Princes of Castaldini: The Once and Future Prince

She’d read up on this place when she’d learned it was Leandro’s birthplace. No wonder Moorish poets described it as “pearls set in emeralds.” That was exactly what this place and the town and countryside it overlooked resembled. Pearly buildings set in emerald nature. They should have added the sapphire, aquamarine and gold of the sea, sky and sandy beaches to the setting.

The palace complex sprawled in multiple levels over the mountainous site, the park around it overgrown with wild-flowers and grass and teeming with roses, orange trees, myrtles and dense elms. Its resident nightingales had been filling the night with songs on their arrival, but now the silence was penetrated only by the sound of water surging in fountains and flowing in cascades.

Leandro came up behind her, stopped millimeters from touching her, creating a force field of screaming sensuality between them, his lips hovering in a path of destruction from her temple to the swell of her breasts. Then he took the same path up. This time he breathed, exhaled his hunger over her. “Would it have gotten you here sooner if I had?”

She collapsed back against him, knowing what a phoenix felt like, burning to ashes only to be recreated, over and over. “How much sooner than forty-eight hours could I have been here?”

“Forty-eight minutes.” His murmur thrummed inside her in a path that connected her heart and core, sending both gushing. “Forty-eight seconds. I should get my R & D department working on teleportation. All that commute time was pure torment…”

His voice plunged on the last word, lurching through her with enough power to whirl her away from him. “You should talk about torment. You invented it.”

He surveyed her, giving new meaning to lord-of-all-he-surveyed. “If I did, you must share dibs on the patent.”

“Okay, from one tormentor to another, how about we do something else for a change? Have a truce and explore your paradise?”

“The one I’ve been cast out of, you mean?”

His tone was unchanged, that teasing, tempting burr. But she felt it. Eight year’s worth of damage and disgrace. It wrung from her the now second nature urge to ease his hurt, to defend him against the pain of the past. She took a breathless step forward. “The one you can now live in again, if you only desire.”

“Oh, I desire.” He aborted her movement, hungry strides backing her up across the huge stone terrace until he had her against the three-foot-high balustrade. His gaze swept her, from piled-up hair to white wedge sandals, practically setting her on fire. “How I only desire.”

“Truce, remember?” She pushed past him to search for air.

“Va bene. I’ll honor it, even if it was a one-sided deal.” He leaned his hips against the balustrade, shoved his hands in his pockets as if they itched, stretching his pants over a sight that almost had her dropping to her knees in worship.

He beckoned to his house staff, who immediately got busy setting up an outdoor café for them. He watched them for a minute then swept a moody glance around. “This place is the one thing I regret about being who I am. My life has always contrived to keep me away from all this.”

And “all this” was something huge to be kept away from.

She walked back to him, the need to connect with him physically in a non-sexual way overwhelming her again. She took his hand in both of hers. “I’m sorry you had to sacrifice being where you wanted to be for what you wanted to be.”

“Funny, eh? To succeed to the point that I don’t get the things I really want.” Her heart no longer had distinct beats, buzzed like a hummingbird’s wings. Did he include her in what he wanted and couldn’t get? Before she asked, he sighed. “But being away from here was out of my hands at first. The funny part is, when it was in my reach, everything I did took it away again.”

She blinked back agitation. She treasured that he was exposing his inner self, letting her in, but she couldn’t stand to see him vulnerable or morose. “You can change all that now.”

He looked at her as if attempting to chart her brainwaves. She felt he must have succeeded by the time he looked back at the preparations. Then his expression changed back to scorching flirtation. “Let me feed you. A tour through my paradise is hard work.”

She scampered behind him to the table his people had conjured up, a dream in crisp white, luscious cream and deep emerald. Silver and crystal flashed and sparkled in the sunlight that hurtled through the canopy’s sighing folds. He dismissed everyone, then sat down in one of the fer forgé chairs. She moved to her own chair, only to be pulled down onto his lap.

She settled on the hardness she was molten for. She gasped, wriggled, wrenching a growl from him as one hand pressed her down harder to meet what felt like an involuntary thrust.

She gulped around the need to crash her lips to his, to straddle him and take him all the way in, to her heart. “So this is what they mean by the lap of plenty? Or is it luxury?”

“Don’t move, or it will be the lap of injury,” he groaned.

“Let me up and no one needs to get hurt.”

“Just don’t move, and I’ll still get to feed you and walk out of this with intact equipment.”

She wriggled more until he thrust back with a long rumble, his hands circling her waist, raising her as he once had during exhausting rides to extremes of ecstasy. She made use of the boost to stagger up to her feet and whirled around to flop down in her chair. “I’ve been feeding myself for some time now, thanks.”

He mock-scowled. “Who’ll lick my fingers for me?”

“So that’s what you wanted? No free rides, huh?”

He tossed his head back with a guffaw. “If I didn’t dread another lecture about criminal excess, I’d tell you what I’m willing to pay for one finger lick right now.”

She leaned over, picked up his hand. Then, holding his eyes, she sucked his middle finger into her mouth. She almost fainted with the spike of arousal. Was turnabout supposed to turn on its perpetrator? But at least she was causing him equal distress.

When he snatched his finger away with another string of language-blending curses, she murmured demurely, “Write the checks. I’ll give you a list of my favorite charities.”

He grunted a laugh. “You’d better stand over my shoulder when I’m writing the checks, or I’m liable to sign my fortune away.”

“For just one lick?”

“But what a lick. So that’s what ‘getting licked’ means, eh? We keep finding out the real meaning behind common expressions.”

He lifted a silver cover bearing a repoussé cartouche. The sight of dewy chicken and vivid vegetables and the scent of spices she couldn’t guess at knotted her stomach with hunger.

She exchanged unabashed smiles with him as he served her, feeling like an eagle that had just discovered she could fly.

Then she breathed, “Tell me.”

He didn’t ask what. He just raised his eyes to hers without raising his face, his expression almost…loving?

As she backpedaled from that interpretation as if she’d landed in shark-infested waters, he lowered his gaze, started to eat. He swallowed his first bite, then began.

“I’ve never stayed here, or on Castaldini, longer than a few months at a time since I was seven. After my mother died, my father was inconsolable. My maternal aunt, who lives in Venice, took me to live with her for two years. I came back for a few months when my father fell sick. Then he died. I was passed between my immediate family members—who happen to live all over the globe—with Ernesto in tow until I was seventeen. Then I struck out on my own. No wonder I’m not much of a Castaldinian.”

She’d been finding it harder to swallow as she imagined him, an only child, being orphaned at an even younger age than she’d been. That last remark had her almost coughing out her food.

“You’re the best sort,” she cried. “You have an uncanny ability to analyze problems and tailor solutions. All you need to do is fit your powers to Castaldini’s needs.”

“You really think so?”

“I’m providing uncensored thoughts, remember?”

“You’re providing a life-saving service. And your uncensored thoughts are a blessing to me and to Castaldini.”

“Which makes me a blessed angel, not a wicked devil, as you always claim,” she quipped, escaping his intensity. “Tell me about this place. It’s…amazing.”

He pushed away a clean plate. When had he finished it? “It is. Castello del Jamida—yes, an Italian/Moorish name—is what its name proclaims, an enduring castle. It was completed by King Antonio himself, but there is no record of when it was started. Its walls enclose an area reaching down from the Indara up there—” she followed his pointing finger “—the highest place in the El Juela mountains, down to the sea. A lot of the palace was rebuilt during the second Moorish period of occupation of Spain in the early fourteenth century, after its near destruction during a re-conquest of Gibraltar.”

She digested the sweeping historical details. “It’s mindboggling. I can’t begin to imagine how big the central castle is.”

“The castle rests on a plateau that measures about three thousand by one thousand feet.”

“That’s as big as the royal palace!”