Praise Me: Princess (Praise Me Daily)
Praise Me: Princess: Chapter 7

That was a quick ride.

To be honest, I’m grateful Conrad cut it short, because while it felt great to be out in the open like that, I started to feel less and less secure without him standing by my side.

Don’t get used to him. He’s leaving today.

Trying not to let the disappointment show on my face, I watch Conrad accept the picnic basket from the chauffer and we set off walking, his heat close to my back…and once again, like magic, the panic of being in the outside world dissolves.

He’s the trick. He’s the remedy.

Or maybe there’s something about the way he’s tough with me that makes me think I am tough and I can handle difficult things, like fear. Or bad dreams. I’m not sure what magic he wields, but it’s effective and I’m not confident in my ability to recreate the confidence he gives me once he’s left the employ of the palace.

We continue on over a gentle hill that slopes back down into a smattering of trees, bringing us out of sight from those remaining behind at the ranch. I glance over at Conrad and try not to laugh, but the commander could not look less suited for carrying a frilly picnic basket if he tried.

“What?” he grunts.

“Nothing. You just look like you stole someone’s lunch.”

“Two days ago, that would have been more likely than me going on a picnic.” He continues his wary scan of our surroundings. “Where do you want to do this?”

Why have I been battling a smile around this man all day? He’s still so mean, but he seems strangely inclined to please me now. I don’t understand it at all. Why would he care about our rapport when I’ll be bidding him goodbye in a matter of hours? “There’s a small pond just this way,” I respond, starting to skip ahead, though I slow down and remain within his reaching distance as soon as I hear his growl.

When did that growl become so comforting?

“I don’t like Huck,” he announces out of nowhere.

“Why not?” I exclaim. “He’s never been anything but sweet to me.”

“I’ll bet he has.” I glance back over my shoulder to replace the commander glowering at me. “You want a sweet man?”

I swallow hard, facing forward again. “It doesn’t really matter what I want, does it? It’s more important for me to make a good match than have what I want.”

“If given the choice, though, you would marry for love.”

“I’ve never allowed myself to consider a love match. There isn’t much point in getting my hopes up over something that is so unlikely.” I stop at the spot I’d envisioned for the picnic and take the blanket from beneath Conrad’s arm, unfolding and spreading it on the soft, green earth. “What are the odds my soul mate is a prince? Staggeringly low.” I shrug. “Although I guess you never know. Maybe it’ll be love at first sight.”

Why does the commander look like he wants to throw the picnic basket like a shotput into the surrounding trees? “It won’t be,” he bites off.

“Why not?”

“Because I said so.”

“Ohhh,” I draw out, taking a seat on the blanket. “Okay, then.”

He continues to frown at me for almost a full five seconds, before jerking his chin at the spot beside me. “What am I supposed to do here? Sit crisscross applesauce like I’m in kindergarten?”

“Yes. Or you can lie on your side. Like this.” I demonstrate, lying down and turning onto my right side, tucking my stacked hands beneath my cheek.

Conrad makes a muffled sound and sets down the basket, lowering himself to the ground, his gaze traveling over the swell of my hip and down the length of my thigh. With his eyes returning to settle on my face, he stretches out onto his left side, facing me with his head propped on a fist. “How’s this?”

“You’re doing marvelously, Commander.”

He hums, studying me closely. “Let’s say you end up hitting it off with this prince.” His tone could not be sourer. “What then?”

“Then we marry, and I set about learning how to be a wife.” I fidget with a loose string on the blanket. “I know very little about that role. I’ve never even watched my mother be a wife, as my father died young.”

“Does the idea of being a wife scare you?”

“Certain things.”

“Such as?”

I chew my lip a moment. “This is such a silly reason to be nervous, but imagine having to buy gifts for someone every single Valentine’s Day and birthday and Christmas. That’s three gifts a year! How does one keep coming up with ideas?”

“This is why they invented gift cards.”

“That’s not very romantic,” I say, wrinkling my nose.

“Noted,” he mutters under his breath. “What else scares you about being a wife?”

“Well…” I hedge. “The obvious stuff. Wedding night. Intimacy.”

“You’ve never been intimate with a man,” he states.

“You didn’t have to sound so positive of that fact.”

Conrad gives me a level look. “In the car, when I told you I couldn’t lie on you without reacting, you had no idea what I meant.”

Don’t look at his penis.

Too late. I looked right at it.

“That gave me away, did it?” I ask, sounding more than a little breathless.

“Afraid so.” He seems to be judging the distance between us and deeming it too far, his body scooting an entire foot closer to mine on the blanket, the fronts of our bodies nearly touching, and my sex contracts in response. “You wouldn’t be able to lie on top of me without reacting, either, Princess.”

My skin grows hot to the touch. “A woman’s reaction is far less obvious,” I say, lowering my voice as if we’re sharing secrets. “How would you know I’m reacting?”

“I’d know.”

Change the subject. “How?” I whisper.

Keeping his gaze locked with mine, the commander rolls onto his back—a thick machine of a man covered in dappled sunlight. “It’s better to show you.” He reaches over to delve his fingers into my loosely braided hair. “Practice being a wife with me, Greta.”

A warm breeze rolls over me, but instead of cooling my body, it’s like blowing on a fire. The flames are fanned. I know very well that my relationship with the commander is unconventional. It has been since last night when I slept in his arms. The indiscretions only started to pile up when I wrapped my legs around him in the back of the SUV and felt his hunger against the seam of my riding pants. I should redraw the lines of propriety…but I don’t want to. No, I ache to leave them blurred.

“A wife would lay on top of her husband?”

“You would if you were my wife,” he says, the pitch of his voice deepening, those long fingers massaging my scalp firmly. “Or you would lie beneath me. No clothes on. And you wouldn’t lie still, either, Princess. You’d be moving. I’d be moving.” His hand drags out of my hair, fingertips traveling down my arm, leaving goosebumps behind. Stopping at my hip. Squeezing. “Come here, baby.”

I’m not sure who moves first or how I move, only that I’m brought up against his powerful body, an exhale shivering out of me at the full contact, his right hand hooking beneath my knee to draw it up, up and over his hip, my face burying in his shoulder as I slide into a straddle on top of my bodyguard, his palms splaying and riding up the outside of my thighs. Up and down, up and down, while I try not to moan over the might of his body, how perfectly he’s been constructed of muscle and flesh.

“What would a wife do now?” I whisper, lifting my head to replace his pupils have expanded, his face drawn as if exerted. Strained.

And his face isn’t the only part of him that’s strained.

His zipper could burst from the burden of what’s behind it.

That ridge is pressed so firmly to my mound, teasing my flesh open, wetting it between at least four layers of clothing. Oh my God, I want to move. Grind. A foreign instinct that I know nothing about but feels so right. So inevitable.

“If you were my wife, I’d rip those tight riding pants down the middle and make you ride me like you just rode that horse.” His head digs back into the earth, his huge hands coming to settle on my backside, clutching it in two rough grips. “Fuck. I’m going to ask you to do it, anyway.”

“Ride you like a horse?” I gasp.

“Yes, Greta.” He urges my hips to punch, roll. “Just like you did in the paddock.”

I’m relieved this request is something I understand. Something I know how to do. Have mastered. Granted, I’m being asked to go cantering on a man, not a horse, but if my riding technique will give him pleasure, I want nothing more than to employ it.

Sitting up eagerly, I plant my hands on his shoulders, as if they are reins, and start to bounce, my sex clapping down gently on that growing bulge, my knees pushing me up into a lift and bucking forward, back down, press, up again, hips tucking forward.

“Don’t stop,” he rasps, lifting his unsteady hands to unbutton my blouse all the way to my belly button, tugging down my white bra so it hardly cups my breasts any longer, leaving my breasts jiggling in the muted sunlight, my breath sawing in and out in time with the commander’s groans, his length growing impossibly thicker underneath me with every gallop of my lower body, his chest lifting, falling, faster, faster.

“Good girl. Oh fuck, you are such a good little princess, aren’t you?” His tightens his hold on my bottom, pressing down, grinding the juncture of my thighs on his distended inches, a new, tingling sensation taking hold of me, making me gasp. “Keep riding me like that horse, but don’t lift your hips this time. Keep them low and work me rough with that virgin pussy…baby, oh baby, that’s it, just like that. Just like riding. That’s what I fucking need. Faster now. That body already knew how to fuck, it just needed to be on top of a man.”

I’m soaking through the seam of my pants and I don’t know how much moisture is considered too much, too forward to be polite, but I’m beginning to care less and less because now that I’m down and grinding, the way I’ve wanted to since the beginning, there’s a wonderful spot that evokes a throaty moan from my throat. I rub and rub and rub that part of me on Conrad’s thickness, hips rotating and canting up and back, whimpers filling the spring pasture air, some unknown feeling capturing me on all sides, but not confining me. It makes no sense, but I want it, I want it.

“Conrad,” I choke out.

“Go on, baby,” he grits, his hands reaching up to cup my face, stroke his thumbs along my cheekbones. A gentle touch, even though his eyes are wild. “Let your body do what it needs to do.”

“Is it going to hurt?”

“No. Nothing hurts my Greta anymore.” His neck muscles are so stark, so strained as he begins to shudder. “Please, baby, you’re making me come.”

I’m making him come.

I’m giving this beautiful, heroic soldier pleasure.

The thrill of that combined with the quickening between my legs has me combusting, my energy skyrocketing and needing somewhere to go. Needing, needing. And I don’t second-guess my urges, I just fall forward and replace his mouth with my own, kissing him like it’s the first and last time, sobbing into frenzied tastes of his mouth, his hands in my hair holding me close while he loves me back with his tongue, his hips thrusting up against me like he’s about to die, and thunder cracks all at once, both of us crying out, dampness gushing into my panties that I’m still raking against him without shame, his shaft at its hardest, throbbing, jerking, his face a mask of pleasure as the seed leaves him and drenches his fly, something I never thought in a million years I could replace so sexy.

So satisfying.

But I don’t have a moment to revel in what my body has achieved, what the commander’s has achieved, because I’m pinned on my back with Conrad’s left forearm while his right hand unfastens my pants, his chest heaving, heaving.

“Daddy’s licking it up,” he growls. “Don’t try and stop me.”

Daddy?

With that confusing and…oddly endearing and arousing word hanging in the atmosphere, I can’t do anything but lie there, gasping for air, while my pants and underwear are jerked down to my knees and Conrad presses his face tight to flesh that I’ve never shown to anyone, moaning, touching me with shaking fingertips, my eyes going wide in shock as he leans in and laps at me worshipfully. He consumes all of me hungrily, noisily, dragging his tongue through every crease, before moving to my inner thighs where I’m also wet. Licking there, too.

When he’s apparently found enough of what he’s looking for, Conrad prowls above me, obscuring my view of the blue sky, his eyes radiating so much intensity, I cease to breathe. “I’ve fought in more battles than I can count, but I’ve never fought for anything more worthy of guarding with my life than you, princess.”

“Thank you,” I whisper, shaken to my core. Suddenly feeling as though I want to burst into tears. “I’ll remember your words long after you’re gone, Commander.”

Why is he looking at me like I’m crazy?

“Let’s eat, Greta,” he says, slipping my panties and riding pants back into place, but not before planting several kisses in places I’ve never been kissed before. “We should be getting back to the palace soon. I need to speak with the queen.”

“To discuss your release,” I attempt to say briskly, but I sound like a child whose best friend just moved away. “I understand.”

“I don’t think you do.”

“Don’t I?”

He pulls me into his lap, kisses the crown of my head and hands me a sandwich. “Eat.”

This is the weirdest day of my life.