In Defiance of Duty (7 page)

“The heir to the kingdom of Khatan will come from your body,” he said, his fierce attention dropping to her abdomen as if he could see the babies they’d never talked about in concrete terms, always couching it in someday and when we’re ready language.

Kiara’s hands crept over her own belly, whether to protect herself or in response to something far more primitive, she didn’t know.

“And the sooner that heir exists, the sooner the whole country can breathe a collective sigh of relief,” he continued in that same aloof tone. “They are still outraged that I vowed to take only one wife. What if you cannot produce sons? What if the royal line is lost?” Azrin shrugged and then smiled, and Kiara almost smiled back, because what he was saying was so archaic that it couldn’t possibly apply to her. To them. To their life together.

But then she remembered that it did.

“Until all these questions are answered,” he said, “I’m afraid your body will be seen to be as much theirs as yours.”

“And you accept that,” she said softly.

“This is our life, Kiara,” he replied, that exhausted sort of look in his eyes that made her feel small and petulant. But that was unfair, wasn’t it? This was her life, too. “This is who we are.”

This is who you are, she thought, but did not say.

She moved away from him, sinking down to sit in one of the heavily brocaded armchairs, blinking back a searing heat, determined that she would not cry. Not now, when she already felt too vulnerable.

“And maybe they’re right,” Azrin said after a moment. Kiara felt the world tilt beneath her feet, and she wasn’t even standing. She stared at him, unable, in that moment, to speak. He shrugged out of his clothes, baring his beautiful body to her, and for once she felt almost numb. “Maybe we should start thinking about children.”

She swallowed, panic licking over her skin, making her head feel heavy.

“Are you saying that as my husband?” she asked, her voice hardly above a whisper. “Or as the king who agrees with his mother that it would foster goodwill with your subjects?”

His gaze grew cold. Unbearably hard. “Can’t I be both?”

She didn’t know how to answer that. She didn’t understand what was happening. She only knew she wanted to curl into a ball and sob, and none of this was helping.

“You told me we could wait until I was ready,” she reminded him, a kind of thick dread making her limbs feel heavy. Making her temples pound. “You promised.”

promised.”

“Don’t look at me like that, Kiara,” he replied, his tone harsh. Or maybe it only felt that way, like one more blow in a long series of them. “We’ve been married for five years. You know I must have an heir at some point or another. It’s not entirely unreasonable to discuss it, is it?”

“Maybe you and your parents and your cabinet ministers should consult with each other, then,” she threw at him, feeling wild. Miserable. Attacked. “You can let me know what conclusions you reach. I’ll just trot along, obeying your decrees like a happy little brood mare, shall I?” She regretted it the moment she said it.

His gaze turned dark, and his face seemed to tighten. He stared at her, affront and something worse all over him, and Kiara couldn’t seem to do anything but stare back. He muttered something in Arabic that made her flinch even without understanding it, then turned and strode away from her. She heard the water turn on in the adjacent bath, and only then did she let herself breathe, though it sounded more like a sob in the simmering wake of his exit.

A wave of misery flooded through her, and she couldn’t stand it. She couldn’t even seem to breathe through it. She found herself up and on her feet, then walking into Azrin’s bath without knowing she meant to move.

She found him in the shower, steam billowing, bracing himself against the tiled wall as the water beat down on him from above. He turned to look at her as she opened the glass door, and her heart seemed to thud too hard against her ribs.

His eyes were much too dark. His mouth was grim. She felt both reverberate deep inside of her, ripping at her.

“I am not your enemy,” he bit out, as if this hurt him, too. As if she did. “Why do you want so badly to be mine?” But she didn’t want to talk. She didn’t know what to say that wouldn’t hurt them both.

She stepped into the shower fully clothed, and let the hot water wash into her. Over her, wetting her dress, her hair. She put her hands out to touch his slick, hard chest, and when he shifted as if he wanted to talk rather than touch, she gave in to the helpless need clawing at her and slid down to her knees. Slicking her hair back, she knelt before him and kissed her way over the hard ridges of his abdomen, then farther down, her hands gripping the hard muscles of his thighs.

And somewhere along the way she forgot that she meant to quiet him, to apologize somehow, and simply found herself worshiping him. Tasting him. Testing those delicious muscles, that mesmerizing skin, with her mouth, her hands, her tongue.

When she finally moved to his sex, he was hard and inviting, and when she leaned back to look up at him his eyes seemed to glitter with the same tension she felt inside of her. That familiar burn, with a new, desperate edge.

She reached between his legs, letting her hands caress the heavy weight of him, and then she leaned forward and took him deep in her mouth. He said her name like a prayer.

And slowly, deliberately, using her lips and her tongue and the long, slow strokes she knew drove him crazy, Kiara made them both forget.

At least for now.

The night before he took the throne, they hardly slept.

He came into her again and again. He laid her out on the wide bed in the center of his room and stretched out above her, loving his way over every single inch of her skin. She shattered into pieces, he followed. She screamed his name until she thought she might go hoarse.

She took him in and loved him back and neither of them spoke of the desperation, the ferocity, that drove him so hard, that made him near-inexhaustible, that made her eyes well over as she clung to him. That made his mouth seem very nearly grim, even in passion.

That made her wish, so fiercely, that she could take them back to where they’d been before his father’s announcement, that she could will away the dawn and everything that she knew would come with it.

But it came anyway, inevitably. A whole nation waited for him. Monarchs and presidents, emirs and prime ministers and cheering crowds of his own people were there to pay their respects to the new King of Khatan. And Kiara would walk slightly behind him, as was tradition, bow her head, accept her own crown and become his queen.

She wondered in that last, stolen moment in their bedroom if he would ever truly be hers again. If he ever had been—or if all of this had simply been borrowed time, after all. She cast the unsettling thought aside. She made herself smile. For him.

All of this was for him. And she doubted he had any idea how hard this was for her, how deeply she feared losing herself entirely to his crown, his country.

Even harder than that was her suspicion that it was something he wouldn’t want to know.

“We must go,” he said. His voice was too gruff, and there were shadows in his nearly-blue eyes. Kiara did not want to be one of them. Not today. “We must be dressed and prepared and moved into place, like pieces on a chess board.”

She ran her hands up over his perfect chest, tilted her head back to look at him, and felt the first real smile she’d had in ages move over her mouth. She did not want to think of her endless lessons in etiquette from the disapproving collective of his sisters, all of whom had made it clear that she could never be the queen he needed. She did not want to think about how cold he had become, how distant. How far away. She did not want to think of chess, either. She wanted to love him, as simple as that. That was all she’d ever wanted.

“The next time we are alone,” she said softly, “you will be the king.”

She did not say my king.

“I will be your husband,” he replied, pressing a last kiss to her temple, soft and sweet, making her ache for him. For them. For their perfect past and their uncertain future. “Nothing more and nothing less.”

And she wanted, so desperately, to believe him.

SOME two months after his grand coronation, Azrin escorted his queen with great fanfare and a pervasive sense of relief into a glittering ballroom in Washington, D.C.

Other couples took honeymoons, but the brand-new King and Queen of Khatan had traveled purely to allow Azrin to have long-overdue state visits and hold Other couples took honeymoons, but the brand-new King and Queen of Khatan had traveled purely to allow Azrin to have long-overdue state visits and hold talks with Khatan’s allies around the globe. He had spent a few hours in the Oval Office this afternoon discussing his plans to transition his kingdom toward a constitutional monarchy, and now it was time to make nice with the diplomats. This was the final stop on this particular political tour, and tomorrow they could finally go back home to Khatan.

He could hardly wait.

“You look beautiful,” he murmured in Kiara’s ear, and she smiled, though she didn’t turn into him as she might have once. He felt his eyes narrow.

He was impatient for some kind of real privacy, finally. He wanted to be alone with her, rather than surrounded on all sides by too many people wanting too much of him, day and night. He wanted to lose himself in her without worrying if the walls were thin and the Royal Guard too close—or if he would be called away to some crisis, some call, some piece of news that could not wait for morning.

She looked impossibly regal tonight as she greeted the assembled dignitaries before them in a gown of rich burgundy, her hair piled high on the top of her head in a complicated arrangement and surrounded with sparkling diamonds that caught the light with her every movement. She laughed politely at something one of the portly, tuxedoed men said to her and he realized, suddenly, that he couldn’t recall the last time he’d heard her real laughter—that gorgeous laugh of hers that made him feel as if he basked in the sunshine of it. Of her.

One more thing that needed to change, he thought. One more thing these long, grueling months had taken from them both.

Once through the receiving line, Azrin led her out onto the dance floor and pulled her into his arms. She swayed toward him gracefully, her posture achingly perfect as he led her in the steps of the dance. He gazed down into her face and saw, he thought with a pang, his queen. Smooth, gracious. Perfect. But not his Kiara.

“Do you remember that weekend in Barcelona?” he asked suddenly. Without thought—only the need to reach her, somehow.

She blinked in that way that he was beginning to recognize as a stalling tactic—one that he suspected kept that irreverent tongue of hers under control. He knew he should have been pleased that she’d learned discretion. Hadn’t that been why she’d spent all those weeks with his sisters? But instead he felt something entirely too much like loss.

“Which weekend?” she asked lightly. Far too politely, as if he was one of the dignitaries she’d just charmed with so little effort and even less of the real her he knew lurked in there somewhere. It had to. “We’ve been there any number of times over the years.”

“You know which one.” He could not pull her close the way he wanted to, and he could not have said why her reticence irritated him so much, so suddenly. He ordered himself to relax. “But I will remind you. We drank far too much sangria and danced for hours. We were the youngest couple in the place by several decades.” He moved closer than he should. “And I know you remember it as well as I do.” He remembered her laughter most of all—the way it had poured over them both like water, bathing them both in the joy of it. He remembered the insistent pulse of the music and the fact that they had been soundly out danced by local couples old enough to be his own grandparents. And he remembered walking back to their hotel in the small hours, holding her hand in his and her impractical shoes in the other, as if the streets were theirs alone. He smiled at the memory.

And then she met his gaze, her brown eyes so serious, and his smile faded.

“I remember,” she said.

An odd note in her voice made everything go very still inside him.

“Something is the matter.” It was more a statement of fact than a question. His hand tightened a fraction around hers. “What is it?” She shook her head slightly.

“This is hardly the time or the place to talk about anything serious,” she said. She indicated the Washington elite surrounding them on all sides, all polite chatter and sharp speculation, with a tilt of her head.

“If that is meant to make me believe that something is not wrong,” he pointed out, his gaze narrow on hers, “it has failed. Miserably.” She only shook her head again, and smiled that perfect, empty smile. And what could Azrin do? He was the King of Khatan. There was no scenario in which he could have any kind of intimate conversation with his wife in the middle of a dance floor. He couldn’t even kiss her the way he wanted to without causing the sort of commotion he preferred to avoid.

He found he hated it.

But he waited.

And as he waited, he watched her, feeling as if he somehow hadn’t seen her in a long time, though they had traveled all over the world together in these past weeks, with the whole of their necessary entourage. She was pale beneath her expertly applied cosmetics. And there was a certain kind of brittleness about the way she moved.

“Are you ill?” he asked abruptly when they were finally alone in a suite set aside for visiting heads of state in an exclusive Georgetown hotel, all rich, old wood and faint gestures toward something more art deco.

Kiara stopped walking away from him—toward the master bedroom at the far end of the suite and the sumptuous bath, presumably—her gown whispering around her as she turned back to face him. He watched her for a moment from his position at the top of the steps that led down from the formal foyer into the long, elegant room, trying to see behind that smooth mask he realized she’d been wearing for weeks now.