Princess from the Shadows Maisey Yates Page 12
“Oh, Rodriguez, let’s go look at the dancer!”
She tugged on his hand and led him through the crowd toward the sound of a guitar rising above the thumping techno music echoing from the clubs.
There was a woman, standing in a clear spot on the cobblestones, a man to her left playing the guitar. She was dancing, high heels stomping hard on the ground, her red dress flaring up to the top of her thighs.
“She’s beautiful,” Carlotta said, a wistful note in her voice.
“Not more beautiful than you are.” It was the truth, and it was usually what a woman wanted to hear when she said something like that.
“No she’s … it’s different. She’s so … free. Everything is so … open and out there. Her passion for life.”
“I have tasted your passion, Carlotta.” He leaned in and kissed her temple. “You are like living fire in my arms. You don’t have to hide anything from me.”
She looked at him, her eyes bright. “I can’t. You take my control from me.”
“It’s mutual.”
“I’m glad.”
“Passion is beautiful,” he said, looking at the dancer again. “Your passion is beautiful.” He turned his attention back to Carlotta. “It is a shame you were ever made to feel differently.”
She smiled at him and he felt it down deep, like a punch in the gut. “I’m learning to see things a bit differently.”
Dios. Her smile. He felt strange now. Lighter and heavier at the same time. He wasn’t sure how she accomplished things like that. “Do you want dinner?”
“Dinner would be lovely.”
He ordered them both beer and tapas and set the baskets on an outdoor table. They were surrounded by street performers dressed as trees, every so often a tree would bend in a different direction. It made everything seem surreal. Not quite of the world he knew. It fit nicely with the things Carlotta was making him feel. “Very good,” she said, taking a bite of salted cod.
“What do you think of your first real out-on-the-town experience?”
“Amazing. And what did you think of your first trip to the zoo?”
“I enjoyed it. Even more because of how Luca seemed to get so much out of everything. Especially the lions.”
“He’s had nightmares about them on and off, don’t ask me why, because I’m not really sure. I don’t think I ever could have talked him into seeing them in person.”
“You think I did?”
“He’s different around you. He seems … confident. It’s cute.”
“I was trying to think what my father might have done if I was afraid of lions,” Rodriguez said, not sure why he’d spoken the words out loud. He cleared his throat. “He wouldn’t have thrown me in the cage, obviously, since I’m the heir. But. he believed in making me a man.”
Carlotta frowned, her well-groomed brows pulled together. “He wouldn’t have scared you….”
“Sure he would have. If he thought it would make me into the kind of man who could lead Santa Christobel as he sees fit. As it is, I’m sure he will be disappointed. Well, no, he won’t. Because he won’t be alive to see it,” he said, trying to keep his tone light. Dismissive.
Carlotta studied his face, her heart feeling too large for her chest. After last night she couldn’t deny feeling nothing for him. It wasn’t just the sex, it was everything. The fact that he’d listened. The fact that she’d even wanted to tell him.
Then today, with Luca. She was right, Luca did scare him, even if she didn’t fully understand why. But the way he was with him, the way he tried, that touched her. He might be a natural charmer with women, but he wasn’t with children.
Even so, that panic, the way he talked about his father, it all made her feel slightly sick. She didn’t really want to ask more. And yet she felt like she had to. Because. she’d told him everything. She wanted to know who he was.
“You seem to know about everything fun in Barcelona. Tell me about it,” she said, deciding it was probably a neutral enough topic.
“About what?”
“You. Your penthouse. Why you moved here when you were seventeen.”
“Teenagers always want to get away, right?”
“I didn’t. I was really good. Until I turned twenty-three. But Natalia was more like that.”
“She’s your twin?”
“Yes. But we aren’t really alike at all. We aren’t really very close anymore either. I blamed her for a while but, to be honest, I think I did my share of distancing. I mean, I talk to everyone, but when you’re hiding something how close can you really be? I feel like I’ve been guarding my secret and licking my wounds for the past six years. Hard to maintain meaningful relationships when you’re that busy. hiding.”
“I imagine. I don’t maintain any, so it’s never been a problem.”
“Oh. So, you didn’t make a lot of friends here?”
“I did. I went to college here. Had a lot of friends. Lots of girlfriends. I was able to feel normal for a while. I had a lot of fun here.”
“I take it you didn’t have fun in Santa Christobel.”
He frowned. “I don’t feel at home there.”
“This place reminds me more of you,” she said. Barcelona was alive. Casual and fun. It lacked the pomp and circumstance of his home country.
“I don’t feel at home here either,” he said. “Don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what?” She took another bite of her fish.
“Like I’m a wounded puppy. I have never been concerned with concepts of home and family. I have nothing to complain about. I had food. I had shelter. Plenty of people don’t have that.”
“That’s not all people need.”
“Sure it is. I came to Barcelona for fun. To get away from my father. Common story,” he said. He made it sound light. Casual. He was very good at that. But she knew it wasn’t. Because it was there again, that horrible bleakness in his eyes.
He was so good at being charming. At bringing everything back to surface. He had charisma and the power to pretend in a way she could never hope to match. But he was pretending.
She looked down at the basket of food in front of her. “My father expected a lot from me. I don’t think either of my parents expected anything from Natalia past a certain point. They just sort of rolled their eyes at her antics. And in some ways, that put more on me. I envied her, a lot. I think it may have been when I really started feeling distant from her. My father especially wanted me to be perfect. Like I was the redemption for the pair of us. When I got pregnant. I’d never seen him like that before. He was so. so angry with me. So disappointed. It hurt more than losing what I’d imagined I had with Gabriel.”
“This is the part where I share?” he asked, dark eyebrow lifted.
“I thought you might.”
“My father didn’t know what to do with a child. He was alone with me. He made mistakes.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s all.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“It’s not a big deal, Carlotta,” he said, his teeth gritted, his hand drawn into a fist. He unfolded it, flexed his fingers out straight. “He felt that I needed to represent the country. I was his heir. His only child. When my mother left, it became very apparent I would be the only son. That made things more. important.”
His tone was even, his expression flat. And the ice in his eyes chilled her through to her bones.
“What did he do to you?” she asked, setting her fork down on the table. “What did he do, Rodriguez?”
He kept his focus on his hand, opening and closing it. “I had to learn to sit still. To be silent, unless I was spoken to.”
“Well, you know Luca. How can you possibly …?” She stopped short, the words sticking in her throat. “How?”
He swallowed, his Adam’s apple moving, his jaw clenched tight. “It took training.” His voice was soft, even, but there was something dark in his tone. “My father had Andalusians. Spirited horses. But he managed
to break them. He never hesitated to order that the whip be used.” He looked up from his hand, dark eyes locked with hers. “Luckily, he didn’t manage to break me. But I did learn when to keep still.”
“Rodriguez … he didn’t …”
“He didn’t use the horsewhip on me, dios, no. He had a metal rod that he would slap across my shins when I got too restless. It left bruises, but it didn’t damage anything.” His words, spoken so casually, as though he were reading from a book. Telling the story of someone else’s life. He seemed utterly removed from it. Determined to stay that way.
“He didn’t damage anything physically,” she said quietly.
“Like I said, Carlotta, we all have our issues. I never went hungry. I never slept out in the cold.”
Anger flooded her, filled her, for him, for the child he’d been. For the man he was. “You dismiss it like that, but what if someone were doing that to Luca?”
The glint in Rodriguez’s eyes turned to ice. “It would be the last thing he ever did.” He stood from the table. “We should go. We will be flying back to Santa Christobel early.”
“Oh … I …”
He leaned over and picked up her basket, still full of food. “I have lost my appetite.”
Carlotta watched Rodriguez close himself off from her, and she felt her heart splinter in her chest, shards of her soul cracking. He walked ahead of her, and she felt like he was taking some of the broken pieces with him. She felt like she’d found a piece of herself, and lost it all at once.
She walked quickly, closing the gap between them. He looked on ahead, not touching her, not acknowledging her. As though he had shut off a switch inside himself. If only she could do the same. She ached, inside and out, for Rodriguez. For what he’d been through. And he was pretending it didn’t matter.
But it was what he did. She could see that. See it and understand it in a way. Because she’d lived that way to a certain extent. What was the point of bleeding for everyone to see when no one could staunch the flow? So much easier to keep the pain inside. To nurture it, as she did. Or to pretend it wasn’t there, like Rodriguez did.
And both of them had been doing it alone for so long, neither of them seemed to know how to bring another person into the mix without upending their perfect order.
That was why he’d walked away. He was trying to hang on to the facade he’d created.
Now she had to decide if she was going to let him.
CHAPTER NINE
BACK at the penthouse, Rodriguez headed straight for his room, closing the door behind him. He needed to think. Needed to process. Needed to figure out why he’d shared all of that with Carlotta. It didn’t matter. It didn’t.
“Rodriguez?”
He turned at the sound of Carlotta’s soft, sweet voice. She was standing in the doorway, one hand clutching the frame as though she were keeping herself from turning and running. No, he couldn’t actually imagine that. Carlotta didn’t run.
He finished shrugging his shirt off and let it fall to the floor. “What?” She just stared at him, green eyes filled with sadness. Pity. For him? For the boy he’d been? He didn’t want that.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he said, more roughly than he’d intended.
“Like what?”
“Like you want to put a Band-Aid on it and make it better. I’m not crying over it, Carlotta. Neither should you.”
“I’m not crying,” she said, her voice breaking on the last word.
He huffed out a laugh. “My father …. he was a terrible father. I don’t know what I can offer to Luca, but I know I won’t be abusive. I understand that what happened to me wasn’t right. But I’m not dwelling.”
“You don’t think it affects you at all?”
He shrugged, even as a slug of pain hit him in the chest. “No. It was all a long time ago. I moved away when I was a teenager, but even before that, my father hadn’t raised his hand to me in years.”
He ignored how exposed he felt and worked his belt free of the buckle, tugging it off and throwing it down with his shirt. He wasn’t going to do a “sharing your feelings and hug” thing, it wasn’t in him.
He moved forward, he didn’t worry about what had happened in the past. And until Luca had showed up with his mother, he’d hardly given it a thought in years.
“We all carry the past with us,” she said quietly.
“And what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” He moved to where she was standing and touched her bare arm, her skin shockingly smooth beneath his hand. “I don’t need psychoanalyzing.”
“No?”
He shook his head. “I would take a kiss though.” He dug deep in himself and searched for that part of him he’d been clinging to for more than ten years. Tried to find the man who flirted, who knew how to keep everything light and superficial.
But Carlotta didn’t respond, at least not in the way he was used to. She didn’t giggle, or look away coquettishly. She stared at him, her eyes locked with his, serious, intense.
She put her hands on his face, her fingers stroking the back of his neck. When her lips touched his, it wasn’t soft, or tentative. She claimed him, her mouth hard on his, her tongue teasing the seam of his lips, demanding entry. A command he couldn’t deny.
He met her kiss, met and matched each thrust of her tongue, wrapped his arm around her waist and pulled her into the room, against his body.
He gripped the door with his other hand and closed it firmly before pressing her against it. She arched into him, full, gorgeous breasts pressed tightly against his chest. This wasn’t quite the harmless flirtation he’d been looking for.
This was dark. Intense. Something both of them seemed unable to fight. If either of them cared to. At the moment, he certainly didn’t.
She moved her hands over his chest, his back, his buttocks, the touch teasing and tormenting him. He rocked against her, right where he knew she wanted him, for her, for him. To ease some of the building, blinding pressure that was threatening to make him come from the pleasure of a simple kiss.
A kiss hadn’t excited him so much since he was a teenager. And for some reason, he felt like one now. Felt like he was on the edge of exploding if he didn’t have her now. Hot and hard, against the door.
But along with that feeling came the overwhelming need to deny his own pleasure. Something that was even more foreign.
He was a considerate lover, and his partners always left well pleasured, but their satisfaction was never his primary concern. His own was. That was why he engaged in casual affairs. Because they each took responsibility for themselves, for their needs, the things that turned them on, they pursued their own pleasures, using the other person as an aid to that.
He did it. The women he slept with did the same.
But it wasn’t what he wanted now. He wanted to give her pleasure. He wanted to watch her face. He could remember how she’d looked last night when they were together, how she looked when she was completely lost in pleasure.
Just the thought made his erection pulse.
He gritted his teeth and pulled away from her, his body protesting. “It’ll be over too fast if we keep going like this.”
“I’m fine with fast,” she said, her hands on his chest. “I never have been before. It’s never been like this. With you. all it takes is a look and I’m so close.”
“Me too,” he said. Not something he’d normally admit. But it was pointless to deny it when his entire body was trembling with need that was poised on the brink of becoming satisfaction. But it wouldn’t be true satisfaction. Not the kind he needed, not the kind he craved. The kind that would only come from bringing her with him.
She pushed the strap of her summer dress down, pulling one arm through, then the other, so the dress was simply hanging from her curves. So easy to tug it down, to reveal her amazing body to his gaze.
He clenched his hands into fists and kept them glued to his sides. Determined to watch. To let her control the pace. For now.
“I didn’t think. after what happened tonight … I didn’t think you’d want this. Want me,” she said.
“Oh, I want you,” he said, swallowing hard. He extended his hand, tensed his muscles to try and disguise the trembling there, and touched the lace edge of her bra, trailing his finger along the line where fine fabric met silken flesh. “Make no mistake, I want you.”
That same sort of heaviness hung in the air, the same kind he’d felt last night. But rather than turning from it, he let it drive him. Feeding the hunger that was growing inside of him until it was a yawning chasm of need that he wasn’t certain he could ever satisfy.
He lowered his head, tracing the path his finger had just followed with the tip of his tongue. Carlotta shuddered beneath his touch and he felt her deep, intense response resonate within him. Her pleasure becoming his own. Her desire filling him, making his body tight and hard with lust.
“Your body is so amazing. So perfect.”
She laughed, a tight, strained sound. “It doesn’t look like it used to. Childbirth does that to you.”
He lowered himself onto his knees and pressed a kiss to her stomach. It wasn’t perfectly tight and flat, it was soft, slightly rounded. So feminine and sexy. “Like I said, it is perfection.”
She put her hand on his bicep, fingers moving over the ridges of muscle. “You aren’t so bad yourself.” She laughed. “Understatement. In fact, I think I’d like to see some more.” She put her finger beneath his chin and pushed up. He stood, the pressure not enough to force his movements in any way, but he responded as though it did. “Take off your clothes,” she said, her eyes locked on his.
“Are you always like this?”
She shook her head. “Never. But you make me feel different.”
She made him feel different too. But he was damned if he’d admit. Not when he could hardly understand it, or even put words to it.