A Royal Engagement: The Storm Within\The Reluctant Queen (10 page)

He shocked her then by reaching over and taking her hand in his far bigger one, holding it between his palms.

Lara jumped, a shudder working through her body, as she stared at the place they were connected, her fingers curling
toward his. She felt herself blush, hard, the heat prickling over her and casting her in a hot, breathless red.

“Is it so terrible?” he asked softly, very nearly amused, his voice a caress in the stillness of the car's plush interior. “I am not a bad man.”

“You'll understand if I choose to reserve judgment on that,” she said in a voice that sounded so much stronger, so much crisper, than she felt—and yet she did not pull her hand away from his. “Given that you are currently blackmailing me into marrying you, as if we are in some gothic novel.”

“You intrigue me, Princess,” he said, his voice insinuating itself in places it should not have been able to reach. Heat moved between them, or she simply burned, and she could not pretend that she was not at least partly as motivated by that as she was by her concern for the rest of it. What did that make her?

“That sounds like a fantastic basis for a marriage,” she managed to say. “You are intrigued, I am forced into it against my will, and the fate of my mother and all the citizens of Alakkul hangs in the balance. How delightful.”

“Ah,” he said in a voice that made her think of much darker delights, skin against skin, long, hot nights, all those things she'd long imagined with him but thought would never come to pass, “but will is a delicate thing, is it not?”

He lifted her hand to his mouth. Trapped, captivated—
appalled
, she told herself!—she only watched. As he turned her hand in his. As he brought her palm closer to the hard line of his full lips. As his thunderstorm eyes met hers, electric, demanding.

And as he kissed the center of her palm, sending a lightning bolt of impossible desire directly into her core.

L
ARA
snatched her hand back, jumping in her seat as if he'd bitten her. And then she felt herself melt into a wild heat, imagining what it might be like if he did exactly that.

“What are you doing?” she demanded, horrified at herself, curling the palm he'd tasted into a fist and shoving it into her lap. Would she fall for him so easily, so quickly? After twelve years and far too much water under the bridge? “You can't—you can't
possibly
—”

“We are to be married,” he said, leaning back in his seat, his gray eyes gleaming silver now, his hard mouth allowing the smallest curve. “What do you think I'm doing?”

She could not think at all—that was the problem! Her mind was a loud, buzzing blank, like static, and it was all too much to take. Adel's unexpected appearance in the parking lot. The threats, the compulsion. The news of her father, which she could still hardly bear to think about, could still barely bring herself to accept as real. Her own capitulation that had led to her presence in this car. And it was his fault! She could not seem to form a single coherent thought, save that.
He
had done this. Lara was perfectly clear about the fact that Adel Qaderi was capable of anything. It was just as her mother had always said—Alakkulian men could not be trusted.

Hadn't he just proved that? What decent, honorable man
would behave as he had done, under these insane circumstances?

Her own pounding need, her own desire—Lara could not let herself consider.

“How can you possibly imagine that I would welcome your advances?” she hissed at him. “I will never—”

“Never is a very long time,” he said, with a soft laugh, as if she delighted him. “Be careful how you use the word. It might come to haunt you.”

Suddenly, the future she could not escape yawned open in front of her, a deep, black hole. It was one thing to offer to make a sacrifice, knowing it was the right thing—the only thing—to do. But how was she meant to survive
this
? The day-to-day, moment-to-moment reality of being in this man's possession? Being a wife? A queen? A
lover
, a voice inside whispered, and her stomach clenched again.

“Are you so delusional that you truly believe that a woman in my position would
ever
want you to touch her?” she asked, her voice rasping over everything she could not say, everything she feared—including her own reactions to this man.
Especially
her reactions. The heat between her legs. The ache in her too-heavy breasts. Her inability to draw a full breath. The car seemed too close around her.
He
was too close.

“I don't know about a woman in your position,” he murmured, stretching his arm out along the back of the seat and in so doing, drawing her attention away from her own panic and bringing it to his electric physicality. “That is far too abstract for me. I can only tell you what is concrete.” His hot gaze dropped from her eyes to her mouth. His voice lowered. “What I see, what I smell, what I know.”

“That I can barely remember you?” she supplied in desperation, shifting to be sure she avoided even the faintest brush of contact with his arm. “That I want nothing to do with you?”

“That your body wants me, no matter what you might say
to the contrary,” he said, seemingly unperturbed by her acidity. He even smiled, as if he could see the way her breasts firmed, her thighs clenched. As if he knew her treacherous body better than she did. As if he understood the potent, wild combination of emotion and arousal that made Lara feel like a stranger to herself.

“You know nothing about me,” she threw out, desperately. “We might as well be complete strangers!”

He leaned forward, and Lara had to force herself not to squeak like a mouse and shrink away from him. But pretending to be strong only left her far too close to him. Close enough to see the faint hint of his beard along his strong jaw. Close enough to find herself mesmerized by that hard mouth she now knew could be devastatingly soft, if he chose. Close enough to smell the faint hint of sandalwood that clung to him, and something else, something male and only his, beneath.

“We are not strangers,” he said, his eyes gleaming pure silver now. “We never were. I am the man who will be your husband, your lover, the father of your children. These things will happen, Princess. Perhaps not today. Perhaps not even soon. But believe me, they will happen.”

“I said I would marry you,” she breathed, locked in his uncompromising gaze, lost in the spell he cast around them. “I can't do anything else, can I?”

“No.” His eyes seemed to warm, and to warm her, too. “You cannot do anything else.”

“I never said anything about…the rest of it,” she continued, deeply unnerved. She was aware of him—every part of him. The way he looked at her, the heat that seemed to emanate from his tautly muscled form, even the places his gaze touched as it swept over her. She had to force herself to breathe. And then again.

His smile deepened, as if she was precious to him some
how. As if she was more than merely a pawn in his game. But how could that be?

He reached down with the hand he'd laid against the back of their seat and traced a line along her jaw, from temple to lip, until he held her chin in his fingers.

She knew she should jerk away. She told herself hers was the fascination of the fly for the spider, the moth for the flame, and it would be suicidal to pay more attention to the unfamiliar heat and
want
that scorched her than to her own mind—

But she did not move.

She only watched him. Helpless. Caught. And unable, in that moment, to think of a single reason she should fight him.

“We will work it out, you and I,” he said. Quiet command rang in his voice, through her. “It was foretold when we were children. Never doubt it now.”

“Of course,” she said, aware of his fingers like hot brands against her skin—aware, too, of the rich, wild heat that washed through her because of it. Of how much she had always wanted him, even when she'd believed him to be no more than a dream. “Because you say so. Does the world always align itself with your wishes, according to your commands?”

“Of course,” he said, echoing her, that smile of his lighting up his eyes, broadcasting that calm confidence, that deceptively graceful strength of his. “I am the King.”

 

The shockingly luxurious private jet hovered somewhere high in the night sky above the Atlantic Ocean, the world shrouded in black on all sides, but Lara could not sleep as she knew she should. She stared blindly out the window as the plane cut through the dark clouds, shivering slightly as reality sank into her like a great weight.

What had she done? How could she possibly have agreed to this?

She had spent her whole life avoiding exactly this—her
return to Alakkul. Marlena had spoken of it as if it was the worst possible scenario, the ultimate pit of doom and despair. As if they would die should it happen—or, worse, wish to die.
“Azat will hunt us down and drag us back there,”
she had told the young Lara again and again.
“He will make you one more of his little puppets, who live only to serve him!”

They had taken Marlena's mother's maiden name as their surname. No more Princess Lara. No more
Your Highness.
Marlena had moved them whenever she felt threatened, whenever she had reason to think the King's goons were drawing near. Always, King Azat was the boogeyman, the monster they sought to avoid. Lara wasn't sure when the crushing fear had started to recede—or why Marlena had finally permitted them to settle down in Denver. She only knew that once she'd finished college, Marlena had seemed far less worried than she'd been before, and far happier to make herself a home in nearby Aspen.

Lara wasn't sure when she'd first started to wonder if, perhaps, Marlena had simply been overreacting. Perhaps there had never been any goons—any escape. Perhaps Marlena had simply wanted a divorce. But thinking such things had always felt deeply disloyal to the only parent she had access to, and felt doubly so now. Lara pushed the thoughts away.

Adel sat not far away, frowning down at the documents before him, a soft reading light surrounding him in a warm halo. Lara could not help but watch him. He was so much more than the cascade of her teenage memories, her teenage feelings, and the simple fact of his commanding presence. He was everything she had been taught to fear about Alakkul—and Alakkulian men in particular. Autocratic bullies, Marlena had said—content to use their power to crush, maim, destroy.

Wasn't that what he'd done today? Wasn't that what she'd let him do? Emotion rose like bile in her throat, and she had to struggle to keep from crying out. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to breathe.

She did not know this man. She had only the memories she'd held on to for years, and her own sense that she owed Marlena this—that she could not let her mother pay such a high price for their escape. That was all. And yet she had agreed to marry him? To be the queen of a country she hardly remembered—had gone out of her way, in fact, to forget? Lara shifted in her seat and wondered if she would wake up and find herself in her bed at home in Denver—if this was one more of those dreams she'd used to have, all desperate and yearning and dark until she woke, gasping for breath, her heart pounding in her chest.

But when she looked up, she was still on the plane. It was all too real. And Adel was watching her from his place across the cabin, as if he'd heard her very thoughts.

“You should rest,” he said. His gray eyes were shadowed now, storm-colored and stern, not silver at all. She did not know why she should feel that as a loss—why she should want to change them back. “You will need your strength, I think, for what lies ahead.”

“Thank you,” she said past the dryness in her throat and the clutch of panic that still gripped her. “That is very comforting.”

“Your father lies in state in the palace,” Adel said, his voice giving her no quarter, his hard eyes allowing her no mercy. “He must be buried as his legacy and consequence demand. As his country demands.”

Lara opened her mouth to make a wry comment on that—to mention, perhaps, what sort of legacy he'd always held in her mind—but swiftly thought better of it. Adel Qaderi, hand-picked by King Azat to succeed him, always the son to her father that she could never be, was unlikely to find Marlena Canon's stories of the cruelties visited upon her particularly persuasive. Given the way he'd referred to her mother already, however offhandedly, Lara suspected Adel believed a deeply skewed version of reality. He was King Azat's chosen heir!
She knew exactly what he believed: the story her father had told him.

But what if Marlena had made all of that up?
a small voice asked. She swallowed. It didn't matter any longer. It couldn't. It was twelve years too late. She would have to go on believing what she'd always believed.

Something must have showed on her face, because his attention seemed to focus in on her then. Too intent. Too demanding. He exuded far too much raw power, even sitting there with his work in front of him, like some kind of common businessman.

Common, Lara thought, with a shaking deep within that she could not quite convince herself was panic, was something Adel Qaderi could never be.

“If you have negative things to say about King Azat, as I can see you do, I suggest you say them to me here,” Adel said. His voice was harsh, his gaze frankly condemning. “You are unlikely to find a receptive ear in Alakkul, where he has long been considered a hero as well as a monarch.”

“Perhaps,” Lara said, conscious of the edge in her voice, her skin prickling with the urge to slap back at that disapproving note in his voice, to defend herself and her mother, “he was a better king than he was a father or a husband.” She raised her brows in challenge. “For your country's sake, I certainly hope so.”

“And you feel qualified to judge him as a man, as a father?” Lara did not mistake that silky tone for something soft—she could see the steel in his gaze. “You, who showed your daughterly devotion by pretending he did not exist for twelve long years? You, who were not even aware that he was ill, nor that he had died?”

“I do not need to justify myself or the intricacies of my family's dynamics to you,” she snapped at him, surprised that his words pricked at her.

His eyes bored into her from across the cabin. Why should
she want to squirm? Why should she feel something far too much like shame? “I witnessed, firsthand, what your abandonment wrought.”

“I can imagine how it must have pained him to lose two of his many interchangeable, nameless possessions,” Lara said sarcastically.

“Azat will raise you to be nothing more than a pet,”
Marlena had told her. Repeatedly.
“Meek. Easy. Forever owned and operated at his command, at his disposal. Is that what you want? Is that any kind of life?”

“Believe me, he knew your name,” Adel replied in that low, furious tone. His mouth twisted, and his gaze chilled. “And your mother's.”

“My mother is the only hero I'm aware of being related to,” Lara threw at him, feeling a desperate, consuming need to defend Marlena. To avenge her. To fight for her, even now, even when she wasn't sure she believed her story. “But that's not something a man like you can understand, can you? The plight of a single mother on her own, forced to run from all she knew—”

“Forced?” Adel laughed, but it was a mirthless sound. “You must be joking. The only thing your mother was ever forced to do was face her own failings as a wife. But she could not handle that, and so she ran from the palace with you rather than deal with the consequences of her behavior.” His gaze hardened. “And when I say ‘consequences,' let me be clear. I am speaking of her admitted infidelity.”