Waking Up In His Royal Bed - Kim Lawrence Page 0,2

for her wildly surging hormones.

‘What?’ he responded with an innocent look and a seemingly mystified shrug that intensified her murderous glare. ‘Unless you have forgotten, we are married.’

CHAPTER TWO

HUFFING OUT A defiant gust of breath through clenched teeth, Beatrice refused to drop her gaze from the challenge she saw in the dark eyes of Dante Aristide Severin Velazquez, Crown Prince of San Macizo.

Her husband.

‘If only I could forget.’ Her mumble came with a resentful glare, at odds with the mood of their civilised divorce.

She never had really understood what a civilised divorce entailed, but she was pretty sure it did not entail having a night of passionate sex with your soon-to-be ex. But on the plus side, her peevish attitude did provide some sort of cover for her deep inner despair.

Everyone made bad choices, and she was no exception, but it sometimes felt that from the moment Dante had walked into her life the only sort of choices she’d made were of the bad variety—actually, disastrous!

She had always operated on the principle that your actions had consequences, and you lived with them. Or, in her case, you neatly plotted a course around them, or at least the more dangerous ones.

Then Dante happened and she forgot her philosophy; her navigation skills took a vacation. She didn’t so much forget as didn’t give a damn about the consequences. The primitive instincts that he had awoken in her were totally in charge. Instincts that had drowned out the warning bells that she had remained determinedly tone deaf to. Actually, last night there had been no bells, just a fierce need.

She had lifted her head and seen the reason why the crowded bar had fallen silent, and had felt a bone-deep desperation, much like any addict who found their drug of choice was close enough to smell. Dante was her addiction, the virus in her blood she had no antibody to.

Which made it seem as though she’d had no choice, but she had. She hadn’t sleepwalked into the situation. She had known what she was doing every step of the way. Admittedly she had not typed his name into a search engine when she’d accepted the offer of dinner, knowing that he wasn’t actually talking about a dinner. But you didn’t need a bio to see at one glance that he represented the sort of danger she had spent her adult life avoiding.

The idea of experiencing an attraction strong enough to make her share intimacy with a man she didn’t know had been a concept she had considered with a disbelieving smile, tinged, if she was honest, with smugness. But she’d had total confidence in her belief that any relationship she had would come from friendship and respect.

She’d slept with Dante that first night. She had been so determined to have that first night end the way she had imagined from the moment she had set eyes on him that she hadn’t told him that this…that he…was her first, in case it made him back away.

Her instincts there had been bang on because Dante had not been pleased by the discovery she was inexperienced, sternly telling her that virgins were not his thing and demanding an explanation.

It could have ended there—it should have—but it hadn’t, because she hadn’t wanted it to.

When she had retorted that she wasn’t a virgin any more so that was one obstacle gone she’d made him laugh, and he’d laughed again when she had explained that it hadn’t been a conscious choice. She hadn’t been waiting for the right man or anything, she simply wasn’t a particularly physical person.

They had spent the next three days and nights in bed disproving this theory. Nothing and no one had disturbed them in the penthouse with million-dollar views that she’d never even looked at, and Beatrice had savoured every hot, skin-peelingly perfect moment of the intimacy because she’d known this heaven wasn’t going to last. Dante had made that painfully clear.

He had left no room for misinterpretation when he’d explained that he was not into long-term relationships, or actually any sort of relationship at this point in his life.

Facts she’d already known, having finally typed his name into her phone’s search engine—even if a tenth of the women he was alleged to have slept with were actually real, it would be amazing that he found time to be so hands-on with the charitable foundation that he had founded.

It made a person wonder if he ever actually slept, except she knew he did. She