Seduce Me in Flames (26 page)

What he was even more aware of was that the real danger to her was standing a respectful distance away. Balkin was in full court regalia, making certain that everyone knew he was still in play, still ready to gain power should the opportunity arise. Yet he was keeping a proper distance from her, keeping his head down, so to speak. Rush actually had to admire the man’s ability to keep his feelings to himself. All reports had said he was very hot tempered, especially when his desires were
thwarted. So either he had suddenly acquired a new level of patience, or he truly was not upset about the power shift going on around him.

Not that that made much sense either. Balkin had to know that his days of power might be numbered as his niece phased him out of her reign. Perhaps that was his game, Rush mused. Perhaps he was trying to avoid being phased out, as if keeping his head down might allow her to overlook all the injustices she had suffered under his boot.

“So,
my great lady
,” spoke up the nobleman who stood before her now, his respectful address full of a rather snide tone, “you think you can rule this country and all of us?”

Ambrea smiled slightly in the face of the man’s rudeness. The room, which had been buzzing with conversation, suddenly quieted. All eyes were trained on the exchange. Rush tensed beside her, but before he could step forward and cuff the little prick, she laid a calming hand over Rush’s wrist, staying him. Still, the request didn’t mean he couldn’t glare at the obnoxious man. He did so with all the pent-up energy he could muster.

“I will do my best,” she replied. “But I know I have much to learn.”

“Your first lesson ought to be that not all of us will fall at your feet, kissing your hem. In truth, some of us think you are a waste of our time.”

Ambrea had to squeeze her fingers closed around Rush’s wrist when she heard a sinister growl roll out of him. She realized he was playing a part, but sometimes she wondered if he wasn’t serious. He had her completely convinced that he could and would rip out any throat necessary just on a whim. But she wasn’t intent on ruling by dictatorial fear as her father and uncle had done. Although Rush’s display would let everyone know
that she was personally protected, it was up to her to show her strength in other matters.

“And you are …?” she asked the thin-framed man whose court robes seemed to ride his frame a bit haphazardly. There was something about it that reminded her of her unfortunate young brother and the only time she had ever met him in person. How sad it was that he never had a chance to find his own footing. Perhaps he might have surprised them all and become far more worthy than she had given him credit for.

“I am Prelate Landrea, prelate over Cirqine province, the largest of your provinces, madam. The paxors of Cirqine answer to my voice and act in unison with me. Together we speak many voices on your council.”

The inference was clear in his tone and haughty bearing that her power was only as good as the council votes she managed to draw into her favor. Rush despised men like him. They existed everywhere, in all political structures, doing their best to make themselves feel more powerful by making others feel less so. They were so often more interested in throwing their power around that they forgot that their job was meant to be a voice for others.

“Prelate, I am delighted to have you here,” Ambrea said with ambitious warmth as she rose to her full height and stepped slowly down the steps of the dais, moving toward him as her hand and fingers slid away from Rush’s. He felt her leave him like a strange, bewitching sort of caress. There was an encompassing feeling of regret when she went, something oddly like deprivation. Rush tried to tell himself that it was his need to protect her and the fact that she was moving out of his range that caused it, but a deeper voice, one that was more truthful with him and a bit quieter, told him that that simply wasn’t the case.

“I trust more a voice that is bravely willing to speak against me than one that kisses at my feet and oozes false charms.” She reached to place both her hands on his shoulders, framing him with her presence. Her receptiveness seemed to baffle him for a moment, and he looked at her as though she was an idiot child. Then he recovered himself and with a rather rude turn of his shoulders he shrugged her off and stepped back out of her reach. The only more rude thing he could have done would have also broken with court etiquette, and that would be to have slapped her away. Although he was willing to be disrespectful to the very limit of the line, he was apparently not willing to cross the line into raw flouting of her authority and imperial blood. A good thing, too, Rush noted to himself as he seethed with a hot desire to bitch-slap the ingrate. Didn’t the man appreciate at all how different politics could be under the reign of this extraordinary woman?

“Madam,” he rejoined coldly, “you would do well to remember that royal blood is always easy to come by. Figureheads will come and go, but in the end it is we politicians who manage Allay.”

“Was that a threat?” Rush snarled suddenly, knowing full well that was exactly what it was. He surged forward, but yet again she stayed him, her hand hitting him squarely in the center of his chest and holding him at bay while she kept her gaze steadily trained on her political adversary.

“Sir,” she said, dropping the address just as coldly as he had dropped hers, if not with an added chill of tempered Delran running through it. “You would do well to remember that the entirety of the council exists at my leisure and for my pleasure. The council was created by a long-ago emperor and can be dissolved by a present one, should she understand that it is not serving its purpose in this world. Instead of casting threats about and
feeling your cock to see how big it is compared to mine, perhaps you can take your energies and direct them toward bringing forth the needs of the
people
to the ear of their ruler. Isn’t that, after all, the essence of your job? And if I believe for all of an instant that you are failing to do your job, Prelate, I will cut you off from all this power you seem to think you have and replace you with one of the no-doubt very hungry paxors who are currently sitting so tamely at your heels but will, given the moment’s opportunity, turn and bite you on your ass and gleefully drag you down to sit tamely at theirs.”

The nobles and politicians in the room collectively gasped at her crude speech, all of them staring in silent awe as they saw the blood of her family line pulse powerfully through her. But instead of using that power for selfish gains and vanities, she was turning it into something else. Something that would, perhaps, be stronger in the long run. Rush smiled crookedly to see the shock on all those faces and the way they looked at her. They didn’t know what to make of her. Every time they thought they were able to pigeonhole her into some kind of neat package, she changed things on them. But in spite of her ability to hand the prelate his ass on a platter, Rush was infuriated by her constantly cutting him off from doing what he deemed as his job. How could he protect her if she wouldn’t give him a chance?

He reached out to curl a slow, powerful hand around her upper arm and pull her close so he could speak to her ear alone.

“Madam, a moment in private, if you will?”

“Now, nobles,” she spoke aloud to the crowded room before her, “I am told I am needed elsewhere. Please. You will join me tonight at the inaugural ball.” She straightened up, and all save Rush lowered themselves in respect. Rush merely raised his hand to her and took a moment of odd pleasure in the way she slid her fingers
against his. It was the closest thing to a caress they would likely ever share again.

As he led her away, he tried to understand why that thought made him so irritable. He walked her through the private receiving room behind the public one and with a sharp gesture ordered back the small entourage of servants and retainers she seemed to be gathering at her train.
They
irritated him too. He had not yet vetted any of them, except for Suna, and didn’t know what their purposes were supposed to be or even if they could be trusted to do so much as hand her a glass of water. The rest of the IM had fallen back once she had reached her throne safely, occupying the rear of the room as discreetly as they could, and allowing the Imperial Guard to stand watch over her, and Rush to watch over the Imperial Guard. He realized very clearly that they could not be trusted any more than anyone else in this damn place. He had a hell of a lot of work to do, just as she did, and there honestly was no protecting her. If her uncle decided to stage a coup right there in the palace, ordering the guards who were loyal to him to cut off her head, Rush would be the only thing to stand between them, and demented mutation or no, he couldn’t see how he could stand between Ambrea and an entire country and somehow manage to keep her alive.

This was what he was thinking as he let the door shut them away from the rest of the palace, his thoughts feeding his already tested temper. He wasn’t exactly known for being hotheaded. Quite the opposite, he’d say. He had learned long ago to keep control of his emotions for fear of what his hidden freakishness might set up on display. But there was something about Ambrea that put him on a knife’s point.

“Can I ask you what the hell I’m here for?” he growled at her the moment they were securely alone. He had spun her about, seizing her between his two hands, giving
her a little bit of a shake even though his actual urge was to shake the head off her shoulders.

She blinked at him with those big blue eyes of hers, the action so slow and deliberate that he was instantly torn between the anger he was feeling and the peculiar sensation that he was about to make a total ass of himself. He had never realized just how much power Ambrea could pack into a single look. After spending a day watching her make powerful eye contact with her subjects, though, he was seeing much more of her depth with every passing instant. And on top of everything else, she was wearing this beautiful gown made of a gauzy, shimmering material in soft pastel lavender that seemed to accentuate all of the things he found so enchanting about her physically. That golden red hair running down her back in natural crimped waves, that ever-so-pale skin and its milky perfection, and her tall, statuesque figure that would make other women seek out surgeons in order to achieve it. Perhaps he had thought she was a bit bony early on, but now that he was seeing her in flattering clothes and a neckline that tortured him as it hovered on the precipice of demure and daring, he was ready to admit he had been wrong.

“I’m sure you know the answer to that. I need you for my protection. I’m dancing among vipers out there,” she said, a delicate shiver running through her. It was the first sign she had given, in all of the hours gone by so far, that she was in any way intimidated by her surroundings. Rush knew that was the way it had to be. If she showed even an instant of weakness in front of them, they would fall on her like rabid beasts. He was the one who had pressed that understanding on her.

“Then why do you constantly push me back?” he demanded through tight teeth. “Let me smack a few of the insolent bastards around, teach them—”

“Teach them what?” she cut in with a hot demand.
“That I’m just like my father? That I will knock out the teeth of anyone who speaks against me? That I will be a tyrant and a bully?”

“No!” He growled in a long sound of frustration, his hands tightening on her, pulling her up closer. “You can’t let them treat you like that! There is such a thing as a healthy fear. Respect! You must demand their respect!”

“I must
earn
their respect!” she countered fervently. “Setting you loose on them is not the way!”

She was breathing quickly as she challenged him with her strong gaze and her raised chin. Rush couldn’t resist the urge he had to reach up and thread his big fingers through her soft, fine hair, the delicacy of it in his grip seeming almost obscene to him, as though he was some kind of uncouth, unwashed thing daring to touch a goddess.

“You are too naïve,” he accused her in a low voice. “You wish to see things in these people that are simply not going to be there. You have to learn to expect the worst and then protect yourself from that worst.”

“I do not have to learn that,” she said fiercely. “Perhaps you do, perhaps all of my guards who will be protecting me do, but I do not. I’m going to give each one of these people the benefit of the doubt for as long as it is reasonable to do so. It’s your job to catch them with the knife in their hand as they’re trying to stab me in the back. Then you will bring them—and the evidence—to me and I will be cold and terrible and consign them to the wet rooms or worse.”

He was so close to her that he saw the instant her eyes went wet, the moment they filled, and he felt when she began to shake. That was when he realized she would never lightly cast a sentence like that on anyone. She would always remember what it had felt like to live in those rooms, always wondering how those who had sent her there could consign her to such a life so unfairly
and still manage to sleep so effortlessly. She would rather die in her efforts to treat others fairly than for one instant find herself casting down an unfair or false sentence.

Rush was overwhelmed by the sudden and painfully needy impulse that rode down through his body and caused him to pull her mouth under his. He knew all the reasons why he shouldn’t do this, all the things that were dangerous about it, and all the ways it made her vulnerable to what he was, but he had looked all of his life for so pure a place of acceptance and fairness in the universe. It felt as though it would be such an essential crime to his soul to make himself walk away from her right then, to deny himself what he had longed for. He simply was not strong enough to do that.

Her lips were sweet and soft, as untried as they had been the first time he had kissed her. The realization that he was the first and only man to know her this intimately warmed him from the inside out, livened the nerves all along his skin. That sensation made him very aware of what could happen next, and almost as soon as he had seized her he was jolting away from her, pulling his hands free of her and holding them up and out of reach so he couldn’t hurt her, burn her, set her on fire.