Marrying for King's Millions / The Spanish Aristocrat's Woman: Marrying for King's Millions

In an instant, his body thickened inside hers, tightening, hardening. She shifted in his arms, wiggling her hips and everything in him fisted hard and tight. He wanted her. More than he had before.

Turning, he held her close, their bodies still joined,

he took the few steps to the nearest couch and laid her down. Beside them, the fire burned, and light and shadow played across her features in a never-ending shift of patterns that only served to make her more beautiful, more dreamlike.

Travis wanted nothing between them this time. He slid free of her body long enough to tear his clothes off, then he bent down over her and helped her shimmy out of her dress. Then she was naked, lying on the soft, pale fabric of the couch and lifting her arms to him.

“Do it again, Travis,” she whispered as he came into her embrace. “Take me there again and let me take you.”

He didn’t need to be asked twice.

Covering her with his body, he braced his weight on his hands at either side of her head. Her eyes were wide and shining in the firelight, the deep green sparkling with a golden glow that intrigued and captivated him. Her mouth was swollen from his kisses and when she touched the tip of her tongue to her lips, he bent his head to capture it.

Their mouths fused as he entered her on a slow slide of languorous satisfaction. He pushed himself into her heat with a calm deliberation he wasn’t really feeling. Every instinct had him clamoring to take her, to drive himself into her body, but his will kept him moving slowly, drawing out the pleasure, making each inch of her he claimed a small victory.

“Travis—” She tore her mouth from his and sucked in air desperately. Lifting her hips under him, she sought to take him in more fully, to draw him deep, high inside. “I need…I need…”

“Me, too.” His words were strained, hollow, echoing with the desperation suddenly tearing at him. With each of her movements, she tore at the foundations of his self-control, his will.

He hadn’t expected this lightninglike connection between them. Now, he couldn’t imagine doing without it.

Travis felt her body tighten around his, felt the first velvety grip of her inner muscles and watched as her eyes flashed with wonder. Then he let himself go, falling into the green of her eyes and the warmth of her body.

The next morning, Julie was feeling completely sated and impossibly lazy. Her body ached in a very good way and just for a second or two, she stretched on the bed and let herself remember the night before.

Lying in Travis’s arms. Feeling the magic that sprung up between them when they touched. Experiencing the incredible sensations caused when their bodies joined. And just for that second or two, she allowed herself to pretend that this marriage was real. That they’d really found something amazing together.

But in the next moment, that illusion was shattered.

“I don’t believe this!” Travis’s outraged shout carried from the next room.

She bolted up in the oversized bed in his room and scrambled off the mattress. Naked, she stood there for a second, wishing she had her robe. Then she shrugged and dragged a sheet they’d yanked loose during the night around her body. Tripping on the edges of it as she went, Julie stumbled into the main room.

Travis was still as a statue, standing in a wide splash of sunlight pouring through the open French doors. A room service cart loaded down with coffee, fresh fruits and an assortment of breakfast pastries stood unnoticed beside him. He held a newspaper and his features were filled with fury as he stared at the front page.

“Travis?”

His gaze snapped to hers and she watched as the anger in his eyes shifted to a different, much harder to read emotion. “We’ve got a situation.”

“Yeah, I heard,” she said, tugging the sheet out of her way as she walked toward him. “What’s wrong?”

“What isn’t?” When she was close enough, he turned the paper toward her.

“Oh, my G—” With her free hand, she snatched at the newspaper and tilted it so that the black-and-white picture taking up most of the front page was in the sunlight. But she hadn’t really needed clarification.

The headline was large and black. King and His New Queen. She winced at that and wondered idly if that would be her new nickname in the press. But when she glanced farther down and took in the picture below the headline, the title Queen was the least of her worries.

The photograph was crystal clear and so detailed, the photographer might as well have been in the room with them. Or rather, on the terrace.

There she and Travis were, captured in the moment when desire had leaped up between them. Her head was thrown back in ecstasy as his hands cupped her breasts and his mouth was at her throat.