Epilogue of Blackmailed Into The Prince's Bed...Part One, Two, Three, Four AND Five (and last...for now. :-) )

Eduardo cascaded his fingers with the fluid warm silk down Jade’s velvet back.

She moaned welcome and pleasure, pressed her arms against the steam-glazed tiles, arched all her resilient heat and femininity into his hardness. Arousal screeched through his body, radiating to his every skin cell, spearing into his loins, roaring for her feel, for union with her.

He’d thought he’d known, from the first look. That he’d always want her.

He’d known nothing.

He craved her, on every level, with an intensity and totality that only grew. He only hoped it would level soon. He didn’t know if he could handle anything fiercer.

“Take me, Eddie…”

That familiar crack ricocheted inside his head as control snapped. He always lost the last flicker of restraint when she called him that.

Something feral rumbled from his gut as he obeyed her, buried himself inside her.

He thrust into her gripping heat, each glide layering pleasure upon pleasure. He loved taking her this way, as she gave herself up to him body and will and trust. But he loved seeing her eyes as he possessed her more, the love that was everything he felt he lived for anymore.

His groan echoed her cry as he left her body. He gave frustration no chance to settle, yanked her out of the shower, down on the luxury of the bathroom’s rug, plunged inside her again. He held those eyes, let that love inundate him, drank her confessions of how he felt inside her, what it meant and did to her, poured his constant longing and escalating adoration.  

Then it was beyond endurance. She convulsed around him, beneath him, the jolts of her satisfaction wrenching his out of his depths to fill her.

She subsided in nerveless satiation, her lips open and quivering over his booming heart, gasped, “Have mercy, Eddie. I can’t love you any more and survive it.”

What he kept thinking. And there was that ‘Eddie’ again. He bore down on her. “So you want an encore.”

“Oh, yes…yes, please.” She squirmed beneath him, then stopped, groaned in regret. “But we’ll have to wait for later tonight.”

He rose on extended arms, struggling to stem his need to dissolve inside her again, invade her, merge them. “Then watch what you call me, or I might haul you out of your first formal reception and give you the…mercy that you deserve.”

She rubbed her leg between his. “Threaten me some more…Eddie.”

He crashed his lips over her tormenting ones.

 

PART TWO

Jade Mitchell-D’Agostino’s first appearance in the royal court of Castaldini had been in full swing for over an hour by the time she made an appearance.

She entered the main royal ballroom, felt like she’d stepped through a portal into a fairytale. She faltered when every head turned and every eye focused on her.

Eduardo gave her waist a squeeze, steadying her, in every way, reassuring her he was right there for her. Always. She quivered a grateful smile up into his melting with indulgence and passion eyes, when she was dying to dive into his arms, hide in his protection.

The only other time she’d ever had that kind of attention had been in their wedding. But then she’d felt she’d stumbled into a who’s who of the finance, politics and media worlds. Somehow facing those world-movers and shakers had been far easier. These people were Eduardo’s family en masse. They mattered more.

And it wasn’t only that she wanted to make him proud that had chaos sweeping inside her. It wasn't even that she'd kept all those dukes and countesses waiting. It was knowing that everybody knew why she had.

She knew she looked as she felt. A woman who’d been savagely pleasured by the dream-come-true of a husband who was hugging her to his side as if she was vital to his every breath.

Which was only fair. He was as necessary to her heart’s beating.

She still shuddered at the thought that she could have lost him.

All through the week from that night he’d made her his, then asked to be hers to the beyond-a-fairytale wedding he’d insisted on giving her when all she’d wanted was to say I do within the hour he’d proposed, she kept projecting what the rest of her life would have been if she had. Then all through their month-long honeymoon, she’d kept dreading that she’d wake up to find it all an illusion, to find herself without him.

But she was with him. And he was beyond any dreams. He’d touched everything in her life and imbued it with his perfection.

Her uncle was back on his feet and streaking through his second chance at life with unbound enthusiasm and zest, her cousins were blossoming, their every potential being fulfilled under Eduardo’s guidance and solicitude. Even the usually pinched and stressed Deanna was blooming, unearthing sides to her that Jade hadn’t suspected existed.

Although Eduardo deeply disapproved of her for being less than adoring to Jade from the moment she'd laid eyes on her, and for daring to put her family's
future above Jade safety when she'd asked her to spy on him, he was offering
her every respect and support. He said she was part of Jade's family and he wanted no shadows or discomforts polluting even an iota of her thoughts or feelings. And he'd done what she'd thought impossible. The tension between her and Deanna was evaporating with each new
interaction. During the party her uncle's family threw them before they'd come to Castaldini two days ago, Jade had felt they were on their way to becoming friends for real.

But the most unexpected development of all had been with Brandon Steele.

The day they'd come back from their honeymoon, he’d approached her with an out-of-the-blue offer. He’d said he wanted anyone who could fool him as completely as she had on his team. Eduardo had sat there grinning from ear to ear as she’d signed a contract to become Brandon’s partner, taking over overseeing Eduardo’s IT security...

“On behalf of my father, King Benedetto, welcome to the royal family of Castaldini, Principessa Jade.”

 

PART THREE

Jade blinked up at the tall, dark, handsome man bowing before her.

This sure wasn’t Durante. But he was a younger, evidently less complex and more at ease version of him. Which meant he was Paolo D’Agostino, the king’s second son.

The king had regretted being unable to reside over her introduction to the royal family and the delegates of neighboring kingdoms. Durante hadn’t regretted not attending one bit. Eduardo had later excused to her Durante's harsher than usual comment. His father was Durante's major hot button. He'd had a violent falling out with him, had not returned to Castaldini in over four years, since his mother, the queen, had died. Durante blamed his father for her death. Some pretty damning evidence had been involved.

Learning that had made her empathize with Durante’s perpetual and, according to Eduardo, recently escalating grouchiness. It had also made her glad she wouldn’t meet the king at this reception. She hadn’t wanted one at all. She didn’t want to be a princess, just to be Eduardo’s lover and partner and wife. But being all that dictated that she become one. And she’d give her all to be everything he needed and deserved.

She now smiled at Paolo, felt an affinity towards him that was diametrically opposed to the awe Durante provoked in her and which so annoyed her into all-out confrontation mode.

“Grazie molto, Principe. It’s my deepest pleasure and privilege to belong to the D’Agostino family.” She curtsied, felt like she’d stumbled into a Jane Austen novel. Eduardo’s fingers dug in her waist as she straightened, his intoxicating heat and the mouth-watering scent of his breath gusting through her as he tucked her back into his body, sending a burst of carnal flame spiraling through her nerve endings, pointing out that if she had, then she’d plunged into the R version of the author’s universe.

After Paolo introduced his wife, the mostly wheelchair-bound Julia and the four of them bantered easily for minutes, he beckoned forward Julia’s sister, Phoebe, and his sister, Clarissa.

Ten minutes later, Eduardo swept her away and around, introducing her to dozens of people she promptly forgot or didn’t even register. A question swept like a hurricane inside her mind, tearing at her focus, at her confidence and certainty.

At the first moment she got him alone, when they opened the dance floor, she let the maelstrom spill from her lips, before it burst her head.

"I always knew you had the world's most beautiful women milling around you, and that's why I couldn't figure out why you wanted me at first, but then I realized you want more than beauty, and I figured you didn't find what you were looking for until me. But you've had Phoebe and Clarissa around for years and they have everything. So how did you fall in love with me? What do I have that they possibly don’t?"

Eduardo stared down at her. Then he threw his head back and laughed, scooped her off the floor into an embrace that no longer pretended to be about dancing.

“You have everything I want in this world.” Her heart expanded to fill her whole being. Until he added, “And to put your mind at total ease, neither ladies would have me, anyway.”

“They turned you down?" she choked. "Though I don’t know how any woman can, is this w-why…?”

 

PART FOUR

Eduardo realized how dismally he’d put that last assurance when he saw all of Jade’s former insecurities mushroom in her eyes. It was like watching her very soul being snuffed out.

“No! Maledizione, Jade—that's not what I meant, or what happened. You’re my first love, will always be my only love.”

The uncertainty in her eyes wavered, but before he had a chance to say anymore, Paolo cut in and swept Jade away.

Eduardo refrained from dancing again until he could dance with her again, unable to wait to erase his blunder.

But when she filled his arms again, she kept the conversation away from the subject, was full of questions and enthusiasm about his family, Castaldini, her new roles, as his 'princess and protector', as she put it. He pressed his lips on the frustration of knowing he had to wait to convince her, once and for all. That she was his one and only. And he wouldn't do this with words, but with the proof of time.

And he had the rest of his life to do that.

A week later, Eduardo was standing by the window of their bedroom suite, looking at the moon-silvered tranquil Castaldinian sea lapping the shores in his mansion by the sea, letting the June wind cool his burning skin.

Waiting those final moments before she joined him was always the hardest. His breath was shortening, his heart hammering, his hands itching. He needed her in his arms, skin to skin, heart to heart, flesh in flesh.

“Eduardo”

He gritted his teeth. How he’d come to hate his name. She’d been calling him Eduardo for the past week. Ever since that damned reception. Everything else was back to normal. Everything but the absence of the incandescent intimacy, the loving humor, the searing indulgence of Eddie. And that alone told him, everything wasn't back to normal.

“Don’t turn.”

He somehow found the strength not to. Only to give her what she wished for. “Then hurry.”

“Close your eyes.”

“Tormentress.”

She gave a soft, smoky chuckle. “At your service. In every way you can fantasize about.”

He felt one of her supple arms hug him from the back, slide across his bunching abdomen up until she lay her open palm over his heart. It almost rammed out of his ribcage for a direct contact.

“I want you to know, that you, what you are, are light years beyond what I ever dared dream of. I will never be able to tell you how much I love you, in how many ways. But…”

His heart clenched. No. No buts. There couldn’t be any. Dio, what was she going to say? Did she still mistrust his emotions? Their permanence? Their reason and source?

His hand over hers convulsed. “If only I can lend you my eyes, my tastes, every last spark of my senses and perceptions, you’d know. That I came to realize what life, what everything that makes me myself was for. It’s all to be with you, to appreciate and love and treasure you with every breath, with every fiber of my being.”

She squashed herself against him on a torn sob, latched warm, trembling lips between his shoulder blades, where his heart kicked back, struggling for a direct kiss.

After long minutes of holding on to her wrapping arms, raining kisses on their soft firmness, murmuring love and surrendering to the poignancy of just being with her, she murmured against his overheating flesh, “So you don’t want anything more?”

“Never. You’re already far more than I ever imagined, light-years more than what I thought could be had.”

She rubbed her face against his back, freed one of her arms. “What if the something more is…this?”

He snapped his eyes open, tried to twist around to face her. Then he froze.

In front of his eyes. Her hand. Holding a white plastic rectangle with an oval indentation.

Two pink lines bisected that.

 

PART FIVE

 

His hurtling intentions to beg her to give him any test at all so he could prove himself to her piled up against the barricade that crashed into his mind. The significance of those two pink lines.

The hand holding that all-important rectangle trembled as her voice did. “You were right that first night. I just know it was that first time. All this pent-up love and longing, it took root, blossomed…”

He tore out of her arms, swung around, his chest heaving to draw in air that seemed to have been sucked out of existence.

Her precious jades wavered, filled. “It’s too soon…you’re not…not…”

He swung her up, aborted her agitation, held her above him at arms length, his own eyes gushing with the enormity of those moments, his love, what she kept giving him since she’d walked into his life. “When? When will you believe that you’re everything to me? That you’ve just impossibly given me more than everything? How long will it take? A year? Ten? Fifty?”

Her tears rained down on his upturned face, merged into the tracks of his own, flowing to his lips. He groaned, let her slide down his body, crushed her own soaking lips beneath his, all of her in a convulsive embrace. She subsided, a quivering mass into his equally shaking arms.

It felt like hours later when she whispered, “You said fifty years?”

“At least that. In return, I want you to surrender all your insecurities about my so-called status, all your uncertainties that anything lasts. I am only the man you’ve blessed with your love, and my love will last. Through this life, and beyond.”

She finally raised a drenched face that shook on smiles of elation and relief, and not a little sheepishness. “Can I believe you now and be done with it, once and for all?”

“You can. You’d better. If you want to keep me sane.”

“I do, just as much as I want to keep you insane.” She rubbed her breasts into him. “So how about a fifty-minute down payment on those fifty years my unbelievable, incomparable...Eddie?”

His heart almost fired from his ribs at hearing the craved Eddie, what made him feel boundless, most vital to her existence, appreciated and hungered for by her to his last cell. His senses switched from poignancy to raging passion in two seconds flat. He ground her hips into his erection, opened her around his own, plunged into her lips, groaned inside her, "Never deprive me of Eddie again, amore."

She rained Eddies on him as he dissolved their barriers, as he joined them, rode her to mindlessness. At the peak of the inferno of sensations, she cried out, "Ti amo, Eddie, siete tutto, la vita mia..."

Hearing her proclaim her emotions in Italian was the final jolt that sent him joining her in ecstasy, pouring his essense into her, raggedlyb echoing her proclamations. "And you're my everything, Giada mia, my life..."

 

Five hundred minutes later, Eduardo still couldn’t have enough of smoothing his hand over Jade’s abdomen, slightly curved with her natural lushness, and yet to show any signs of the miracle of love growing inside her. 

He gathered her deeper into him, limbs and passion and dependence. “If it's a girl, she'll be Amber."

A burst of pleasure and poignancy spread over her face at hearing her mother's name. She hugged him tighter. "And if it's a boy, he'll be Agosto." His late father's name.

"We'll keep Agosto for if we need one more name for a boy. If it's a boy he will be Ricardo." For Richard, the man who was the only father she knew.

Her eyes filled again, this time with a surpluss of pure happiness. "And if the third name is for a girl, she'll be Isabella." His mother's name. "And if we need a fourth name..."

He captured her lips, fed her his tongue, until she whimpered, undulated against him again. He severed the kiss, rose on one elbow. "I had to stop you from naming more babies or we'll end up with a larger brood than Paolo's. Though I would love to fill my world with replicas of you, more than anything I want you to have the best of everything, don't want being a mother to take over your life. A child with you is more than I ever dreamed of. There will be more only if you wish and if you can handle them while having everything else that enriches your life and keeps you fulfilled and happy, your career and your research and..."

She surged into him. "You...and more and more of you, all the time, always."

"You'll always have all of me, all the time. And yes, I'm selfish too, want to have more and more of you, all the time I can." He filled his heart and sight with her ecstatic agreement. Then she squirmed up, latched her petal-soft lips on his pulse and his arousal turned from rock to steel. "Speaking of which, I need another down payment. A fifty-day extension of our honeymoon.”

She slid sinuously against his rioting again body, everything that made life worth living blazing in her eyes. “You’re on. And I’ll raise you those fifty years. The rest of my life. And beyond.”

He pressed between her welcoming thighs, sought her depths, went home, groaned his pleasure, his pledge, "At least that long."

 

Desire
THE CASTALDINI CROWN
THE ONCE AND FUTURE PRINCE—May 09
THE PRODIGAL PRINCE'S SEDUCTION—Jun 09
THE ILLEGITIMATE KING—Jul 09

Nocturne
MORTAL ENEMY, IMMORTAL LOVER—Awakening The Beast Oct 09

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