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  She rode me, rolling her hips harder and harder as I played with her clit with my thumb, my fingers. She begged for more with her body, abandoning herself to her hunger. Her need.

  Letting this girl go was going to fucking kill me.

  Her pussy was tightening now, really tightening, and I grit my teeth in anticipation.

  Emily’s eyes shut. She whimpered again.

  And then she came. My hands clamped around her hips as I held on for dear life. Her cunt held me in a vise-like grip as she came, and came, and kept bloody coming. Her back arched. Her fingers dug into the skin on my chest.

  I couldn’t take it. I couldn’t handle this.

  She was still coming when I sat up and guided her back down onto the bed. I turned her body so that she was on her side. I got up on my knees, bunching her knees up to her chest. I reached between us to guide myself back into her cunt.

  Curling my hand around the nape of her neck, I slammed into her, hard and merciless.

  “Yes,” she breathed. “God, Kit, yes.”

  Our bodies slapped against each other. I pounded into her, completely consumed, completely lost. My orgasm was coming hot and fast. I hated this. I loved it. I loved her, I wanted her, I wanted this to be real, I wanted to come inside her and claim her.

  I sputtered when my orgasm hit. I growled as I came, I came so hard that cum was already seeping out of her pussy. Sensation pounded through me, blocking everything else out, blocking everything but the sweetness of this feeling, this moment.

  Closing my eyes, I waited for the aftershocks to subside. They kept coming, pushing me under, making it difficult to breathe.

  Finally the shocks retreated. An enormous, overwhelming tenderness filled me in their wake. I opened my eyes, ran my hand down Emily’s back, smoothing her hair away from her face.

  She let out a sigh—it was a happy sound, a contented one. My heart swelled.

  I bent down and pressed a kiss onto her shoulder. Her lips curled into a smile.

  In that moment, I was so happy I thought I might burst.

  This bloody girl.

  “I’m going to pull out of you,” I murmured against her skin.

  Emily nodded.

  She winced when I left her. A rush of cum followed. I’d forgotten how messy bare sex was.

  I gently touched my middle finger to her cunt. “Sore?”

  “Yeah.” She turned on her back to face me. “But just a little bit. Not enough to keep me from doing that again.”

  I kissed her mouth. I fell down onto the bed. I needed to clean myself up. But I didn’t want to leave Emily. Not even for a moment. I didn’t want the doubt to creep in yet. It would be here to mock us in the morning.

  I fell onto my side and curled an arm around Emily’s middle, tucking her into my body. She was trembling. I kissed her neck. Her shoulder blade. Her neck again. I took her hand in mine, holding them both to her belly.

  I didn’t want to ruin the moment with words. The second we started talking, reality would come crashing in on us.

  So I just held Emily. Held her hand. And I let the warmth of my body seep into hers. It was all I could offer her.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Kit

  I woke up with the taste of Emily’s pussy on my mouth.

  Licking my lips, my dick sprung to sudden, almost painful life as I pried my eyes open. My heart skipped a beat when they landed on Emily. She was still sleeping, face turned away from me. In the yellow morning light, her pale skin was radiant and impossibly smooth. Her red, bed-mussed hair was fanned out on the pillow. It tickled my shoulder as she breathed quietly, evenly. Her lips were pink and still a little swollen.

  There was color everywhere.

  Taking it all in, my heart felt too big for my body. So did my cock. Which was something of a miracle, considering we’d stayed up until dawn sharing a baker’s dozen of orgasms between us. We’d made love in the shower and on the floor. I’d bent her over the sink, and she’d pushed me against the door and sucked me off. I took her from behind, I took her from the side. I took her every which way she’d let me.

  The sex had been dirty and intense and fun. I didn’t tell her about my fantasy of making a family with her. But I’d thought about it a lot as our bodies had come together again. And again. The thought of having a lifetime of that kind of sex—of getting to relive that connection with someone every bloody night while also creating a baby or two—was unbearably sweet.

  I breathed through the sudden tightness in my throat. I hadn’t allowed myself to feel much of anything before I met Emily. Well, nothing good, anyway. I knew stress. I knew worry.

  But now I felt everything. An overwhelming sense of gratitude. The crisp coolness of the sheets. Desire gathering between my legs. Excitement for what came next. Appreciation of just how fucking excellent the girl sleeping next to me was.

  I was being reckless. And I was alive, truly, vibrantly alive, for the first time since my parents had died.

  I wasn’t going back to being the Ice Prince after this. I couldn’t. Going back would be a betrayal of the truth I’d found with Emily last night. Going back would mean choosing darkness over light. Loneliness over connection.

  Going back was the wrong choice. The cowardly choice.

  Maybe there was a way to make this relationship actually work, so Emily wouldn’t have to give up her business to be with me. For fuck’s sake, I was the future King of England. Couldn’t I pull some strings, change some rules, make the monarchy work for me instead of the other way around?

  We had to try. I would never forgive myself for at least not giving it a shot. I’d learned so much in the past few weeks. About Emily. About myself. I knew now that I could never marry one of those perfect princess girls my uncle would approve of. I knew that there was only one Emily Kilpatrick in the world.

  If I let her slip through my fingers, I’d be faced with one of two choices. Be alone. Or be with someone I didn’t love.

  Those choices both sucked. I wanted to choose Emily. But that was assuming Emily wanted to choose me, too.

  I’d convince her to make that choice. Or I’d die trying. I’d need the Queen’s blessing to make my relationship with Emily real. But I was her favorite grandchild. And she’d admitted to liking how down to earth Em was. Perhaps it wouldn’t be such a tough sell.

  My heart skipped a beat when Emily stirred. Stretching her hands above her head, she drew a deep breath and opened her eyes.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  Her eyes went wide as the memory of last night hit her. She clapped a hand to her forehead. “Oh my God.”

  “I know.”

  “Oh my God, Kit, we—you and I—”

  “I know.” I grinned. I rolled onto my side to face her. “And it was brilliant.”

  Emily grinned, too. “It was, wasn’t it?”

  I reached for her hand and took it in mine. I watched her face; emotion flittered across her eyes, her grin dimming. For half a second I worried she’d pull away. This was definitely the type of touching that had made her so uncomfortable.

  It was the way people in love touched. It was the way we’d touched last night.

  “Is this all right?” I asked.

  Emily swallowed.

  “Kit,” she said after a beat, her voice suddenly serious. “What the hell are we doing?”

  My heart thumped. I was hit by an image of a family. Our family, mine and Emily’s.

  My family had been taken from me when I was young. Ever since my parents had passed, I’d wanted them back. I’d wanted to recreate the happiness and the sense of belonging I felt when they were around. I’d begun to think that it would never happen for me. That I’d never belong anywhere again.

  Then I get a second chance with Emily Kilpatrick, and suddenly I feel…seen, I guess. Understood.

  Opened up.

  I finally found my belonging.

  I belonged with her. We’d been together for all of a couple weeks. But we we
nt back longer than that. And I was old enough, I’d dated around enough, to know what I wanted and what I didn’t.

  I wanted Emily. I hadn’t wanted anyone like this, ever.

  This was going to hurt like hell. But it was time.

  It was time I stopped burying my past. It was time to bring it all out into the light, because that was where I wanted to live now.

  I curled her fingers around my palm and kissed them. “Don’t move. I’ll be right back.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Emily

  I waited with a pounding heart for Kit to come back to bed.

  I was exhausted and sore. Every time I moved, I was reminded of all the ardent, amazing, delicious sex I’d had with Kit over the past twelve hours. The sex we’d had in college had been incredible. But this…

  This was a whole other level. It’d been fucking, dirty and hot. But it had also been making love. Emotional, intense. Beautiful.

  My heart felt wrung out. It was going to hurt so, so badly when I’d have to let him go. But I was determined to enjoy the beauty of what we’d become in the meantime.

  I sat up when Kit slipped back into the room. He was still stark naked. I took a moment to appreciate his body.

  Oh, that body. He was broadly built, athletic and masculine in all the best ways. I especially loved the way his abs sloped into his hips and lower back. The thick veins that snaked up his forearms and popped against the backs of his hands. The rounded muscles in his shoulders, biceps, butt.

  He had a really, really nice butt.

  A familiar heat came to life between my legs. It made the soreness there sting. But I didn’t care. I’d devoured him last night, but I was still hungry for more. I wondered if the hunger I had for him would ever be satiated. I’d never felt like this before. Not with Luke. Definitely not with the other guys I’d been with over the past year or so.

  This hunger was new, and terrifying, and exciting. I had to get a grip on it, but I didn’t know how. I didn’t want to. Not yet.

  Not until I had to.

  Kit climbed into bed beside me. I noticed he had something tucked underneath his arm. It looked like an old photo album. Something from the eighties, with a simple maroon cover that was embossed in gold along the edges. I could see the pages inside were yellow with age. My parents had albums just like this back home in Atlanta. They kept my baby pictures in them.

  My stomach flipped.

  “What’s this?” I asked, careful to keep my voice even.

  Kit settled the album on his lap. He settled an arm around my shoulders, pulling me close.

  “Come here and I’ll show you,” he said.

  I burrowed into Kit’s body, reveling in the safety I felt in his arms. His skin was warm. It smelled like him, like spice and lemons. I couldn’t believe this was mine. He was mine, for right now at least.

  He pressed a kiss into my hair. Then he opened the album.

  The breath left my lungs when my eyes fell on the page. There were three pictures, slightly blurry like all photos from the eighties. Each one was carefully placed under the shiny plastic sleeve. In them, a pretty young woman in a hospital gown was holding a baby. A man with carefully parted hair was standing beside them. The baby was screaming, but the man and woman were smiling, the kind of exhausted, elated smiles I’d often seen on the faces of new parents.

  Inscriptions were written in careful, looping cursive underneath each picture. Mummy, Dad, and Christopher, January 10, 1984. Christopher at St. James’s Hospital. Christopher, three hours old.

  I swallowed the sudden tightness in my throat. Kit had never talked about his parents with me.

  “This is you,” I said.

  He nodded, tapping his finger on his mother. “Mum put together an album for each of us after we were born. I keep them in the safe downstairs.”

  “Look at you,” I said, trying to smile. “A pain in the ass from the beginning.”

  Kit laughed. “I was a colicky baby. Mum said I screamed for the first four months of my life.”

  The page cracked as he turned it. There were more pictures of Kit. One of him in a car seat. Another of him wearing a pair of his mom’s totally eighties sunglasses, a bright yellow pacifier in his mouth. His parents were in a few of them. It was so cool seeing Princess Caroline and Prince Edward in these private photos. It was like peeking behind the curtain of their very public lives.

  They looked so happy in the pictures. So hands on. It was clear that they had a special connection with Kit. There was one picture of his dad holding him on his hip, the two of them giggling at some private joke. Another of his mom holding him up in the air.

  I could not fathom how much Kit must miss her.

  My eyes smarted.

  “Your mom was gorgeous,” I said.

  Kit swallowed. Sniffed. “Wasn’t she? My parents look so bloody young in these pictures to me now. Mum was only twenty-two when she had me.”

  “It was the eighties,” I said, shrugging. “She must’ve really had her shit together. At twenty-two, I was living in my parents’ basement, broke as a joke.”

  “Yeah. I was living in the library, working on my thesis. I don’t think I saw the sun that year at all.” Kit scoffed. “It was not pretty.”

  He kept turning the pages. We laughed at a picture of him naked in a bathtub. He pointed to another. In this one, Kit was in a wagon, dressed up as a tiny clown. He told me how his dad made all their Halloween costumes.

  Tears fell from Kit’s eyes onto his cheeks, his jaw, his throat.

  “This is why the foundation is so important to me,” he explained. “They were the ones who started it. It’s become my connection to my parents. To the work they did.”

  I burrowed my cheek into his chest. “They’d be proud of you.”

  “You think?”

  “I do.” And I meant it.

  With each page that Kit turned, my heart broke a little more. Even though he was crying, he kept talking. Kept laughing through the tears. I understood why he hadn’t talked to me about his parents until now. But I didn’t understand why, all of the sudden, he was opening up like this to me.

  “Kit.” I looked up at him. “Don’t get me wrong, I am loving every minute of this. But you don’t talk about your parents, ever. Not with me. Not with the press.”

  Kit’s eyes searched mine. They were piercingly blue in the strident morning light. His gaze was warm. Wet. Flooded with tears and pain and relief. It was a total transformation from the Ice Prince who’d appeared in his sister’s office a few weeks ago.

  “You’re right,” he said, wiping away a tear with the flat of his palm. “I don’t talk about them. But I want to talk about them with you.”

  My vision blurred. “Why?”

  Kit took a deep breath. Let it out. “You asked me what we’re doing here. And the honest answer, Em, is that I don’t know. But this”—he pointed to a picture of him with his parents—“this is what I wish we were doing. Emily, this is what I dream of doing with you.”

  “This, as in—”

  “Starting a family. I want to be with you, love. Really, honestly be with you.”

  A tear slid down my face. Kit reached over, wiped it away with his thumb.

  For a split second I wondered if I was still asleep, and this was all a dream. A wonderful, incredible dream. Because the Kit I’d known didn’t do this kind of thing. He didn’t feel, much less confess to feeling such enormous things for me.

  But this Kit was different. He was open. Honest.

  Was this the real Kit, the one I could trust? Or was he the fake fiancée, playing a part?

  Could I trust myself to know the difference?

  “Kit, I—”

  “I don’t need an answer right now. You can tell me to go fuck myself if you’d like—if you’re not feeling what I’m feeling. I know it’s fast. But for so long, I thought I’d never have a family again. The women I’d been with…I couldn’t picture sharing my life with them. Then you came
along. Suddenly, the world cracked open. I can picture myself with you, Em. I can picture this happening for us,” he said, tapping again on the photo.

  It hit me like a giant wave, the longing for that to actually happen for us. But hadn’t I already learned that it wasn’t possible for someone like me to have all that? Hadn’t I already learned that a thriving career and a thriving personal life were two mutually exclusive concepts?

  “But my career,” I said. “Kit, I can’t give up my business. Things are really starting to happen for us. I’ve worked so hard to get here…”

  He looked at me. “I’m not asking you to. I want you to keep doing what you love. I want to support you in any way I can. We’ll try to figure out how to make a relationship work in the meantime. Maybe it will work. Maybe it won’t. But I want to try. I think it’s worth a shot. I mean, haven’t we made it work so far?”

  I scoffed. “It’s been three weeks, Kit.”

  “So? If we can make it three weeks, maybe we can make it longer than that.” He brushed the hair out of my face. “Please, Em. Try with me.”

  Taking a breath, I searched Kit’s eyes. I’d made the mistake before of wanting this with Luke. He’d also promised to support my ambitions. And then he’d fallen down on me.

  But Kit was not Luke. In fact, he was the opposite of my ex in all the best ways. I’d learned some hard lessons about work and about life. But I’d also learned that Kit was trustworthy, and kind. He came through on his promises in a way Luke never had.

  Maybe the lesson I’d actually learned was that I couldn’t have a career and a relationship with Luke. Maybe—just maybe—I could have both if I was with the right guy.

  If I was with a guy like Kit.

  My heart was pounding as the answer formed inside my head, my heart. Excitement spread through me, slowly at first. Then faster as I came to realize that it could actually happen.

  As I realized that all my dreams, not just the dreams I had for EP Designs, could come true. And they’d come true with Kit.

  “Okay,” I said, letting out the breath I’d taken. “Let’s try.”