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There could be nothing that suggested that Azrin was compromised in any way by what many in his country took to be the lax moral code of anyone not from their own part of the world. There could certainly be no hint that the passion between Azrin and his princess was still so intense, so all-encompassing, that some days they did not even get out of bed, even after all this time. He was hoping that this night might lead directly into one of those lost days, even though he knew there was so much to do now, so many details to take care of and so little time to do it all in…
He should tell her now. Immediately. He knew that he should—that there was no real excuse for waiting. There was only his curious inability to speak up as he should. There was only that part of him that didn’t want to accept this was happening.
He wanted this one night, that was all. This last, perfect night of the life they’d both enjoyed so much for so long that had let him pretend he was someone else. What was one night more?
“I missed you, Azrin,” Kiara whispered, her supple body flush against his, her arm around his waist as they walked. “Two weeks is much too long.”
“It was unavoidable.” He heard the dark note in his voice and smiled down at her to dispel it. “I didn’t care for it, either.”
He would be happy when this part of their life was behind them, he thought as they made their way through the usual crowds flocking to Sydney’s pretty jewel of a harbor to enjoy the mild evening, the restaurants, the view. He would be more than pleased to do without these weeks of separations that they tried valiantly to keep to ten days or less. The endless grind of international travel to this or that city, in every corner of the globe, to steal a day, a night, even an afternoon together. Meeting up with his wife in hotels that became interchangeable in the cities where they did not have a residence, and hardly noticing which residence was which when they were in one of them. New York, Singapore, Tokyo, Paris, the capital city of his own country, Arjat an-Nahr, on an endlessly repeating cycle. Always having to plan to see his wife around the demands of their calendars, never simply seeing her. Never really able to simply be with her.
He would not miss this part of their life at all. He told himself that having this part end would be worth the rest of it. At least they would be together. Surely that was the important thing.
“You should not have stayed so long in Arjat an-Nahr,” she was saying, that teasing note in her voice, the one that normally made him smile automatically. “I’m tempted to think that you care more for your country and its demands on your time than your poor, neglected wife.”
He knew she was kidding. Of course she was. But still—tonight, it pricked at him. It seemed to suggest things about their future that he knew he didn’t want to hear. That he could not accept, not even as an offhanded joke. It cut too deep tonight.
“I will be king one day,” he reminded her, keeping his voice light, because he knew—he did—that she was only teasing, the way she often did. The way she always had. Wasn’t her very irreverence why he had been so drawn to her in the first place? “Everything will come second to my country then, Kiara. Even you.”
And him, of course. Especially him.
She looked up at him, those marvelous brown eyes of hers moving over his face in the dark. He knew that she could read him, and wondered what she saw. Not the truth, of course. He knew even she could not know that, not from a single searching look, no matter how well she could read what she saw. No one knew the truth yet save his father’s doctors, his mother and Azrin himself.
“I know who I married,” she told him softly, though Azrin did not think she could when he felt so unsure of it himself. “Do you doubt it?” She smiled; soothing, somehow, what felt so raw in him that easily. As if she could sense it without his having to tell her. And then her voice took on that teasing lilt again, encouraging him to follow her back into lighter, shallower waters. “You always take such pains to remind me, after all.”
It was only change, he told himself. Everything changed. Even them. Even this. It was neither good nor bad—it was simply the natural order of things.
And more than that, he had always known this day was coming. Why had he imagined otherwise, these past five years? Who had he been trying to fool?
“Do you mean when I request that you keep your voice down while you are pretending that I am merely some overconfident stranger picking you up in a bar, lest the papers feel the need to share this game of yours with the whole world?” He couldn’t quite make his voice sound reproving, especially not when her brown eyes were so warm, so challenging, and seemed to connect directly with his sex. And his heart. “Does that count as taking pains, Kiara? Or is it simply a more highly developed sense of self-preservation?”
“Yes, my liege,” she murmured in feigned obeisance, laughter thrumming in her voice, just below the surface. She even bowed her head in a mock sign of respect. “Whatever you say, my liege.”
His almost equally feigned look of exasperation made her laugh, and the bright, musical sound of it seemed to roll through him like light.
He couldn’t regret the past five years. He didn’t.
He had always taken his duties as Crown Prince as seriously as he’d taken his position as the managing director of the Khatan Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds in the world. Kiara had always been wholly dedicated to her own role as vice president of her family’s famous winery in South Australia’s renowned Barossa Valley, a career that took her all over the world and kept her as busy as he was. Theirs had always been a modern marriage, the only one like it in the whole of his family’s history.
But then, he had long been his country’s emblem of the future, whether he wanted to be or not—and no one had ever asked him his feelings on the subject. His feelings were irrelevant, Azrin knew. While his father was very much and very proudly wedded to the old ways, Azrin was supposed to represent the modern age come to life in the midst of old-world Khatan, his small, oil-rich island nation in the Persian Gulf.
He knew—had always known—that once he took the throne he was expected to usher in the new era of Khatan that his father either could not or did not want to. He was expected to lead his people into a freer, more independent future, without the bloodshed and turmoil some of their neighboring countries had experienced.
And Kiara had been his first step in that direction, little as he might have thought of her in those terms when he’d met her. She was a twenty-first century Western woman in every respect, independent and ambitious, a fourth generation Australian winemaker and wholly impressive in her own right. Marrying her had been a commitment to a very different kind of future than the one his old school father, with his traditional three wives, offered their people.
Together, Azrin and Kiara were considered the new face of a new Khatan. That wouldn’t change now—it would only become more analyzed and critiqued. More speculated about. More observed and remarked upon. Their marriage would cease to be theirs; it would become his people’s, just as the rest of his life would. It was inevitable.
Azrin had always known this day would come. He just hadn’t expected it would come now. So soon. And perhaps because he’d thought he would have so many more years left before it happened, he certainly hadn’t understood until now how very much he’d dreaded it.
He didn’t want to admit that, not even to himself.
“Where have you gone?” she asked now, stopping, and thereby making him stop, too. The busy Sydney Pier bristled with ferries and commuters headed home for the evening, tourist groups and restaurant patrons on their way to an evening out. Her clever eyes met his as her palm curved against his jaw. “You’re miles away.”
“I am still in Khatan,” he said, which was true enough. He took her hand in his, lacing their fingers together, and tugged her along with him as he started to walk again, guiding her around the usual cluster of stalls and street performers making the most of the evening rush and the ever-present tourists. “But I would much rather be in you. Naked, I think you said?”
“I did say that.” Her voice was so proper, so demure. Only because he knew her well could he hear the mischief beneath the surface, that touch of wickedness that made him harden in response. “I thought you might have forgotten. My liege.”
“I never forget anything that has to do with your naked body, Kiara,” he said in a low voice. “Believe me.”
He wasn’t ready, he thought—and yet he must be. What he wanted, what he felt—none of that mattered any longer. What mattered was who he was, and therefore who he was about to become. He simply had to learn to keep his own desires, his own feelings, in reserve, just as he’d done for years before he’d met Kiara. In truth, it had been nothing but selfishness that had allowed him to spend the past five years pretending it could ever be otherwise.
He handed Kiara into the long black car that idled at the curb once they reached the street and climbed in after her.
Despite the fact that they were a prince and a princess, a royal sheikh and his chosen bride, they had spent years behaving as if they were like any other high-powered couple anywhere else in the world. They’d believed it themselves, Azrin thought. He certainly had.
The Prince and Princess of Khatan were relatable, accessible. Normal. They worked hard and didn’t get to see as much of each other as they’d like. Theirs was not a story of harems and exoticism, royal excesses and the bizarre lifestyles of the absurdly privileged. They were your everyday, run-of-the-mill power couple, just trying to excel at what they did. Just like you.
And yet they were not those couples, and never would be.
They were not normal. They had only been pretending. He told himself it was not a kind of grief that gripped him then—that it was simply reality.
He would be king. She would be his queen. There were greater expectations of those roles than of the ones they’d been playing at all this time. There were different, more complicated considerations. He knew with the kick of something like foreboding, deep in his gut, that there were great sacrifices that both of them would have to make.
It was only change, he told himself again. Everything and everyone changed.
But not tonight.
CHAPTER TWO
IT TOOK Kiara long moments after she woke in the wide, plush bed in the center of a room bathed in light to recall that she was in Sydney. In the penthouse in Sydney, she reminded herself as she stretched—that glorious multilevel dwelling high on the top of an exclusive building that only Azrin, who had been raised between several palaces, could call an apartment. Her lips curved.
She swung her legs over the side of the platform bed and rose slowly, smiling at the delicious feeling of bone-lessness all throughout her body. That was the Azrin effect. She supposed she should have been used to it by now. Images of the previous night swept through her head, each more erotic than the last. He was a sensualist, her husband; a demanding lover who held nothing back—and took everything in return.
She found herself in the opulent shower with no real idea how she’d got there, humming to herself as she used the delicately scented soap over the skin he’d tasted and touched repeatedly. That was what he did—he made her a besotted, airheaded fool. When he was near, she found she could think of very little else.
Just him. Only him.
She stepped from the great glass shower that she knew from past experience could hold both of them as well as some of Azrin’s more inventive fantasies, and toweled herself off, letting her hair down from the clip she’d used to secure it away from the hot spray. Sometimes she felt guilty that she often considered her demanding career a necessary a bit of breathing room between rounds with her far more demanding, far more consuming husband. There was just something about Azrin, she thought, smiling to herself, that encouraged complete surrender.
She found him out in the great room, lounging carelessly on the low sofa that sprawled out in the center of the sleek, modern space, speaking in assured and confident Arabic into the tablet he used for video conferencing. His fierce gaze met hers and though he did not smile, a flash of heat moved through her anyway.
Even after the night they’d shared, she wanted more. Her core warmed anew, ready for him at a glance. Again. Always.
He was lethal.
She made sure to keep out of sight of the camera, slipping into the open-plan gourmet kitchen that neither she nor Azrin had ever cooked in to fix herself a morning coffee from the imposing, gleaming espresso machine. A few minutes later she settled with the fruits of her labor—a flat white in a warm ceramic mug, perfectly made if she said so herself—on one of the chrome bar stools that fetched up to the shiny granite expanse of kitchen counter.
She still did not speak Arabic, though she’d picked up a few phrases over the years, none of them particularly repeatable outside of the bedroom. So she didn’t try to figure out what he was talking about in that commanding tone that reminded her that he was a royal prince who some called my liege without irony; she let his deep, sure voice wash over her like a caress. She sat and enjoyed a rare moment with nothing to do but look out the wall of floor-to-ceiling glass windows that faced north, the spectacular view stretching across the green lushness of Hyde Park toward the gorgeous Royal Botanic Gardens, the soaring shapes of the Sydney Opera House, and the picturesque Sydney Harbor, all of it bathed in the sweet, golden Australian sunshine.
But she couldn’t keep it up. Too soon she was worrying over a problem that had cropped up with the export of one of the Zinfandels they’d been experimenting with in recent years, and wondering if it required a quick, unscheduled call to her mother, the formidable CEO of Frederick Wines and sometime bane of Kiara’s existence. Given the complicated cocktail of guilt, love and obligation that characterized Kiara’s relationship with her mother as both her daughter and her second-in-command, Kiara usually preferred to handle things like this on her own. She argued the pros and cons in her head, going back and forth again and again.
Sydney preened before her in the abundant sunshine, skyscrapers sparkling in the light and the harbor dotted with sails and ferry boats far below, but Kiara hardly saw them. In her mind, she saw the greens and golds of her beloved Barossa Valley, the rich green vineyards spreading out in all directions, the complacent little towns bristling with Bavarian architecture, built by settlers like Kiara’s ancestors who’d fled from religious persecution in Prussia. She saw the family vineyards that had dominated her life since she was a girl—and the grand old chateau that had been in her family for generations.
The winery had taken over her mother’s life when she’d found herself there, a widow with an infant, and it was Kiara’s life, too, as it could hardly be anything else. At the very least, she had to prove to both her mother and herself that it had all been worth it, didn’t she? All the years of sacrifice and struggle on her mother’s part to build and maintain Kiara’s heritage—surely Kiara owed her, at the very least, her own commitment to that heritage.
She wasn’t sure what made her look up to find Azrin watching her then, his conference clearly over and an unusually serious look on his ruthless face.
“Good morning,” she said and smiled, pushing her concerns away as she drank him in, as if he could clear her head and vanquish her mother’s doubt just by being there in front of her. Instead of halfway across the world somewhere, available only by phone or video chat, which was the way she usually saw him.
She expected him to smile back. But he only looked at her for a long moment, and something twisted inside her—something she didn’t entirely understand. She remembered, then, his unusual urgency the night before. The edge to him that had made him even more fierce, even more demanding than usual. Something skittered down her spine, making her sit straighter on the stool. She smoothed the edges of her silk wrapper around her. She didn’t look away.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked softly. “What’s happened?”
“I am admiring my beautiful wife,” he said, though there was a certain rawness in his near-blue eyes. “My princess. My future queen.”
Kiara was uneasy, and she didn’t know why. He looked as if he’d been up for hours, which was not particularly remarkable, given his many business concerns and the world’s various time zones. His dark hair looked rumpled, as if he’d been running his hands through it repeatedly. He hadn’t bothered to shave, and the rough shadow along his tough jaw made him look more like the sheikh she sometimes forgot he was and less like the cosmopolitan, sophisticated husband with whom she explored the great modern cities of the world.
For some reason, her throat was dry.
“You could sound a bit less complimentary,” she pointed out, trying to sound as teasing and as light as she usually did. “If you tried. Though you’d have to work hard at it.”
He nearly smiled then, and she had the strange notion that it was against his will. Something sat heavy in the room, making her anxious, and she could see he felt it, too—that it was in him, something grim and hard behind his gaze, making those near-blue eyes grow dark. Making it difficult to breathe.
Kiara prided herself on her ability to close deals and navigate the sometimes treacherous labyrinth of international business concerns in general and the wine industry in particular. Hell, she was good at it. She’d had to be, having had to overcome the usual suspicions that she’d been promoted thanks to her relationship with the boss lady rather than her own hard work, and then, after her wedding, having to stare down everyone who’d sniggered and snidely called her your highness or princess in the middle of a tense meeting.
She enjoyed confounding expectations, thank you very much. She’d learned how to keep people at arm’s length as a defense mechanism against her mother’s complete lack of boundaries when she was still a girl. She’d spent her professional life cultivating a little bit of an untouchable ice-queen facade, and becoming a widely photographed and speculated-about princess had only helped make her deliberate shell that much more impenetrable. She liked it that way.
But this man was different. This man looked at her with some kind of pain in him and she would do anything—dance, tease, crawl, whatever worked—to make it go away. This was Azrin, and the love she felt for him—the love that had crashed into her and wholly altered the course of her life five years ago—was impossible to hide away behind some smooth mask. He was the one person on earth that she never, ever wanted at arm’s length, no matter how wild and unbalanced that sometimes made her feel inside, and no matter how far away from each other they often were.
She was up and on her feet before she knew she meant to move, crossing over to him.
“I have something to tell you,” he said, his gaze still so dark, so bleak.
“Then tell me,” she said. But she straddled him where he sat, letting her silk wrapper fall open to show that she was naked and still warm from her shower beneath it. “But you’ll forgive me if I make the conversation a little more exciting, won’t you?”
She wasn’t really thinking. She only knew she wanted to soothe him, and to do something to make whatever this was better. She felt him harden beneath her, felt his breath against her neck, as if he was as helpless to resist this pull between them as she had always been.
But she knew they both were. It had been this way, outsized and impossible and wholly irresistible, from the very beginning.
“Kiara …” he said, in that tone that was supposed to be reproving, chastising even, but his hands slid beneath the wrapper and onto her bare skin, smoothing over her hips. She arched against him, feeling the scrape of his jaw against the tender slope of her breast. He tilted his head back to look up at her, his hard mouth in an unsmiling line. “What are you doing?”
She thought that was obvious, but she only smiled, and rolled her hips, the heat and strength of him against the softest part of her. She ached as if she’d never had him. She burned as if he was already deep within her. And his eyes lit with that same fire, and she knew he felt it, too.
Holding his gaze, she reached down between them and released him from his trousers with impatient hands, stroking his silken length, driving herself a little bit wild. Still watching him, those unholy eyes and his fierce, uncompromising face, she shifted up and over him, then sank down, sheathing him hard and deep within her.
“I’m distracting you,” she told him, her voice uneven.
“Or possibly killing me,” he muttered, taking her mouth with his in a long, hard kiss. “As I suspect is your plan.”
She moved against him, rocking him deeper into her, unable to bite back her own small sigh of pleasure. He moved with her until she started to shake, and then he took control. His hands gripped her hips, preventing her from rocking against him when she wanted to tip herself over the edge.
“What are you doing?” she demanded, her voice a mere scrap of ragged sound, and his smile made her shiver.
“Distracting you,” he said, his cool eyes glittering with that sensual promise that made her feel nearly giddy. “You’ll come when I tell you to, Kiara, and not before.”
She wanted to argue, but he moved then, and she could do nothing at all but move with him, surrendering to his hands, his wicked mouth, and his dark, whispered commands. Letting him build the fire between them into an out of control blaze. Letting him take them both exactly where she wanted to go.
And when he finally ordered her to come, she did, screaming out his name.
Azrin could not understand why he didn’t simply tell her.
Why he hadn’t told her already. Why some part of him didn’t want to tell her at all.
They’d had the one last, long night. Drawing it out any further was nothing more than the very kind of selfishness he could no longer allow himself.
She was still in the shower. He could see the shape of her through the steamy glass, and he already regretted having left the warm embrace of the hot water. He could have stayed in there with her, and continued this exercise in pretense, in misdirection, as if they could lose themselves enough in each other that the whole world would go away.
Perhaps that was what he wanted. If he was honest, he knew that it was.
Hadn’t that been what Kiara had always been for him? A step away from the expected—an escape from the traditional?
Enjoy yourself while you can, his father had said when he’d married, his creased face canny, knowing. As unsympathetic as ever, the old man as harsh a ruler of his family as he was of his country. You will pay for it all soon enough, I promise you.
Because his father had known, too: Kiara was Azrin’s way of asserting himself in a life that would too soon be swallowed whole by duty and sacrifice. There would be no escape.
But Kiara had been his. All his. He’d been unable to resist her. She was his most selfish act of all, having nothing whatosever to do with the things that were expected of him, the things he expected of himself. He had been meant to marry a woman like his own mother—one of the exquisite Khatanian girls who had been trotted out before him at every social opportunity since he was a boy, each more perfect than the last, each competing to show herself to be the most obvious choice for Azrin’s future queen.
They were indistinguishably attractive, impeccably mannered and becomingly modest. They were all from powerful, noble families, all raised with the same set of ideals and expectations, all bred to be perfect wives and excellent mothers, all taught from birth to anticipate and tend to a man’s every passing whim—and if that man was to be their king? All the better.
Instead, he’d met Kiara in a crowded little laneway in Melbourne. He had been walking off his jet lag as he prepared for a week’s worth of meetings with some of the city’s financial leaders. He’d ducked into one of the narrow alleys that snaked behind a typical Melbourne street featuring a jumble of sleek modern skyscrapers and Victorian-era facades, and had found his way to a tiny cafе that had reminded him of one of his favorite spots in Paris. His bodyguard had cleared the way for him to claim a seat at one of the tiny tables overlooking the busy little lane—perhaps a touch overzealously.
“I think you’ll find it’s customary to pretend to apologize when stealing a table from someone else,” she had said, a teasing note in her voice that made her sound as if she was about to bubble over into laughter. As if there was something impossibly merry, very nearly golden, inside her just bursting to come out. That had been his first impression of Kiara—that voice.
Then he’d looked up. He’d never been able to account for the way that first look at her, when she’d been a stranger and speaking to him as if she found him both unimpressive in the extreme and somewhat ridiculous—not something that had ever happened to him before—had struck him like that. Like an unerring blow straight to the solar plexus.
First he’d seen that mouth. It had hit him. Hard. He’d seen her brown eyes, much too intelligent and direct, with the same arch look in them that he’d heard in her voice. He’d had the impression of her pretty face, her hair thrown back into a careless twist at the back of her head. It had been winter in Melbourne, and she’d dressed for it in boots and tights beneath some kind of flirty little skirt, and a sleek sort of coat with a bright red scarf wrapped about her neck. She had been all edges and color, attitude and mockery, and should not have attracted or interested him in any possible way.
“But as you and your entourage are fairly bristling with self-importance,” she’d continued in that same tone, waving a hand at his bodyguard and himself with an obvious lack of the respect he’d usually received, which Azrin had found entirely too intriguing in spite of himself, “I can only assume that you see cafе tables as one more thing you are compelled to conquer.” She’d smiled, which had not detracted from her sarcasm in any way. “In which case, have at. You clearly need it more than I do.”
She’d turned to go, and Azrin had found that unbearable. He hadn’t allowed himself to question why that should be, or, worse, why he should feel compelled to act on that unprecedented feeling.
“Please,” he’d said, shocking his usually unflappable bodyguard almost as much as he’d shocked himself—as Azrin was not known for his interest in sharp-mouthed, clever-eyed girls who took too much pleasure in public dressing-downs. “Join me. You can enumerate my many character flaws, and I will buy you a coffee for your troubles.”
She’d turned back to him, a considering sort of light in her captivating eyes, and a smile moving across that generous mouth of hers.
“I can do that alone,” she’d pointed out, her smile deepening. “I’m already doing it in my head, as a matter of fact.”
“Think of how much more satisfying it will be to abuse me to my face,” he’d said silkily. “How can you resist that kind of challenge?”
