Chapter 30: My Dark Prince: Chapter 29

Age Nineteen.

If I could choose one moment to last a lifetime, it would be now. With Briar Rose, sleeping away her hangover as I watched her from the hanging lounge chair on the tiny balcony, all of Paris unfurled beneath us.

She sprawled across the sheets like a painting – soft, and beautiful, and peaceful. I knew when she woke up, the little line between her brows would return, and she’d find a way to chew through her already worn-down nails.

I sighed and began scrolling through the hundreds of unread texts from Dad, Mom, and Seb.

The evening came and went, bleeding into nighttime. I needed to book a flight back to the U.S., but I didn’t want to leave her before I made sure she was okay.

Technically, she could return with me to the States. But Dad and Seb would never let us live it down. Seb would roast the shit out of me, but only because he never passed up an opportunity. But Dad. He’d hide his disappointment, though I’d see it in his lingering stares and deep sighs.

No. He counted on me to bring my A-game. To study the company inside and out. He expected me to be focused. That meant following the original plan Briar Rose and I had made, even if it meant a few weeks apart.

I didn’t remember falling asleep on the lounger, but the minute I heard Briar Rose’s husky voice call my name, I sprang to my feet and beelined into the room. She stretched her arms over her head, fully awake with the treasures I’d brought back from the pharmacy fanned across the sheets before her.

She swigged the Gatorade, her cheeks and nose sunburnt and her eyes still heavily lidded with exhaustion. “You watched me sleep?”

“I wanted to make sure you’re okay.”

She nodded.

I rested a hip against the dresser, studying her. “Are you …?”

“I’ll be better once you make me forget.” She patted the space next to her with a smile. “Come here.”

I strolled toward her and sat on the other side of the bed, avoiding her personal space. The relief at seeing her well crackled inside my chest. Not just well, but no longer completely crushed.

I pried a menu from where it wedged between the hotel’s welcoming packet. “Do you want some room service?”

“It’s three in the morning.” She snorted. “I’m sure they’re closed.”

“I’m sure they’re not …” I wiggled my brows. “… for the right tip.”

Briar Rose laughed. It died down in her throat. “I think I need to get used to being a broke-ass student. I don’t think my parents will be footing the bill for most of my things.”

“We’ll make it work.” I patted her leg, knowing full well I would make it work.

I wouldn’t even have to ask my parents. I had my own savings. Well, enough to get her through two years of college tuition and dorm fees with plans for more.

I pressed my lips to her forehead for a few seconds, breathing her in. Dry. The clamminess had evaporated sometime during her nap.

She kicked her foot out, playing footsies with my thigh.

I looped a hand around it and began to massage her. “Listen, Cuddlebug. I need to get you back to Geneva. Dad expects me back home for that internship.”

“How about you just spend the night here?” she suggested, brightening up.

I bit down on my lower lip, shaking my head. “I wish I could. But I—”

“Come on, Ollie. I haven’t seen you all year.”

“It’s really important to me,” I admitted, quiet. “This internship.”

Even as I explained this to her, I felt like a shithead. It was her eighteenth birthday, and her parents had dumped her ass and divorced her without as much as a cupcake or a greeting card. And here I was, wound tight about some bullshit internship forced on me by my dad for a company I’d inherit anyway.

She twisted, crawling up along my body on her hands and knees on the bed. “At least bid me farewell nicely.”

“Listen, I don’t want to rush things—”

But before I could complete the sentence, she sank her groin against my hard-on. Her flimsy underwear did nothing to hide the wetness between her thighs. I could feel her ready for me, even through my jeans.

I sucked in a breath. We’d made out and even dry-humped before, but this felt different.

She dipped her head down and scooped my lower lip between her lips, sucking on it teasingly. “We’re not rushing anything.”

Her tongue traced my mouth, prying it open, and soon, we shared a passionate kiss. Her fingertips moved toward my torso under my shirt, tracing their way up my ribcage.

“I want you to fuck me,” she begged, grazing my chest with her nails. “I’ve been wanting you to fuck me since I was sixteen. I wanted it when I was drunk, and I want it now when I’m sober. I want to feel you moving inside me. Filling me.”

“This is not how I wanted it to happen.”

And still, my hands moved of their own accord, trailing the backs of her thighs, tugging her legs apart. My fingers curled around the smooth, sun-kissed flesh of her ass. I slammed her against my erection, grinding her tight, wet pussy against my hard-on through our clothes.

“We’ve waited for so long,” I said through our kiss. “I want this to mean something.”

“It does mean something.” Her mouth traced mine as she spoke. “Just because there’s no candlelight, or wine, or a cabin in a snowstorm doesn’t mean it’s not real. We don’t need the clichés.”

It wasn’t the clichés I sought. It was the perfect moment. A moment in which our emotions didn’t burn so bright that we’d fucking explode at any second. But right now, my heart wasn’t the one in danger of ignition.

Briar Rose undid the button on my jeans and unzipped me, leaning down to kiss me again. I was eighty-three percent sure we both tasted funky.

Her lips traced my jawline, hot and soft, moving down my body. “Do you have a condom?”

She bunched my shirt all the way up to my neck, leaving a lot of skin to kiss on her way down. I felt delirious in the worst-best way possible. Like I hovered on the fine line between happy drunk and need-my-stomach-pumped drunk.

“Condom?” I asked, disoriented. “I think I lost my grasp on the English language. I mean, I might …” I trailed off, trying to sort through the chaos in my head.

As I thought, Briar Rose scooped my painfully hard cock into her mouth and grabbed it by the root, giving it a lick. I hissed out. My whole body ached for her.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I remembered Sebastian shoving a condom into my wallet as I rushed out of the lake house to the airport.

He’d sent me a smirk designed to piss me off. “You forgot your condoms, bro.”

“I’m not going to use any condoms, assface.” I rapped his forehead with my knuckles. “She’s distraught.”

“Even better. I once had a one-night stand with a chick whose cousin just died. She was feral.”

“You are a terrible human being.”

“I’m not as great as other beings, either.” Sebastian chuckled, shoving a single condom into my wallet. “Take it anyway. Thank me later.”

“Well, tell Dad I’ll be back ASAP and that it was an emergency.”

“Yeah, yeah. Have fun boning Princess Aurora, bro.”

“I have a condom,” I managed to rasp, staring in fascination at the crown of Briar Rose’s head.

Her hair had come apart during her drunken ordeal. It fanned against my thighs and the bed as she took me in her mouth, sucking me off awkwardly, and adorably, and fuck, I was about to come.

I gathered her hair with trembling fingers, too overcome with emotions and excitement to comprehend what was really happening. “Baby, I’m going to bust a wad if you don’t stop right now. I’m already so close.”

She peered up, her lips swollen and pink from going down on me. I clumsily pulled her up, kissing her, tasting the earthiness of my cock on her lips. Every single one of my senses went wild. I didn’t know what to do with myself. It was too much and not enough all at once.

I grabbed her face and kissed her wildly, flipping us on the bed and peeling her panties off. My phone blew up with messages on the nightstand, but I ignored it. I drowned in Briar Rose, savoring her, taking however much she offered, and losing track of the real world.

I bunched her dress in my fist, ripping it apart. She gasped, mumbling something about not having a change of clothes. I couldn’t even fully understand what she’d said, I was so sucked into this moment.

The moment I’d waited for since I turned fourteen.

Her panties were gone.

So was my self-control.

There were hands everywhere. Pawing, and grabbing, and caressing. I don’t know how I managed to rip away from her the seven seconds it took me to grab my wallet and fish out the condom, but it took us three attempts to roll it up my cock.

Then, she lay back down on the bed as I boxed her with my arms, and I finally gulped in a breath and caught myself.

“Are you sure you want to do this?” I kissed her hair. Her nose. The hollow part of her neck. “We can stop. We can wait. We can do this when you finally come hom—”

“I am home.” She flattened her palm against my heart, and it thudded so violently against it, I feared I was hurting her. “Home is where you are, Ollie.”

And that was all it took for me to press home.

It felt like an uphill battle, lodging myself inside her. She was tight and snug, and there was the barrier of her virginity. But I could also feel how soaked she was. How ready for me.

And Briar Rose wasn’t a stranger to pain. She didn’t even wince. Just melted against me, skin-to-skin, as I buried myself so deep that every inch of me melted inside her.

I waited a second to adjust my heartbeat.

“You can move.” She stroked my hair, kissing me. “It’s not that bad.”

“Thank you, but I’m trying not to get a heart attack here.”

We both laughed into a clumsy, sloppy kiss.

“Is it good for you?” she asked.

“It’s heaven. Perfect.” I inhaled, exhaled, and repeated the action like it was new to me. “You?”

“I love you inside of me. I love you outside of me, too, but when you’re inside of me, I feel whole. Like you’re a part of my body.”

When I thrust in and out of her, I started seeing stars. The pleasure was too much to take, the edge of a climax so intense, I forgot how to breathe.

We held each other for dear life, like this was a ride we didn’t think we’d survive. Briar Rose panted hard, meeting me with her hipbones, grinding, spreading her legs further apart.

“I’m going to come,” she announced first.

It filled me with pride – and also relief, since I was pretty sure I couldn’t hold back the cum fest coming her way.

“Me, too.”

It happened at once. In a chaotic symphony of lust, love, and laughter.

Quivers everywhere.

Eyes rolling inside their sockets.

Deep belly-laughs that burrowed into our bones.

We came together in each other’s arms. So exhilarating for both of us that we couldn’t help but kiss, and chuckle, and pinch each other, like we’d just achieved something no one else in history had ever managed. Bungee-jumped without a rope and somehow survived.

“Holy shit.” I rolled off her, slapping an arm over my forehead. Sweat met my skin, my pulse hammering from my wrist to my temple. “What was that?”

She rolled to her side and grinned at me, dazed. “I don’t know, but can we both agree we need to do it every day, three times a day, until we’re tired of it?”

“If by three times a day, you mean six times a day, which I am sure you do, then I’m game.”

She giggled.

I looked down between her thighs. Streaks of red matted inside them.

I reached to stroke the bloodied part. “Did it hurt a lot?”

She shook her head, hanging her beautiful eyes on me. “Not a lot. But enough that I’m glad I did it with someone who’s worth the pain.”

I opened my mouth to say something, but my phone started blowing up again.

Ping.

Ping.

Ping.

Ping.

“Take it.” She nodded. “It must be important, and I know you’re not supposed to be here.”

I reached for the nightstand and grabbed my phone.

Seb vB: I managed to snag you a last-minute ticket because I’m literally a fucking saint.

Seb vB: Your plane takes off in a couple hours from Charles de Gaulle, so you need to haul ass there RIGHT NOW.

Seb vB: If you make it here overnight, I think Dad will see it was a 24-hr. emergency and let it slide with your inheritance intact.

Seb vB: If not, I promise to hire you as a janitor at one of the hotels when I take over <3 I made a disgruntled sound, darting my gaze back to her. “I hate to do this …”

Truly.

I knew Dad would eventually get over it if I ditched him, but he might ground me for a decade in the meantime, and that included access to my allowance. Without a guarantee from Cuddlebug’s pseudo parents, I operated on the assumption that the cost of her education and our future home and family together fell entirely on me.

“You have to go.” She smiled, biting down on her lower lip. “It’s okay. I know. I’m very grateful you came for twenty-four hours to celebrate my eighteenth birthday.”

“Me, too.”

I kissed her quickly, then immediately jumped up to my feet and grabbed my boxers and jeans. I didn’t even wipe my balls. Just pulled off the used condom, filled with about two gallons of my cum, knotted it, and threw it in the trashcan under the writing desk.

“Are you okay to go to Geneva yourself?”

I sounded like a grade-A asshole. Like those useless fuckboys girls would complain about in college, who only cared about one thing.

I reminded myself I wasn’t, in fact, a fuckboy. That I would share my entire life with this girl – and soon. That, in a few weeks, we’d be together, in the same college, same town, a breath away from one another. Then, things would finally be normal.

She hopped out of the bed, grabbing her dress. “Yup.”

The dress hung from her fists in tatters, thanks to yours truly. She tried putting it on, but it was slashed where her cleavage was. Cuddlebug winced.

I turned to look at her. “Oh, shit.”

“Don’t worry about it.” She waved her hand at me, laughing a little. “I’ll use a hotel robe and dash outside to get myself something in the morning. You have a flight to catch. Go.”

“I’m not leaving you without clothes and with blood between your legs.”

I turned to rush toward her, but my phone pinged again.

Dammit, Sebastian.

“No.” Briar Rose started pushing me out the door. “I know how passionate your dad is about the business. Don’t disappoint him. Go. Seriously, I can probably hire someone to fetch me something from one of the stores downstairs. It’s Paris, for crying out loud. It is not short on boutiques.”

“But—”

Cuddlebug forced out another metallic giggle. “Go, Ollie, go.”

She pushed me all the way past the bathroom. I stumbled, putting my shoes on as I advanced to the exit, patting my jacket and pockets to make sure I had my wallet, phone, and passport.

I stopped at the door, cupping her face in both my palms. This was not how I wanted our first time to be. I wanted cuddles, and spooning, and nauseatingly romantic movies.

But there’d be time for all of that.

Soon.

“I love you.” I kissed her. “I’ll see you in a few weeks.”

She grinned. “See you in a few weeks.”

“Forever starts now,” I promised her.

I didn’t know it back then, but I lied.