Crowned For The Drakon Legacy

And yet, when Nikandros lifted them in his hands and kissed the voluptuous valley between, all the while muttering in Greek, Mia felt like the sexiest woman on earth.

When he lifted the dark, knotted nipple to his mouth and licked it, she arched her body toward him with a needy groan. He continued to lick and stroke the nipple until it was wet and so painfully sensitized that each ministration of his sent a twang of pleasure straight through to her sex. “I can’t bear it,” she whispered, her breath panting in and out of her like a whistle.

Release hovered on the edge of her consciousness, taunting and teasing, twined with this gorgeous man.

“But I have only just gotten started,” he whispered, meeting her eyes. The devilish glint in them made Mia tremble all over. Still holding her gaze, he opened his mouth and closed it over her nipple. And did something that Mia had never imagined could be done between a man and a woman, something so wantonly glorious that a line of fire tingled down her spine.

Legs locked around his hips, Mia convulsed as he suckled on that nipple, his hands stroking every inch of her skin from her back to her buttocks. When he shifted his attention to the other nipple, she protested. Her mouth found his bicep. Damp and salty, he tasted like heaven when she licked him.

He kept up the strokes of his mouth over her nipple while his fingers separated the folds of her sex. When he pressed his thumb against the crest, Mia begged, “Please, now, Nik.”

Instead, he took her mouth. The kiss was damp and hot, her erratic breathing slowly spiraling down to normal. And then he built her up again, until every muscle was taut and begging. And again. And again.

By penetrating her slick sex with two fingers.

By suckling on her nipple with such delirious intent that the peak hardened.

And every time she was near release, he pulled her back from it. Fists clenched on his muscled back, Mia sobbed his name over and over again, begging for relief.

Gentle fingers pushed her hair from her forehead, while he studied her with a slumbering gaze full of wicked fire. “What do you want?” she bit out hoarsely, lips swollen and stinging and her body trembling.

Stubble marks covered the swells of her breasts and her abdomen.

His tongue flicked out against her tight nipple, which made her core dampen even more. “To see you like this. Your brown eyes—always so wary and reserved, dark and dilated—your body, damp and flushed with need...you my slave in this bed.”

“I hate you,” she retorted, on principle, even as her body arched off the bed when he tongued her belly button.

“I know,” he said with a wicked smile, and then he was rubbing that stubbly jaw against the tender skin of her thighs. Blue-black hair tickled the sensitive skin of her lower belly. Every pelvic muscle locked, tightened against his onslaught.

Digging her fingers in his shoulders, she said, “Nikandros—”

“Tut, tut, let me in, Mia,” he said, firm hands pushing her thighs wide apart, until her slick flesh was all but open to his devouring gaze. His nostrils flared and Mia closed her eyes. Embarrassment and anticipation and soul-wrenching need—she was a cauldron of emotions.

The long muscles of her thighs convulsed when he bent his dark head and took a long lick of her damp folds.

Back arching off the bed, Mia pushed herself onto her elbows and dug her hands into his hair. Pleasure rode her lower belly hard as he kept up the strokes of his tongue. She writhed and moaned, but his arm on her belly locked her against the bed.

Again and again, he licked, driving her high, then easing up the pressure. The moment he sucked her tender flesh with his lips, Mia broke apart.

The wave of pleasure was so intense that she saw darkness and light. Deep, wrenching spasms of her muscles went on and on, while tears soaked her cheeks.

She barely caught her breath when he flipped her onto her stomach, and then pulled her up until she was on all fours. Her hair fell over Mia narrowing her view to the silvery sheets spread in front of her. She was still panting, echoes of her climax still twisting and turning deep inside her lower belly.

Only when his fingers, digging into her hips, pulled her back toward him did she realize her vulnerable position.

She tensed, the position alien and intrusive to her. How intimately he would see and know her like this...

He bent over her until his mouth reached the curve of her shoulder. Soft heat swirled through her pleasure-suffused nerves as he kissed her. His thick shaft wedged into the crease of her buttocks and Mia jerked at the strange, unraveling tingles in her sensitive tissues. Expletives filled the room, his breath hissing out of him.

“Do you not like it like this?” He sounded hoarse as if he were the one who’d already broken apart and been remade anew. Another kiss, this time with his teeth involved. The drag of his teeth against her skin made her breath rasp against the sheets.

The slide of his hot skin over hers, his breath caressing her neck, every inch of Mia felt carnal, as if her body had been made for only this purpose, only this man. Words were an impossibility.

“Ahh...and you think I’m gentleman enough to say fine.”

She licked her lips, struggling to put her thoughts into words. “I don’t know whether I will like it this way.”

She instantly knew that he didn’t like that answer. Whether he never liked hearing about his lovers’ exes or particularly Brian, she had no idea. And she didn’t care.

One long finger traced the line of her spine all the way to the crease of her buttocks, teasing and taunting. A kiss landed on her left buttock and Mia blushed and burned in turns. Her arms ached, her body felt alien in the rivulets of sensations coursing through it.

She heard the whispered tear of a condom packet, and the sinuous slide of it over his shaft. Anticipation built like a balloon inside her and she felt him come up behind her.

Strong fingers drew a line of fire from her neck to her navel. “If it kills me, I’ll make it good for you. Trust me?”

Breath on tenterhooks, Mia nodded.

“Say it, pethi mou.”

“I trust you, Nikandros. More than I’ve ever done anyone.”

Hands on her hips, he entered her with one long stroke that set fire to her nerve endings. “Christos, you are tight.” He shuddered around her, the hard muscles of his body locked tight, as if to stop himself from moving. “You needed more, Mia? Tell me you’re okay.”

First came an achy, alien sensation that threatened to buckle her legs under him. In this position, it felt like there was no part of her that Nikandros hadn’t touched and claimed. “I’m...it feels...strange, but full, Nik.”

He bent over her and kissed her damp skin, whispering endearments that sent a rush of tears to her eyes.

No, she didn’t want tenderness from him. As if she were some fragile, breakable thing that he could not use the way he wanted. She wanted to be woman enough for him.

Slowly, she wriggled her hips back and forth, side to side, getting used to his thick invasion. And with every movement, spirals of need swirled out from her sex. His breath slowed, deepened as she repeated the movements of her hips, and then pushed back in an inexperienced movement.

“Like that?” she said into the velvety dark depth of the night.

With a guttural curse, his fingers crawled up her back over her spine and into her hair. He held her so tightly that pain and pleasure infused together. Nik pulled out almost all the way, and then thrust back in so hard that Mia would have skidded across the bed if he wasn’t holding her.

Pleasure so intense and so profound that she thought she might pass out radiated down her spine and speared her lower belly.

If not for tonight, if not for Nikandros, she’d have died never knowing that it could be like this. That pleasure could be so exquisite that one’s soul could be remade from it. Her moans rose in pitch as Nikandros pounded into her, her name a guttural incantation on his lips, over and over. Mia didn’t know how it was possible but her body was greedily racing toward another peak.

As if he knew her body better than she did, Nik pulled her close, fingers bruisingly tight on her hips. His thrusts became short and tight while one hand moved between her legs. “Come for me, Mia,” he commanded, and then he gave her no choice but to follow him by tweaking her swollen clitoris between his fingers. Counterpoint to his hard thrusts.

Mia broke apart again with a soul-shattering cry.

Pleasure surrounded her in sharp, staccato bursts. He groaned as his thrusts lost the rhythm and finesse he had employed before and descended into purely animalistic movements.

This was what Mia wanted, what she needed. For this man, this gorgeous, powerful man who had given her a small part of herself back, for him to lose himself inside her. She wanted to steal away a part of him, even a tiny part, as he was doing to her.

The roar of his climax fell over her skin like some powerful magic returning and remaking her.

Tears coursing down her cheeks, Mia fell onto the bed and hid her face in the sheets. Every muscle in her body trembled. A sob fought to rise through her and she bit her lip to contain it. Limbs like rubber, she went willingly when he pulled her into the cradle of his arms. Words of gratitude, words of desperation rushed to her lips.

Her vision blurred, she looked down at them.

Moonlight played shadows over their twined naked limbs, damp, glistening skin and the rumpled sheets. Greedy even now, her gaze moved up one hair-roughened calf to the long, hard muscle of his thigh, the jut of his narrow hip bone. Carnal hunger and something else rang like a bell inside of her.

In gentle movements, he pushed back a lock of hair sticking to her damp forehead and pressed a tender kiss to her shoulder. “You’re well?”

She could only nod. There was a glitter in his eyes, as if he too was shaken by the intensity of what they had shared. As if he too was...

No!

This was the Prince, a man who was so good in bed that women over the world chased him for one night... She couldn’t make this moment any more than it was.

Her throat closed over words she couldn’t say, a sudden weight on her chest. For the first time in months, grief and fury washed away, leaving a strange awareness of herself.

When he gathered her to him and breathed against her temple, she gave herself over to the beckoning hand of sleep that was taking over her mind, body and soul.

Nikandros Drakos was a fantasy come true, and in her case, he’d given her something immeasurable, indefinable.

But that’s all he would ever be.

CHAPTER THREE

Six weeks later

“YOU’RE PREGNANT, MIA.”

Her ob-gyn’s soft declaration had kept ringing around in Mia’s head all day as she set the high school soccer team through its drills as their new assistant coach.

Sheila, who had also known Mia since their mothers had dropped them off at the same elementary school, had held Mia’s hand. “After everything you’ve been through this year, I... Mia, say something. This news could be a shock in itself but—”

“It’s a shock, yes, but, oh...” Mia didn’t know where the words had come from. She’d been alone for so long, but all she felt was overwhelming joy, a profound sense of anticipation in her chest. That night had been the beginning of a new chapter of her life and a child was the result. “I want this baby, Sheila. I...will love this baby.”

That night back at the two-bedroom apartment she’d been allotted at the campus, Mia still couldn’t stop smiling nor looking at her stomach in the mirror. Nor had her mind wavered even a little bit. But then, she’d always known her mind.

Accepting her new job, moving out of the apartment that Brian and she had shared—it had been the right move. Standing on the sidelines, watching young, ambitious players give their soul to soccer, it was fulfilling, yes, but life stretched ahead of her, a chasm of loneliness.

A baby would change everything, fill her days and nights. A baby she would love without conditions.

Even though there had been curiosity in her eyes, Sheila hadn’t pressed Mia for details about who the father was.

The father. Mia fell back onto the couch in her living room with a soft plop.

Nikandros... Cold sweat gathered on her forehead.

This baby belonged to Nikandros too.

Not a day had gone by in six weeks that Mia hadn’t thought about that night or him.

How could she escape it when every news channel was bleating on and on about the tiny principality of Drakon, the Mediterranean’s Jewel, and the decline of its King Theos into madness, a fact that had been hidden from the media and its people for a long time? When every social media site covered the smallest movement of its Princes?

With a greed she couldn’t curb, Mia had followed the news of the royal family. The media had been lambasting Nikandros yet again, for dereliction of duty and apparently not caring enough about the country.

Only Mia knew how much returning to Drakon had affected Nikandros, but even she found it easy to forget in the face of his merrymaking.

Not once had he answered the media’s questions—would he stay in Drakon now and shoulder the responsibility of its people? Would he share his brother Crown Prince Andreas’s burden?

Only deep silence from Nikandros. The pap had already caught him partying at a friend’s nightclub, racing a dangerous curve in Drakon in a hell-on-wheels red Ferrari. The media then pronounced that the reckless Daredevil Prince Nikandros had reverted to form three days after the public announcement of his father’s madness.

It was clear that the Daredevil Prince was not going to change his spots and settle down into responsibility. He had seemed so serious, so full of an unnamed pain to Mia, but now this, in front of his entire nation.

Had it all been just an act? Would he even acknowledge a child who had accidentally been conceived after a one-night stand as his?

Swallowing away the ache in her throat, the urge to share the news with him, Mia decided to wait to inform him.

At least, until she was strong enough to face Nikandros without weakening again. Until she was strong enough to face his reaction to their unborn child.

* * *

Nikandros stood on the ramparts of the King’s Palace and stared out at the panoramic views offered of Drakon and the harbor. The smallish hill on which the eight-hundred-year-old palace stood had provided a strategic defense location from the numerous attacks through the centuries, from various regional and global powers who had always wanted to assimilate the small Mediterranean gem for their own.

But the House of Drakos—his ancestors, with this palace as their stronghold—had clung on, despite the attacks and defended the little jewel.

As a kid, stuck in the palace hospice during hot summers and mild, wet winters alike, Nikandros had loved the history of Drakon.

A dragon and its treasures and one band of fierce warriors, the stories had sustained him through a wretched, ill childhood. He’d inhaled the old volumes in the vast library, breathed in every arch, wall and wing that had been added to the King’s Palace by each generation, making it impregnable. With no children to play with, he had weaved elaborate dreams picturing Andreas and himself as modern princes who would deliver Drakon from its various nemeses.

Crown Prince Andreas, his older brother, would command him, and Nikandros, his loyal knight, would jump to do his bidding.

“Why won’t he visit me, Maman?” He’d relentlessly plagued his mother with the same question every time they had seen Andreas on TV, standing proudly by their father.

“You’ll join him when you’re feeling better, ma cherie,” his maman would say.

But Andreas had never had time for the attention-craving, mostly ill Nikandros. Nor had King Theos ever shown any interest in him beyond inquiring of the doctors if his spare was going to make it.

Not until Nikandros had turned nineteen and finally, against all medical predictions, seemed to have cast off the sickness that had plagued him all his life. And then, only then, had Theos entered Nikandros’s life.

“I should have sent the guards to this terrace to look for you,” came the deep voice of his brother, Crown Prince Andreas. A small smile flitted over Andreas’s lips, as if this was one of those sweet memories that siblings shared. That is, if the siblings had come from a normal family and were not the much-adored son and heir of a little mad, power-obsessed King and the spare he had barely tolerated and known even less.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Nik drawled in a careless voice, forcing himself to relax his tight grip on the stone wall.

“The nurses used to run over the palace looking for you, only to find you here amongst these ramparts, waving that rubber sword around with barely a stitch over your body. This was your favorite place,” finished Andreas, coming to stand by Nik.

“How the hell would you know?” When you barely ever saw me, he didn’t say.

“The study in my wing has a window that provides a perfect view of this very terrace. I would watch you brandish that rubber thing, fighting off imaginary enemies. If not the ramparts, it would be stables. Third choice, the kitchens.” The wistfulness in his brother’s voice cut Nikandros.

Thick silence descended over the terrace. Nik stared at the gaunt hollows of his brother’s face shadowed in the waning light of the sun.

Theos was slipping, had descended into the final stage of the dementia that had claimed him for the past few years. The sight of his once-proud and overbearing father with that crazed look in his eyes, and fragments of gibberish falling from his lips—it had shaken him deeply.

And yet it was the look in Andreas’s eyes that rooted him to the spot.

Andreas had been dealing with his father’s madness for years now, and the country’s declining morale, and the power-hungry Crown Council.

Guilt twisted deep and low in Nik’s gut. He’d known what was happening but had refused to come. “It is a little late to pretend we share a brotherly bond, Andreas.”

The infuriatingly amenable expression did not budge from his brother’s inscrutable eyes. He wished Andreas would throw a punch at him. Or call his actions despicable. But of course, his brother would never oblige.

He hadn’t back then, when Nik had told Andreas what he had done with his precious fiancée, and he wouldn’t now.

“Why did you return then, Nik? Did you finally feel pity for me? Or dare I hope that you have grown a sense of duty to your country?”

Damn Andreas for always knowing the right question to ask. Nik himself didn’t know the answer to that question.

Had he done it because the sense of history, the heritage of Drakon that he had always yearned to be a part of when he had been a little boy, had sunk its claws into him again?

Or had he done it because leaving Drakon would mean facing that all the little things that had previously given him such pleasure still paled when he thought of one ex-soccer player?

“I promised Maman I would stick around for your coronation.”

Andreas’s mouth flattened. “The coronation is postponed.”

Nik frowned. He knew that these past few years, behind the curtains, Andreas had run the show. So why was his brother, who’d been born and bred into the role of King, now postponing the coronation? “With Theos frothing at the mouth, Drakon needs you at the helm.”

“So you do think about Drakon then.”

“Why did you ask me to return? And the truth, Andreas.”

Nik folded his hands, his stance clearly belligerent. But Andreas would never take the bait. He would never do something as emotional as get into a fight with his brother.

“I need you, Nikandros.”

It was, apparently, a time for shocks. First Brian, then Mia, then his father and now Andreas.

Andreas sighed. “The Council has been getting more and more disturbed about my lack of marriage. With father’s final decline fast approaching, it is now a matter of public and political concern owing to legal and international consequences. If I should die tomorrow suddenly, our treaty with our powerful neighbor becomes void and we could be annexed.

“The economy is on a nosedive and financial analyses do not show it recovering anytime soon.”

“Then why didn’t you marry that...woman and produce heirs by now?” Nik interrupted, bile rising even at the thought of her and what he’d done.

“If you had bothered to visit once or inquired after us, you’d have learned that I broke that engagement with Isabella as soon as you left.”

“I’ve not heard a whisper of it.”

Andreas shrugged. “Because it worked well for me and Isabella to let the world believe I was engaged to her for a long while. Her brother wanted it said that she’d walked away from the alliance. Rejected the Crown Prince of Drakon.

“I agreed.”

“Father must have hated that.”

“Father and I have learned to understand each other better,” Andreas said cryptically.

“What I did then was—”

“I don’t want to dwell in the past, Nikandros. It would not show either of us well, ne? The point is I need your help, in a hundred ways. And I believe you possess a far more giving nature than I do.

“I need father declared incompetent, to build Drakon’s economy back up again and its morale, to stop the Crown Council from dictating my life.”

Nikandros had heard from numerous sources of his own the unrest among the populace, the slow exodus of businesses to their competitive neighbor, of deals falling through and investors pulling out because Andreas would not announce the date of his engagement, much less the wedding.

Because Andreas would not bow to the Crown Council’s demands, and he, Nikandros, had turned his back long ago on Drakon.

Which was why he’d stayed longer than he’d planned to, the challenge it presented to his business sense engaging his interest despite himself. The economy of Drakon was ripe for the taking. Tourism could be boosted, some of the old ways let go of... Much as he wanted to deny the knowledge, Nikandros understood perfectly what Andreas wanted and Drakon needed—fresh blood. “Then marry, Andreas.”

“I will not rush into any alliance before weighing the long-term needs of Drakon. I have to appoint you the Hereditary Heir, Nik.”

Nikandros had walked out on his family years ago, publicly declaring that he was renouncing his status as second in line to the throne.

But Andreas’s words began to tug at a powerful desire he’d denied for so long. Christos, once he’d loved his homeland with everything he had. Walking away from it had almost destroyed him. It had also been his salvation because only away from his father’s and Andreas’s shadows had Nikandros come into his own.

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