In Defiance of Duty (11 page)

“I was not trying to intimidate anyone,” he said mildly enough. Which was perhaps not in the least bit mild. “You would know it if I had been, I am certain.” She shook her head as if she despaired of him. He let his gaze travel all over her, and enjoyed it when she flushed. There was so much to say, to work through, and yet all he could seem to concentrate on was the simple satisfaction of being with her again. Of affecting her. Of making her react to him instead of simply walking away from him. He was sure that made him a fool, and he couldn’t even bring himself to care.

“You look tired,” he pointed out because he knew it would make her eyes narrow in outrage, and it did. “Sleepless nights? An unquiet mind, perhaps, interfering with your rest?”

“Not at all.” She met his gaze then with the full force of hers, brown and deep and, he couldn’t help but notice, shadowed. She angled her chin up in some kind of defiance. “I’ve never slept better.”

Azrin didn’t bother to call her a liar. He didn’t have to. He could see the smudges of sleeplessness below her beautiful eyes, like twin bruises. He could see how pale she still was, though that did not seem to diminish either her prettiness or his automatic response to it. He found her as bewitching as ever—more, he acknowledged, because she seemed so unusually vulnerable.

And he was not above feeling it as a kind of victory that her return home had not resulted in an immediate return to her former vitality. That this separation was as terrible for her as it was for him. That she was not blooming into health and happiness without him. What would he have done if she was?

The air between them seemed to stretch, then tighten. Finally, she shifted in her seat, as if the tension was getting to her as much as it was to him. He had the impression it was hard for her to look at him again. Or perhaps he only wanted it to be. As if that might be telling.

“Why are you here?” she asked quietly, staring down at her hands as if they fascinated her suddenly.

“To discuss the terms of our separation, of course.” Which was true, in its way. She flinched, then looked toward the open door. He watched her, his eyes narrowing in speculation. Was that guilt? His body thrummed with a kind of anticipation. “Is it a secret?”

“Not a secret, of course. But I haven’t got around to telling anyone.”

“Meaning it’s a secret.”

“Meaning I haven’t got around to telling anyone,” she repeated, frowning at him. “It doesn’t mean anything more than that.” He studied her for a moment. “Why not?” When she frowned again, as if she didn’t understand him, he sighed. “Why haven’t you told anyone? I can understand not wishing to call a press conference, but surely this is precisely the news your mother has waited all these years to hear. Why would you deny her?” She shook her head, her frown deepening. She pulled in a breath.

“I thought I knew who I was marrying,” she said in a small voice. “What I was getting myself into. I thought I knew what I was doing.” Her shoulders rose and then fell. “I was wrong.”

He let that sit for a moment, ignoring the wild pounding inside of him that wanted only to reject her attempts to distance herself. Even in words.

“Let me understand you,” he said coolly, when he could speak without any hint of temper. Or, worse, that shameful desperation. “Your intention is to simply slip back into your old life? Pretend none of this ever happened?”

The look in her eyes then hurt him.

“I doubt it would work,” she said almost ruefully. “But what else can we do?”

“This is the solution you have come up with.” It was not exactly a question, and her gaze became wary as she watched him. He leaned back against the sofa, the better to keep himself from reaching out to her. “This is the best you can do, after all of these weeks apart.”

“I didn’t say I was ready to discuss anything today,” she pointed out crisply. “You chose to simply appear here without any warning. You can’t possibly expect me to be anything but thrown off balance.”

“You have not bothered to keep in touch, Kiara,” he said, his hold on his control slipping again, and his temper bleeding through despite his best efforts. “What was I meant to do?”

“You were meant to give me space,” she retorted. She shook her head, as if cataloguing all of his shortcomings, all of her complaints. “You seem to have a very hard time listening to the things I want and need, Azrin. It’s difficult not to assume that speaks to deep and abiding flaws in our relationship.”

“If I recall your comments in Washington correctly,” he bit out, “and I am certain I do, there is not a single aspect of our relationship that you don’t find flawed.

Or did I misunderstand your suggestion that I take a second wife? And perhaps even a third?” He did not imagine the way she stiffened then, the way her lips pressed tightly together.

“Are you here to tell me you’ve found a few good candidates?” she asked, and he did not imagine the edge in her voice, either. Good, he thought, a dark satisfaction running through him then. Why should he be the only one to take exception to that particular suggestion?

satisfaction running through him then. Why should he be the only one to take exception to that particular suggestion?

“Perhaps I should ask you the same question,” he replied, suddenly far calmer than he’d been. “Wasn’t that my supposed replacement I saw out in the kitchen?” Kiara closed her eyes briefly, then opened them again. They were too bright, but she made no attempt to hide that from him, she only looked at him. He thought he saw the faintest tremor move over her lips, but she rubbed her hand over her jaw and he could not be sure.

“I don’t want to do this,” she said in a low voice. “I don’t want to fight with you. It only proves how little we know each other after all this time, and it breaks my heart.” She pulled in a breath. “We come from very different worlds, Azrin, just as everybody warned us. Our parents, the papers, angry strangers on the internet.

Maybe we should end this now before we wind up hating each other. I have to think that would be even worse.” He moved then, leaning toward her but not quite closing the distance between them. As ever, he felt the burn of it. The fire, the connection. Her eyes widened, but she didn’t shrink away from him. He was desperate enough to think that might be progress.

“What would it take?” he asked. “What do you think could fix this?”

She shrugged helplessly, a gesture of surrender that he found stuck into him like something sharp. He didn’t want her to give in, this strong, stubborn woman. To give up. He wanted anything but that.

“I don’t think we can, unless you have access to a time machine.” She let out a small sound. “How else could we go back and really figure out who we are?”

“Do you think I don’t know who you are, Kiara?” he asked, aware that his voice was little more than a rasp in the quiet room.

“I know you don’t,” she said, some of the hardness returning to her gaze, her mouth. But then she seemed to shake it off. “But the truth is, I thought you were someone else entirely. I knew a man who was only a prince as an aside. I was completely unprepared for what you’d become when you became a king.”

“I am the same man,” he said. His voice was too harsh, too sure. The words seemed to fall between them like stones.

“You are not.” Her voice was firm. When her eyes met his, he saw the gleam of something he didn’t fully understand and certainly didn’t like.

This was worse, he thought then—worse even than gestures of defeat. This quiet, soft-spoken talk of the end of them, as if Kiara was conducting a pale, distant postmortem. The wildness was easier; the passion and the pain. The fight. This was intolerable.

“I think you misunderstand me,” he managed to say in a voice somewhere near even. “In fact, I know you do.”

“See?” She opened her hands wide. “You are making my point for me.”

He had to move then and he did, rising from the sofa and somehow not going to her, not touching her, not showing her the vivid truth of them that he could feel arcing between them even now, even as she talked so resolutely about an ending he could not, would not accept. He prowled to the window and stared out, seeing nothing. No acres of vines, no blue sky above, no distant hills.

“What if we could make our own time machine of sorts?” he asked without turning around to face her. “You made a lot of claims in Washington. That I pushed you into dating me, into sleeping with me, into marrying me. What if we dated on your schedule instead?” There was no sound at all for a beat, then another. Then she made a sort of scoffing noise. Azrin turned then. There was a hectic color splashed across her cheekbones that could as easily be temper or desire. Or some potent combination of both.

He raised his brows at her, daring her, and waited.

“What are you talking about?” she asked after another long moment. “That’s ridiculous.” Her voice was cross. Annoyed. But he was sure there was something beneath it. He could feel it. He knew it—because she was wrong. He knew her.

“Why is it ridiculous?” he asked, finding to his surprise that he was suddenly able to project a great calm he did not feel. At all.

“We can’t just pretend that nothing’s happened between us!” she threw at him, her eyes wide, that color deepening in her cheeks. “That we’re not married, that you’re not … you. We can’t date!”

“We don’t have to pretend that we’re not who we are—that would defeat the purpose.” He spoke with such authority, as if he was not making this up on the spot.

As if this was not a last-ditch attempt to talk her into something he knew neither one of them would ever forgive him for simply taking. Though perhaps only he knew how close he was to doing so—simply throwing her over his shoulder like some kind of barbarian and to hell with what she said she wanted.

“We can pretend that we have just met,” he continued like a civilized man would. “You say I don’t know you and I say that if that’s true, we can fix it. Introduce yourself to me. Tell me who you are.” He shrugged. “Perhaps you will find you don’t know me as well as you think you do, either. Perhaps we will find there are whole worlds yet to discover between us.”

She stared at him.

“You’re serious,” she breathed.

She swallowed, then shook her head as if she couldn’t believe it. As if she doubted what she was seeing, hearing. Or perhaps she only wanted to doubt it.

“Come, now, Kiara,” he said silkily. “What do you have to lose?”

SHE had everything to lose, Kiara thought some time later. But that wasn’t something she could tell him, not without admitting how lost he made her feel, or how easily he could have made her stay with him in Washington, had he only pressed the issue.

They sat together out on the wide stone terrace that overlooked the gardens and the winery’s busy cellar door, watching the summer tourists come in flocks and buses and even on foot to sample the Frederick wines and the food they served in the small, adjacent restaurant.

The day was impossibly perfect all around them, as if it was colluding with Kiara to show off the beauty of the valley to Azrin, to demand he take notice. They had debated Azrin’s absurd idea in the sitting room for a long time, until Kiara had been sure her head was going to break into pieces, and they’d agreed, finally, to take a break from it. A small negotiated oasis of peace.

“Surely,” Azrin had drawled in that sardonic way of his, “we are not so lost to each other that we cannot enjoy each other’s company. If only for a little while.”

“Surely,” Azrin had drawled in that sardonic way of his, “we are not so lost to each other that we cannot enjoy each other’s company. If only for a little while.” There had been no particular reason for that remark to set her teeth on edge, and yet it had.

Nevertheless, Kiara had taken Azrin on a tour of the vineyards, showing him all the ways Frederick Winery had changed since he’d last been here for any serious length of time, back when they’d started dating. She couldn’t pretend that there wasn’t a huge part of her that was trying to prove something to him as she did it.

Look at the scale of our operation, perhaps. Pay attention to how I’m needed here, and why, she’d said without using the words, with every single vine and barrel she’d pointed out to him.

Azrin, of course, had said nothing. He’d only watched and listened, had seemed to consider the things she’d showed him, with that intense focus of his that made her heart seem to work harder in her chest.

After the impromptu tour, they’d sat down for a simple lunch full of local flavor that Kiara had pulled together from the usual reserves in the chateau’s kitchen.

She’d put thick slices of freshly baked bread, a few German sausages and a selection of local cheeses on a platter. Then she’d fished a bit of pear chutney from the pantry and, after a moment’s thought, a particularly spicy beetroot relish, as well. She’d added small bowls of almonds and olives, and a dish of salted olive oil to dip the bread in.

Neither one of them wanted wine despite the fact there was so much of it available; a necessary precaution in her case, Kiara reasoned, given Azrin’s historic ability to run roughshod right over her even without any wine involved.

Or was it more accurate to say it was usually her decision to give in to whatever it was he wanted, whether he asked her for her surrender or not? She wasn’t sure she liked that thought, and concentrated on the food instead.

For a long time, they simply ate together at one of the small tables nestled there in the shade, in a silence she might have thought was peaceful, even companionable, had she not known better. Had the tension between them not added some kind of indefinable seasoning to each bite she took, a sort of prickle to the breeze that played over the table, even a certain heat to the measuring way his storm-tossed eyes moved over her when he thought she wasn’t paying attention.

“You can’t really want to walk away from our marriage without at least trying to fix it,” he said after one such look in that darkly seductive way of his—breaking the silence and the peace between them that easily, though there was a part of Kiara that welcomed it the way she welcomed the onset of a storm after too long beneath threatening clouds. “That doesn’t sound like the Kiara I know.”