Cinderella's Royal Seduction / Crowned At The Desert King's Command

This was torture. Genuine torture.

“Would you like to turn ov—”

“No,” he growled. He was fully hard. If she looked him in the eye, she would know how badly he wanted to drag her atop him and see how much abuse this table could take.

A surprised pause. “I’ll finish with your neck and scalp, then?”

“Yes.”

She moved to stand above his head. All he could see through the face cradle was her bare feet.

Each of her big toes wore a silhouette of a woman’s shoe against a background of pink. The plain one was peeling up. The other was bedecked with jewels and winked at him as she curled her toes and set gentle fingertips against the back of his neck.

“If I’ve been too rough—”

“You haven’t.” He closed his eyes in pleasure-pain. “This is the best massage of my life. I have to cut it short before it turns into something else.”

He thought he heard a small “Eep.” He definitely heard her swallow.

“Stay mean,” he growled.

Her laugh was garbled and semihysterical, but she obeyed. She did cruel things to his trapezius muscles, turning snarling pit bulls into docile golden retrievers.

The final act was a merciless grip of all four fingertips of both hands into the muscles at the base of his skull. She held him in a dull headache for what felt like ten minutes before the pain evaporated into a sensation of sunshine dawning after a long, harsh winter.

She speared her fingers into his hair and erased his memory of pain, leaving the tranquil buzz he’d only previously experienced postcoitally.

“Take your time rising and dressing.” Her voice sounded throaty and laden with desire, causing a fresh rush of heat into his groin. “Drink some water.”

He couldn’t move. Wait. He picked up his head, but the door was already closing behind her.

He felt drugged as he sat up, peeved that he hadn’t asked her name. Probably for the best. He looked down at his lap, as ready for sex as he’d ever been.

If she could put him through his paces with a massage, what would sex with her be like?

The strong tug between his thighs told him thoughts like that were unhelpful.

As he pulled on his robe, he resented the hell out of his position. Curse tradition and snobbery and an illness that had put the future on his doorstep. Ten years ago, he could have had an affair with a spa worker and no one would have known or cared.

Once he’d moved back into the palace, he’d had to become more circumspect in his choices, but he still could have managed a fling with someone whose connections were less prestigious than his own. There would have been blowback, but an affair wasn’t marriage.

That’s what Rhys had to court now, though. Any relationship he started would have to be taken to the finish line. Was he really going to go against the grain with a pool-girl masseuse? Refuse to do his duty to his brother and the crown in favor of appeasing his libido?

He cursed, annoyed. One dinner was all he was after, before he made the rounds through the more expected choices of potential brides. Was that so much to ask? One evening to get to know her before he was forced to settle?

It was a selfish rationalization he shouldn’t even contemplate.

He poured a cup of water from the cistern and threw it back like a shot of scotch. As he kicked into his sandals by the door, he almost mistook the speck on the tiles for a spider, but no.

He bent and touched his fingertip to it, picking up the silhouette of a woman’s shoe, just like the one that had been coming off her toe. Huh.

Pinching it between his finger and thumb, he tucked it deep into the pocket of his robe, considering.

Flushed and confused, Sopi hurried to get as far away from the prince as possible, all the way to the other end of the building, where the service entrance to the kitchen was located. She stood on the back stoop in the cold dusk, trying to bring herself back under control.

She had provided a lot of massages, usually to women, but many to men, and had never once felt so affected by the experience. It hadn’t been lascivious, either. It had been…elemental. She’d never become so entranced by a deep and genuine yearning to ease and soothe and heal. Yet touching him had been stimulating, too, keeping her in a state of alert readiness. Like petting a giant cat.

Or a man in peak condition who appealed to her on a primitive level.

She could have stroked her hands over him for hours, like a sculptor lovingly sanding her creation to a fine polish. In those last seconds before she’d asked him to roll over, she had felt a strong urge to splay herself atop him. Blanket him with her body while soaking in his essence.

Truthfully, she’d been lost in her world at that point and had been shocked back to reality when he declined to turn faceup.

I have to cut it short before it turns into something else.

She’d been stunned. Embarrassed that she’d aroused him, but shaken and inflamed by the idea. All the banked sexual energy she’d been suppressing as she administered the massage had suddenly engulfed her in a rush of carnal hunger.

If he hadn’t told her to “stay mean,” she didn’t know what she might have done, but she’d found the concrete knots at the base of his skull. Heavy is the crown, she’d thought, wondering what his life was like back in Verina.

She would never know.

A sudden shiver had her realizing she had cooled past comfortable. She went inside, where the kitchen staff was scrambling to prepare for the dinner rush.

Without being asked, she slipped into the change room and put on her prep cook garb, then spent an hour peeling potatoes and scrubbing pots.

She was at her sweaty, sticky worst when she headed back to her cabin for a shower. The sound of squabbling as she approached through the trees almost had her turning back.

“Sopi!” Fernanda said when she spotted her. “Where have you been? I’ve been texting you.”

“Oh?” Sopi pretended to scan her phone.

“She blocks us, you stooge,” Nanette said pithily.

“Only when I’m working,” Sopi said sweetly as she slid between the two towering beauties to unlock her door. “The paying guests are my priority, seeing as they support us.” Hint, hint.

“Well, this has to do with the prince, so you ought to have been paying attention.” As she entered uninvited, Fernanda wrinkled her nose at the clutter.

“She wants to make a fool of herself and wants you to help,” Nanette informed Sopi with an eye roll.

“Why are you here?” Fernanda charged. “The same reason.”

“To shower with me?” Sopi asked facetiously. “I don’t usually entertain there.”

“Shocker,” Nanette muttered with an examination of her nails.

Always a joy spending time with family. Sopi bit back a sigh.

“The dining room could use you both to hostess this evening,” Sopi said, mainly to Nanette. She never lifted a finger unless Maude pressed her. “We have a full house. Tables will turn over three or four times at least.”

“Unavailable. Sorry,” Nanette said with a saccharine smile.

“Not even for the chance to seat the prince?”

“He’s not eating downstairs,” Fernanda jumped in to say. “That’s why I’m here. Women are lined up out the door at the salon to get one of these.” Fernanda handed Sopi a sheet of toe decals.

Sopi frowned. “They’re defective. I was in the salon earlier. They fall off.”

“Yes, I know that. That’s why you have to put it on. To make sure it stays.”

Sopi shook her head, almost thinking there was a compliment in there, but definitely a backhanded one.

“If you’re not going to help in the dining room, I have to shower and hurry back. Stick it on yourself. It’s not rocket science.”

“Forget the dining room,” Fernanda said with a stamp of her foot. “No one will even show up there. The prince is dining privately. With a woman who has one of these stuck to her toe.”

“What?” When she had pushed her feet into her closed-toe kitchen clogs, Sopi had noticed that she’d lost her plain shoe decal during the massage. She had only managed to keep the bedazzled one. She removed her snow boots now but self-consciously kept her socks on.

Nanette straightened from leaning against the decommissioned stove, wiping her hands across her backside as she did. “It seems the prince met someone who interests him, but he doesn’t know her name. His assistant put the word out that this woman only has one shoe.” She flipped her hair. “Apparently, she knows who she is, and he wants her to come to his suite this evening if she would like to dine with him.”

“He—that’s silly,” Sopi said, hyperaware of the hot blush that flooded into her cheeks. It was a tremendous long shot that he could be talking about her. “Fernanda, he’s going to know right away whether you’re the woman he is trying to meet. If you don’t already have a decal, you’re not her.”

“Well, his bodyguard doesn’t know that, does he? If I can get in to see him, the prince can decide if I’m the right woman or not.”

Sopi opened her mouth but couldn’t find words. Fernanda wasn’t the brightest candle on the cake and tended to be very self-involved. She came across as selfish, but she wasn’t mean, just firmly stuck between thoughtless and clueless.

“I tried to tell her.” Nanette grew more alert, like a jackal that scented something on the air. She was definitely the brains in the family, calculating and sharp.

“Yet here you are. Wanting the same thing,” Fernanda hissed at her sister. “So it’s not such a stupid idea, is it?”

“Wait.” Sopi held up a hand. “Did you say there’s some sort of run on at the salon?”

“Yes! Everyone is trying to get one. The girls tried to tell me to come back later, but there’s no time. Can you just…” Fernanda unzipped her knee-high spiked-heel boot and dragged off her sock. “Hurry.” She wiggled her toes. “I need to dress.”

“Fernanda—” Sopi looked to Nanette for backup, but Nanette was also removing her ankle-high snakeskin boot. “I don’t even have polish—oh.”

Fernanda had absconded with a handful of bottles from the salon. Nanette had brought a tiny tube of fast acting superadhesive. She handed that over with a pointed look. She wouldn’t lose her decal, come hell or high water.

“You’re going to parade to his suite with everyone else, all wearing one shoe so he can see you have a decal on your toe?” Sopi asked with bemusement.

“I’ll wear proper open-toed evening shoes, won’t I? Honestly, Sopi.” Fernanda rolled her eyes.

Right. Sopi was the one being ridiculous.

Since it was the fastest way to get these two women to leave her private space, Sopi sat on the stairs to her loft. She motioned for Fernanda to set her foot beside her thigh.

“I put a pair of these on earlier,” Sopi mused as she very carefully placed the shoe on Fernanda’s toe. “I guess I should dress up and come with you. Maybe it’s me he’s looking for.” It was a deliberate effort to provoke a reaction, so she shouldn’t have been stung by Fernanda’s dismissive snort.

“Oh, right. Have you even spoken to him for one second?”

“I have, actually.” Sopi was always annoyed when these two put on that tone that disparaged her as a backwoods hick who lacked their refinement.

“What did you talk about?” Nanette asked, gaze narrowed.

“Nothing much.” She shook the bottle of polish. “He didn’t even ask my name.” It was another dig.

She swiped the brush across the decal, varnishing the shoe into place. When she looked up, Fernanda was scowling with suspicion.

“Have you given any thought to how you’ll walk back with wet polish on your toe?” Sopi asked.

“That’s why I brought the glue,” Nanette said, nudging her sister aside and eyeing Sopi shrewdly. “What would you wear?” she asked.

“Hmm?” Sopi glanced up from trying to break the seal on the glue nozzle.

“To dine with the prince.”

“Oh.” She hadn’t given one iota of thought to actually doing it, but she’d come this far into needling them. She let bravado take her a few more steps. “I have some things of my mother’s. There’s a vintage Chanel I’ve always wanted an excuse to wear.”

“How am I only hearing about this now? Show me.” Nanette sounded genuinely impressed, but maybe Sopi was that desperate to finally take her by surprise.

She finished gluing the shoe to Nanette’s toe, then trotted up the stairs to her loft.

In the chest beneath the window, she kept a handful of keepsakes—her parents’ wedding album, the Christmas ornaments that hadn’t broken over the years and her audition tape to a televised singing contest that might have been her big break if her father hadn’t passed away the week she was supposed to appear.

Moving all of that aside, she drew out a zipped fabric box that also stored her summer wear. She dumped her clothes onto the floor and drew out the tissue-wrapped dress.

Sopi bit her lip as she noticed the moths had been into it. Voraciously.

Nanette arrived at the top of the stairs and said, “Oh my God. I thought I lived in a hovel.”

“Don’t you dare,” Sopi said, voice sharpened by the strike of painful knowledge that she had lost a prized possession. This rag only proved she was nowhere near the prince’s league. “You live here for free. Who do you think pays for that?”

“You just said it. It’s free. No one is making you live like this. You’re the one who plays the martyr all the time. ‘Oh, woe. If you don’t play hostess, I have to.’”

“‘Oh, woe,’” Sopi shot back. “‘I can’t put a sticker on my own toe.’”

“Exactly,” Nanette said with a hair flip and a complete absence of apology. “Set standards for yourself and refuse to compromise them.” Her scathing glance dismissed Sopi’s handful of possessions and the dress that was definitely not living up to her claims.

Such a cow. If Sopi was the cretin they thought, she would push Nanette down the stairs, taking out Fernanda, who had come up behind her to make a face of amused disgust as she looked around. God, she hated both of them.

“Oh, Sopi, no,” Fernanda said when she saw the dress. Her tone held the depth of sympathy one saved for muddy dogs found starving in ditches. “You have to store vintage pieces properly. Otherwise they fall apart when you wear them. Everyone knows that. What a shame.”

“Clearly your standards aren’t being met here,” Sopi said through her teeth. “Kindly leave my hovel and never come back.”

“Does this mean you won’t do my hair?”

“Seriously, Fernanda?” Sopi glared.

“You don’t have to be so sensitive! I don’t understand why she treats us like this,” Fernanda complained as the two women went down the stairs.

They left, and Sopi hurried to lock the door so they couldn’t return. Then she went into the shower and wept over old dresses and lost parents and foolish fantasies about unattainable men.

When she turned off the water, she stared at the bedazzled shoe on her one toe. Stupid. She picked it off so her nail was an ugly, chipped mess, and she left it that way as a reminder to stay grounded.

Then she wished even harder that the prince would marry one of her stepsisters and get them all out of her life for good.

“Say that again,” Rhys growled at his assistant.

Gerard shifted uncomfortably. “I did as you asked. I put the word out that you were trying to locate the woman with the little shoe on her toe.”

“You said I had met her already? That I knew who I was looking for?”

“Perhaps I wasn’t clear on that?” His assistant’s shoulders hunched up to his ears. “It seemed self-explanatory, but…” He trailed off, miserable.

“And now there’s…how many women in the hall?”

“Fifty? Sixty?”

“All with one shoe on her toe.”

“I’m afraid so, sir.” Gerard swallowed.

“What am I supposed to do? Walk the line as though inspecting the troops, looking for her among them?” He’d been trying to be discreet. Rather than make it clear he was looking for someone on staff, he had thought he would get word to her through the grapevine. She could then quietly appear in his room if she was interested.

“How did they even get up here in the elevator?”

“The one shoe, sir. The bodyguards—”

Rhys pinched the bridge of his nose. “Suggestions on how to get rid of them?”

“Perhaps if you simply ate in the dining room? Mingled? Gave them a chance to say hello?”

Rhys had no appetite. “That never works. It only encourages them to approach me later.” But he had to find himself a wife, and what was he going to do? Put a staff member in the unnerving position of having to walk a gauntlet to reach him for a single date that would go nowhere?

If she was out there and wanted to see him, she would already have knocked on his door. No, she was either too self-conscious or wasn’t interested.

What a galling thought. Deep down, however, he knew it was for the best.

It still infuriated him.

“Fine,” he growled. “Tell them I’ll dine downstairs after all.”

When the news came that the prince would in fact need a table, Sopi experienced a rush of panic. She definitely, positively didn’t want to see him. After brooding for a solid hour, she had decided that what he must have meant when he cut short her massage was that he thought she was turning it into something it wasn’t.

Unsurprisingly, her stepsisters both appeared within minutes of the announcement, eager to marshal rivals to terrible tables and have an excuse to brush past the prince’s table while he ate. He would sit with the handful of upper-crust bachelors who had accompanied him onto the slopes and were providing further red meat for the marriage-minded women hungry for a good match.

Sopi gladly relinquished the reservation desk and slipped into the laundry room to help fold sheets and towels.

With nearly every guest now rubbing elbows in the dining room, the rest of the building was quiet. She stuck with her friends in housekeeping, joking and exchanging light gossip about the guests as they restocked the linen cupboards and performed the turn-down service in the top-floor rooms.

She did the prince’s room herself and, as she plumped the pillow, noticed the tiny black shoe on the night table. It sat atop one of the burgundy portfolios Maude liked to use for special event meetings. She would make a note from a bride or other VIP guest, then snap it shut and hand it off to Sopi with instructions to make things happen.

Sopi’s pulse tripped at the sight of the tiny shoe, but a bodyguard stood by observing her, so she closed the drapes, set wrapped chocolates on the pillow and left.

Eventually, the guests retired from the dining room to hit the hot pools. Most of them were drunk and she resigned herself to a lot of cleanup later but helped the kitchen recover first.

While she was there, Maude pulled her aside with another list of to-dos. By the time they were done, it was time to close the pool and saunas. As Sopi marshaled the stragglers out, fully eight people tried to bribe her into calling them if the prince showed up after hours.

She bundled the last naked nymph into a robe and onto an elevator, then switched everything to service. That locked off the treatment level to all but the staff cards. She sighed in relief, facing miles to go before she slept, but the closing chores were ones she almost enjoyed. She could do them at her own pace and no one ever interrupted her.

Humming, she wheeled the mop from the closet and got started.

Midnight and Rhys was wide-awake, standing at the window, wired.

Wondering.

Swearing at himself. At his brother. At life.

For two hours, he’d been surrounded by beautiful, eligible, well-bred women, none of whom had been the one he wanted to see. It wasn’t like him to be so fixated. He didn’t like it. He’d seen the dark side of humans who became obsessed.

The darkest night of his life replayed uninvited. His well-practiced ability to block it didn’t work this time, and his head filled with the shouts and crashing and what he’d thought had been fireworks inside the palace.

He’d been ten, old enough to take in the full horror of being invaded by soldiers in military garb and the gravity of their holding his parents at gunpoint below. He’d been too young to make a difference, though. In fact, he’d made things worse. He had screamed and rushed to the top of the stairs, where Henrik was being held off by a soldier.

If he had halted beside Henrik, his parents might still be alive. He had gone for the soldier’s gun, though, and the soldier had crashed him in the face with the butt of his rifle, splitting his cheek and knocking him onto his ass.

Rhys had heard his mother scream. She had started to race up the stairs to him. A soldier below grabbed her arm and yanked her back. His father intervened, and the tension below erupted into four shots that left his parents crumpled on the floor.

Rhys could still feel the unnatural strength in Henrik as he’d gripped the shoulders of Rhys’s pajamas and dragged him backward, behind the half wall of the upper gallery. Rhys had been limp with shock, gaze held by the cold stare of the soldier who had shot his parents so remorselessly.

He would never forget the ugly lack of humanity in that pair of eyes. He would forever carry the weight of guilt that if he hadn’t given in to his own impulses, his parents might be alive today.

Distantly, he’d been aware of Henrik stammering out pleas. Promises they would never come back if they were allowed to leave. He’d somehow got Rhys onto his feet and pulled him down the service stairs and out of the palace.

Shock had set in and Rhys didn’t recall much of the days after that, but guilt remained a heavy cloak on him. Guilt and loss and failure. He was grateful to Henrik for getting them out, but a day never went by where he didn’t feel sick for escaping. For surviving when his parents had died because of his rash actions.

A day never went by when he didn’t feel their loss as though pieces had been carved out of his heart. His chest throbbed even more acutely with apprehension over Henrik’s diagnosis.

Why Henrik? It should be him staring into the muzzle of a life-threatening diagnosis, not his brother. If he lost Henrik—

He couldn’t let himself think it.

This was why he hadn’t wanted to marry and have children. This agonizing fear and inability to control the future were intolerable.

He swore under his breath.

If grim introspection was the only mood he could conjure, he needed a serious distraction. He walked across to the folio Maude had given him, the one he had said he wanted to review when he had made his abrupt exit from the dining room earlier this evening.

Maude’s eldest daughter, a lithe beauty, had fallen into step alongside him as he departed, offering an excuse about fetching something from her room. Her purpose had been obvious, though. She had deliberately created the impression she was the one he’d been seeking as his dinner companion. In the elevator, she had set her pretty silver shoe next to his, not quite nudging, but definitely inviting him to notice her toe.

This constant circling was exhausting. In the space of a day, he’d come around from thinking he should marry to impatience for task completion. Maude’s eldest was exactly what was expected of the royal family—well-bred, smoothly sophisticated and picture-perfect beautiful. She struck him as the possessive type, too. Overtures from other women would no longer be a problem. She would make damned sure of it.