Page 82 of Scandal Queen

Heat flamed along my throat and cheeks.

Oliver laughed, leaning over and brushing a kiss across my skin. “FYI,” he whispered. “I’m still dirty.”

The Queen who still stood by the door to the guest room, her gaze on her sleeping daughter, turned towards us. “Happy birthday, Leia. And congratulations. I’m sorry what should have been a wonderful evening has degenerated in this way.”

I smiled and shrugged.

Janine gave me a squeeze with her left arm. “I’m going to head home. I’ll see you tomorrow,” she smiled. “Well, I guess I mean later today.”

“You will?”

She grinned. “Oops.” Chuckling she leant in and gave me a kiss. When she went to walk away, I held onto her hand tightly. My lifeboat. For a moment I didn’t want her to leave me here with these people. Smiling, her eyes meeting mine, she untangled my grasp on her hand and then placed it on Oliver’s hand. “Get some sleep, Leia. It’s been a day and a half.”

I nodded, a smile creeping along my lips. “I should have been in bed hours ago.”

“God, I know. I don’t know why you aren’t round and bright orange yet.”

“I keep telling you, guys. Disney isn’t real. Pumpkins don’t change into things.”

I led her to the door of the apartment where a driver stood ready to take her back home to Richard, her husband. She turned at the door as Oliver came up behind me and slid his hands around my middle. “Some fairy tales come true, Leia. I see it in you every day, and that was before you went and met a prince.”

“My life was not a fairy tale.” I chuckled and shook my head. “I think it’s slipped, and it’s a nightmare now.”

“I’m standing right here.” Oliver kissed the side of my throat and a different kind of heat flamed inside me, this one not the scorch of embarrassment, but rather the desperate dry burn of desire. I’d never have enough of him, and now he’d promised to be mine forever.

“Let’s go home.” I turned and whispered against his skin.

“Let’s.”

Four o’clock had crept past by the time Oliver shut the door behind us to our bedroom. Walking through the door of the small cottage had truly felt like coming home, away from the high walls of the palace, and the crowded sitting room of the apartment. The warm air of Fenmore and that reassuring click of our own front door had sounded like heaven.

For about thirty seconds until four diamonds blinded Nana and we then had an over-excitable pensioner on our hands.

“Wow.” Oliver began to unbutton his shirt and my exhaustion evaporated. “I think she said yes.”

“So it’s just Daisy left to ask.”

“Easy. She loves me.” Oliver flashed me a smirk.

“True. Very true.” For one dark moment my mind drifted to the woman who’d come forward but then I pushed it back. Then I thought of Isabella and whether I should have acted on my concerns by now. I pushed that back too. “Anyway, I have a few things to discuss.” I turned my back and tilted my neck so he could get to the zip on my dress. As it slowly undid and he pushed the velvet off my shoulders, his kiss trailed up the skin of my spine. I shivered hard.

“Things to discuss? That sounds ominous.”

“Like… if there are only seven years between us now, just how exactly do you plan to maintain your dirty old man mantle?”

With my dress on the floor, I turned back around to him dressed in just my black lacy underwear and began to undo the rest of the buttons on his shirt.

The left side of his mouth hitched and that deep and dark kindle of desire he awoke in me, the monster he’d created and kept alive with his touch, flickered to life.

“But most importantly.” I ran my hands down his flat stomach, revelling in the gentle grooves of his abs, my fingers hooking onto the waistband of his trousers. “Why aren’t you wearing underwear to a state function?”

He laughed and then leant forward, catching my mouth, his tongue hot as it slipped between my lips. My skin burned as he brushed his palms along my waist, his hands drifting over the lace of my underwear.

All humour dropped as his kiss deepened and his touch became firmer. A hunger I knew I’d never be able to satisfy gnawed in the depths of my stomach. Hooking his hands around my back he unclasped my bra and pulled it from my shoulders, his thumbs grazing down my arms. His gaze burned bright as fire as it lowered over my pebbled nipples. I shivered again as his lips curved into a smile that would be my earthly ruin. Dressed in only black knickers and diamonds, I held the man of my dreams, beyond my dreams, beyond any concept I’d ever thought possible, in my thrall.

I nibbled my lower lip, my pulse racing in my veins.

Slowly, he lifted his fingers, trailing them in a light caress of my nipples. The heat in my stomach intensified until I had to squeeze my thighs together. “You are so incredibly beautiful.” Another brush of his fingers, another responsive and uncontrollable shiver. “And you’re mine.”