Page 11 of Her Royal Daddy
“Wow,” I breathed, turning in a full circle and drinking it all in.
Mazi said nothing, nor did he look impressed. He just followed the butlers up the stairs; awestruck by the luxury around me, I had to hurry to catch up with them. Led through a minor maze of lavish corridors, we finally ended up in what we were told in broken English was a residential wing. Although given rooms that were side by side, our entry doors were at least sixty feet apart. That was where they gave us each a key and Mazi and I parted, escorted into our separate rooms.
I didn’t know about Mazi, but my room was more than just a bed. It was an apartment, open and spacious but with luxury furniture that clearly designated a living room, dining room, fully decked out kitchen with a wrapped snack basket on the counter, a balcony that overlooked the garden, an office, a bedroom with massive four-poster bed, and a bathroom that came complete with a whirlpool tub, a glass shower, a mosaic tile floor that depicted the ocean floor, and two toilets.
Two.
I’d never been anyplace that had two toilets before. I hardly knew what to do with myself.
“Would you require anything else?” my escort asked, his soft voice polite and his accent so heavy I had a hard time understanding him.
“No, I’m fine. Thank you.” I came toward him, digging through my purse for a tip, but he immediately declined it, bowed, and backed out of my apartment, closing the double doors behind him. “Holy cow,” I whispered to myself, turning in a full circle to let the opulence of the place sink in. Like every other part of the palace I had seen, my rooms were a mix of modern things and decorations from the cultural past. Osei pride was in every picture and painting on the walls, the oceanic mosaic on the bathroom floor, and in the jungle’s worth of plants both inside and out on the balcony.
I stepped outside. Dark as it was, I leaned up against the rail and did my best to see everything possible. The lights of the palace cast a glow across the lawn, but this was a time for shadows and the darkness didn’t let the light go very far. Still, I could see enough to know the lawn was spacious and surrounded by a curtain of trees, the dark forms of which rustled and swayed in the chilly breeze. Beyond the trees, I could hear ocean waves, gently rolling up onto some distant beach somewhere. Ocean waves weren’t the same as car alarms, beeping trucks, and traffic at all hours of the night, but it was background noise and it did help keep my nerves at the unnatural quiet of it all at bay.
Looking up at the night sky, even with the lights of the palace on, I could even see stars. It was magnificent. I hadn’t seen stars like this since the blackout in 2003. “Wow.”
“Yeah, it’s something, isn’t it?”
I startled. I hadn’t heard Mazi come out. For all I knew, he might have been standing on his balcony first and I just never saw him. But I saw him now. He was leaning against the rail, his broad hands resting on the smooth stone as he gazed at the night sky.
“Quiet, too,” Mazi commented.
“That’s going to be hard to get used to,” I agreed, crossing the length of my balcony to close as much distance between us as possible. There were still twenty feet between his rail and mine, but quiet as it was out here, we hardly had to raise our voices to hear one another. I didn’t know if anyone else was living in our ‘residential wing,’ but with any luck we wouldn’t wake them up just by talking.
“I could get used to this,” Mazi said, although he didn’t sound particularly happy about that.
The journalist in me took note of that, although the rest of me was already making up rational excuses.
“First time out of New York?” I asked.
He tipped his head in a nod.
“Homesick?”
For the first time, he looked at me. “My home isn’t anywhere near as nice as this.”
“That doesn’t mean you can’t miss it,” I countered.
His eyes narrowed, but a corner of his mouth twitched, and then he changed the subject. “How are you and Ms. Beatrix settling in?”
And just like that, I was snapped straight back to the jet bathroom, my head swimming, hugging my bunny to my chest while I watched one of the most handsome men on Earth picking my crayons up off the floor. Every inch of his hard body exuded easy sexuality, and every soothing word out of his mouth hit every fantasy Daddy dom chord inside me. Blame it on the alcohol, because at one point in time, I’d thought the same thing about Brian and look how that had turned out.
I’d done really well at keeping myself in check, right up until he wrapped his arm around me and took me off to take a nap. After that, things didn’t get anywhere near as fuzzy and hard to recall as I wished they would. I remembered everything. Falling on the floor, check. Calling him Daddy and propositioning him while lying on the floor, double check.
My face flamed, but I’ll be damned if my nipples didn’t peak, instantly tightening into buds that all but begged to be kissed.
I cleared my suddenly too tight throat. “Thank you for not taking advantage of things.”
Not that I was at all sure I’d have regretted it if he had.
“No thanks needed,” he assured, a slow smile curling his mouth. “That said, if you want to come over here and call me Daddy again, things just might turn out a little differently.”
And just like that, my body found every pulse of eroticism my nap on the plane had killed. Slow blossoms of heat unfurled in my womb, their bloom encouraged by his smile and the leonine ease with which he pushed back off the rail to move in as close to me as our parted balconies would allow.
“The last time I said that, you threatened to spank me,” I replied, hardly believing the words falling out of my mouth. It was like someone else teasing, flirting with him. I wasn’t that girl. I didn’t have casual encounters with men I barely knew, not on private jets and certainly not in foreign palaces in the wee small hours of the morning.
“It wasn’t a threat,” he replied, hooking his thumbs in the pockets in the way that pulled my gaze to his belt and refused to let me look away.
