up at the ceiling.
The dream doesn’t recede—that’s the problem. Usually, they start dissolving the second I wake, details tearing away before I can get hold of them. This one stays. The look on his face, the scrape of his voice. My own words, spoken with the kind of aching devotion that no enemy should ever draw out of a man like me.
“Fucking unbelievable,” I mutter to the empty room.
My cock twitches against my stomach at the memory of the dream, and I glare upward as though my own body has personally betrayed me. Which, to be fair, it has.
I know I should take care of it. The practical solution is right there—hand, shower, five quiet minutes, and less edge in mewhen the day starts. But the idea pisses me off on principle because the image in my head is Vincenzo above me, and I refuse to jerk off to a recovered memory like some lovesick teenager with no self-respect.
That lasts all of ten seconds before I realize the self-respect argument is already dead on arrival because I’m lying here, naked and hard, thinking about how he tasted when I kissed him.
I throw the sheets back, swing my legs over the side of the bed, and stand. Cold air slides over my skin, waking the rest of me faster than I’d like. I sleep naked, always have. Clothes in bed feel restrictive and stupid, and there’s no one in this wing with enough of a death wish to come into my quarters.
I stalk toward the adjoining bathroom, then stop halfway because I smell fresh coffee.
Saint Helena is secure enough that every unexpected smell matters.
My room opens into a private suite: bedroom, bath, sitting area, and the kitchen space down one short staircase lined with dark marble and old stone.
I stand there listening for half a second—no alarm, no shouting, no gunfire, and no footsteps from guards rushing a breach. Just the house breathing around me and the low, quiet clink of ceramic against stone below.
I go downstairs naked and in a mood foul enough to make priests sweat. One hand is already curled into a fist as I hit the bottom step—but I stop so abruptly it’s almost undignified.
Vincenzo is sitting at my marble counter, drinking coffee.
For one insane second, my brain simply refuses the image.
Black trousers, white shirt with the sleeves rolled halfway up his forearms, dark hair slightly disordered in that infuriatingly aristocratic way that makes him look more expensive rather than less composed. No jacket, and no tie.
He’s perched on one of the stools by the island with one ankle hooked against the rung, coffee cup in one hand, the morning paper folded beside him as if he’s some domesticated husband waiting for me to come down and complain about the weather.
My first reaction is anger. My second is the humiliating awareness that he looks obscenely good in my kitchen. My third is that he has the audacity to glance up, take in the fact that I’m completely naked, and not even try to hide the way his eyes dip.
That’s what gets me moving again.
I cross the space between us fast enough that he barely has time to set the coffee down before I’ve got a hand around his throat and the other braced on the counter, shoving him backward on the stool.
A lesser man would panic. Vincenzo just looks up at me with widening pupils and a mouth that wants to smile.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” I demand.
