Chapter 24: My Dark Prince: Chapter 23

She’d become a vegetarian. News to me.

My soul nearly left my body when she asked me about her tattoos. I still remembered the one she’d inked on herself the last summer we were together, just as she turned eighteen. And I didn’t lie. Not technically, anyway. I did eat her out and traced those letters as they healed. I did kiss it better when it hurt.

The rest of the dinner was blissfully uneventful. Briar was funny, observant, and although she couldn’t remember her addresses, friends, or job for the last fifteen years, she had no trouble at all discussing fucking Nietzsche in depth. She had just remembered she was a philosophy major in college.

“I think this is what I meant by fight like a girl.” She twirled spaghetti onto her fork with a spoon and slurped it like a kid, grinning at me. “Women are pioneers. Nietzsche was a bitter man with more health issues than Vogue. Polite society largely shunned him for not believing in God, and he was as broke as your average college fuckboy. A chauvinist, just like the rest of his peers. Still, women nurtured him. Smart women. Feminists. His sister, mother, aunt, Lou Salome.”

“Lou who?”

“The woman he proposed to three times. A brilliant author and intellectual. She rejected all three proposals.”

“Why did she do that?”

“She wanted to marry her equal. You see, despite the general views of her time, Lou Salome knew her worth. She figured out just how little he thought of her, and she deemed him less than she deserved. It wasn’t arrogance, or greed, or snobbery. It was pure fact.”

“And that fact is?”

She snatched up the candle and blew it out. “A man’s shadow is designed to hide a woman’s light. It seeks to contain what it cannot control.”

Her brain turned me on.

I wanted to fuck her mouth, knowing all the smart things that came out of it.

By the time we made it back to the master bedroom, I hadn’t stopped thinking of what I wanted to do to her. Clearly, I hadn’t found my morals between her dip in the pond and now.

She waltzed into the bathroom to brush her teeth while I changed into pajamas in the closet, peeking at her wardrobe. It was so basic I almost wept.

Briar possessed a style that could only be described as uniquely hers. She didn’t dress like every inch of Earth served as her runway, drowning in the nouveau riche clothes Dallas and Frankie blew six figures on every month. Nor did she dress like Fae, a fashion victim in desperate need of an eye transplant.

No, vintage jeans filled Briar’s closet. Genuine cowboy boots, rolled-up sleeves, and leather jackets. Cool. Briar was cool. She’d always been. It was one of the reasons I never strayed when we were together. I never had FOMO. I knew I already had the best.

I returned to the bed, fluffing pillows and peeling off the elaborate construction the maid insisted on doing every morning.

“Ollie.”

“What?” I zipped into the bathroom, partly for the chance to catch her naked, but mostly because I genuinely worried for her.

She wore a cropped pink tee – no bra, nipples puckered – and sweatpants rolled at the waist. Her toothbrush hung in her mouth, foam covering her teeth. “Look what I found out I can do.”

Without waiting for a response, she flipped into a headstand, bending her elbows inch by inch with her legs up in the air, straight as an arrow. Her cropped shirt rode up, revealing her tits.

I repeat – her tits were bare, tan, gorgeous, and right in front of my face. She had a nipple piercing. My dick leeched onto my abs, weeping precum.

“Did you know I can do that?” she murmured around the toothbrush.

“Make me cream my pants by simply existing? Sure.”

How did one even discover they could do a headstand? I made a mental note to watch her more carefully, lest I find her upside-down in the spiky rose bushes after a quadruple backflip gone wrong.

The toothbrush clattered to the floor with her chuckle.

Briar beamed at me, foamy toothpaste racing up her cheek. “Am I a yogi?”

“Evidently.”

“Great.” She was still upside down with a direct view of my hard-on. Not much I could do about that. “What other hobbies do I have?”

“Blue-balling me.”

She carefully lowered her feet to the floor, righted herself, and prowled toward me, swaying her hips with each step. “We can take care of that, you know.” Her voice curled between us like smoke.

She treaded close, and just when I thought she’d lock her arms around my neck, she surprised me by swinging her leg up like a ballerina and propping her ankle over my shoulder. Her body melted onto mine, the entire length of her long leg pressed against me. Her pussy was flush against my erection.

My eyes rolled in their sockets. I forced them closed, gasping for breath, reminding myself this engagement, unlike my attraction, was fake. That if she had her full faculties about her, she’d castrate me right now, using a nail clipper to draw out the pain as much as possible.

“Baby.” I reached to kiss her button nose. I swear I felt the width of my dick wedged inside her pussy lips through our clothes for a second. “We can’t be doing this right now.” I kissed the heel of her bare foot, slowly helping her set it down on the tiles. “Trust me, there is nothing I’d like to do more than … well, you. But we need to give you time to adjust. Before you lost your memory, we got into an argument. You were mad at me. I don’t want to take advantage of you.”

I couldn’t tell her the whole truth. But I could be frank that having sex was not a good idea. To be sure, it was a fucking amazing idea. Perhaps the best idea anyone, anywhere, at any point in civilization ever had. But her true self wouldn’t want that.

She twisted toward the Jack and Jill sinks and spat out toothpaste, filling water into a cup to rinse her teeth. “What did we fight about?”

“I can’t tell you.”

She whipped around, swiping her mouth dry with the back of her hand. “Why not?”

“Doctor Cohen told me not to disturb you with anything you might find upsetting. What I did was upsetting.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Cheated on me upsetting?”

“As I said before, I have never cheated on you and never will.” I propped an elbow over the doorframe, tousling my hair. “However, in the spirit of full transparency, I was not abstinent in the time period we were broken up.”

And that time period was fifteen years.

She put the toothbrush back in its place and tossed a face towel into the fancy laundry basket. “You’re worrying me.”

I pushed off the doorframe, sauntered over to her, and grabbed her shoulders, kissing her forehead. My lips lingered on her skin. “You have nothing to worry about. I adore you. I would never intentionally hurt you. We had a hiccup. I just want to wait until you regain your memory before we have sex. If, after you remember everything, you still want me in your bed, I promise to never leave.”

She blinked up at me. “Does this mean we won’t be sleeping in the same bed?”

“If you don’t feel comfortable, I can definitely use one of the guestrooms.”

“No.” She rested her palms over my chest. We both noticed my heart galloping wildly. “I don’t want to sleep alone. I want you by my side.”

“Your wish is my command.”

“But no sex until I remember?”

“No sex until you remember.”

“Fine … but the second I do, you have to eat me out for forty minutes.” She raised her brow. “Like you did at The Versailles Palace.”

“It was fifty minutes, and of course.”

“While tracing the letters of my tattoo.”

“Deal.”

The chances she’d want anything to do with my dick, let alone any other organ in my body, after she regained her memory were slim.

I had no one but myself to blame.