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“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 café 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?”
As it turned out, she couldn’t.
Azrin had spent the rest of the afternoon trying to convince her to join him for dinner at his hotel, and the rest of his time in Melbourne trying to persuade her to go to bed with him. He’d managed only the dinner that night and then a week of the same, and he was not a man who had before then had even a passing acquaintance with failure of any sort.
He hadn’t known how to process it. He’d told himself that had been why he’d been so unreasonably obsessed with this woman who had treated him so cavalierly, who had laughed at him when he’d tried to seduce her, and yet whose kisses had nearly taken off the back of his head when she’d condescended to bestow them upon him.
“You want the chase, not me,” she’d informed him primly on his last night in Melbourne.
She had just stopped another kiss from going too far, and had even removed herself from Azrin’s grasp, stepping back against the wall outside the door to her flat, into which she’d steadfastly refused to invite him. Again.
He’d had the frustrating suspicion that she was about to leave him standing there.
Again.
“What if I want you?” he’d asked, that wholly unfamiliar frustration bleeding into his voice and tangling in the air between them. “What if the chase is nothing but an impediment?”
“What a delightful fantasy,” she’d replied—though he already knew that was not quite true, that careless tone she adopted. “But I’m afraid that your great, romantic pursuit of me will have to take a backseat to my graduate studies. I’m sure you understand. Dark and brooding princes tend to turn out to be little more than fairy-tale interludes, in my experience—”
“You have vast experience with princes, do you?” His tone had been sardonic, but she’d ignored him anyway.
“—while I really do require my Masters in Wine Technology and Viticulture to get on with my real life.” She’d smiled at him, even as he’d registered the way she’d emphasized the word real. “I’ll understand if you want to throw a little bit of a strop and sulk all the way back to your throne. No one will think any the less of you.”
“Kiara,” he’d said then, unable to keep his hands off her, and wanting more than just the simple pleasure of his palm over the curve of her upper arm, which was what he’d had to settle for. She was not for him—he’d known that—but he’d been completely incapable of accepting it as he should. “Prepare yourself for the fairy-tale interlude. I may have to go to Khatan tomorrow morning, but I’ll be back.”
“Of course you will,” she’d said, smiling as if she’d known better.
But he’d come back, as promised. Again and again. Until she’d finally started to believe him.
He watched her now, his unexpected princess, as she climbed from the shower and wrapped herself in one of the soft towels. She smiled at him, and he felt something clench inside of him. She had never wanted to be a queen. She hadn’t even wanted to be a princess. She’d wanted him, that was all, just as he’d wanted her. Perhaps it had been foolish to imagine that that kind of connection, that impossible need, could be enough.
But foolish or not, this was the bed they’d made.
And now it was time to lie in it, whether he liked it or not. Whether she liked it or not.
Whether he wanted to be the King of Khatan or not— which had never mattered before, he reminded himself sharply, and certainly didn’t matter now. It simply was.
“My father’s cancer is back,” he said abruptly.
“Azrin, no,” Kiara breathed, as she tried to process his words.
He did not move from his position in the doorway. He leaned against the doorjamb with seeming nonchalance, beautiful and yet somehow remote, in nothing but dark trousers he hadn’t bothered to fully button. But she could see the grim lines around his mouth, and the tension gripping his long frame. And the dark gray of his eyes, focused on her in a way that she could not quite understand.
“He plans to fight it, of course,” he said in that same, oddly detached way, as if he was forcing himself to get through this by rote. As if this was the preview to something much bigger. Something worse. What that might be, Kiara did not want to imagine. “He is nothing if not ornery.”
“I’m so sorry,” Kiara said, her head spinning. It was difficult to imagine the old king, Azrin’s belligerent and autocratic father, anything but his demanding and robust self. It was impossible to imagine that even cancer would dare try to beat King Zayed, when nothing and no one else had ever come close to loosening the iron grip he held on his country, his throne. His only son.
“He does not seem particularly concerned that it will kill him this time,” Azrin continued. He shifted then, thrusting his hands into the pockets of his trousers. His mouth twisted. “But then, he has always had an exalted sense of himself. It is what led to the worst excesses of his reign. He leaves the wailing and gnashing of teeth to my mother.”
Queen Madihah was the first of the old king’s three wives. That and her production of the Crown Prince rendered her a national treasure. She was the very model of serene, gracious, modestly restrained Khatanian femininity, and as such, had always made Kiara feel distinctly brash and unpolished by comparison. It was impossible to imagine her changing expression, much less wailing.
“He’s in excellent health otherwise,” she said, thinking of the last time she’d seen her father-in-law, sometime the previous spring. He had insisted she join him for a long walk in the palace gardens, and despite the fact that Kiara regularly put in time on treadmills in gyms all over the world, the pace the older man had set had left her close to winded. That and the way he’d interrogated her, as if he was still suspicious of her relationship with his son and heir, as if he expected her to reveal her true motives at any moment, whatever those might be. “You would never know he was in his seventies …”
Something moved across Azrin’s face then, and she let the words trail away.
“He has announced that he is an old man, and has only the weapons to fight one battle left in him,” he said. Kiara felt frozen in place, and she didn’t understand it. It was something to do with the way he was looking at her, the set to his jaw, that made her … nervous. Much too nervous. “He doesn’t think he can care for the kingdom and for himself, not now. Not the way he did the last time.”
“Whatever he needs to do to beat it,” Kiara said immediately. Staunchly. “And whatever we need to do to help him.”
The silence seemed to stretch taut between them.
“He is stepping aside, Kiara,” Azrin said. Almost gently, yet with that steel beneath that made a kind of panic curl into something thick and hot in her belly. “Retiring.”
For a moment, she didn’t know what he meant.
“Of course,” she said, when his meaning penetrated. “It will be good practice for you to take the throne while he recovers, won’t it?”
“No.” Again, that voice. His eyes so hard on hers. As if she was letting him down—had already done so—and she didn’t know how that could have happened without her knowing it. Without her meaning to do it. She locked her knees beneath her, afraid, suddenly, that they might tremble and betray the full scope of her agitation.
“No?” she echoed. “It won’t be good practice?”
“It won’t be temporary. He is stepping aside for good.”
She blinked. He waited. Something inside her seemed to go terribly still. As if she could not comprehend what he was telling her. But she did.
“That means—” She stopped herself. She had the urge to laugh then, but knew, somehow, that she did not dare. That he would not forgive her if she did, not now. She shook her head.
“It means I will be the new king of Khatan in six short weeks,” Azrin said in that strong, sure voice, as if that hardness was a part of him now, as if it was part of who he was becoming. As if it was a necessary precursor to the throne.
“Six weeks?” Kiara did laugh then, slightly. Her voice seemed too high, too uncertain. “I’d hardly got used to you being a prince over five years of marriage. I can’t get my head around you being king in a little more than a month!”
She thought he might smile at that, but his mouth remained that flat, stern line. His eyes were the coldest she’d ever seen them. She felt, again, as if she’d been thrown neck deep into something that she ought to understand, but didn’t.
“You don’t have to get your head around it,” he said with a kind of distant formality that made her tense up in response. “I’ve been getting my head around becoming king my whole life. This was always going to happen—it’s just happening a bit more quickly than I’d originally anticipated.”
Pull yourself together, Kiara ordered herself then, suddenly aware that she was standing stock still in the middle of the bathroom floor, staring at him as if he’d transformed into some kind of monster before her very eyes. Hardly the way a good, supportive spouse should behave at such a time.
She imagined there was no one in the world who wouldn’t feel out of their depth at a moment like this. Thrones! Kings! But this was her husband. This was real. She could sort out her own feelings later. In private. She walked over to him, rising on her toes to press a kiss against his hard jaw.
“This can’t be easy,” she said softly. “But I love you. We’ll figure it out.”
“I suspect he must be sicker than he wishes to let on,” Azrin said, his voice gruff. “He always promised he would die before he abdicated.” He let out a sound that was not quite a laugh. “But then, he took the throne when he was all of nineteen. There was only one way to hold it. He came by his ruthlessness honestly.”
She kissed him again, determined to ignore that tension simmering in him and all around them. She knew that Azrin’s relationship with his father had never been easy. That the king had never been pleased with the way the kingdom viewed Azrin as some kind of savior-in-waiting. Azrin had always said that if his father had only managed to have another son, Azrin would never have remained his heir. But he hadn’t.
This is real, she told herself again.
“You can do this,” she said. “You’ve been preparing for years. You’re ready.”
“Yes, Kiara. I’m ready,” he said quietly, his eyes again too dark, his mouth too grim.
Something gripped her then, some kind of terror, but she shoved it aside, annoyed with herself. Again. Was she really so self-involved? She could only stare up at him as he ran a hand over the back of her head, smoothing down her wet hair, gently tipping her head back to gaze at him more fully.
Azrin’s mouth curved slightly then, though it was in no way a smile, the way she wanted it to be. His gaze seared into hers, and she was afraid, suddenly, of the things he might see there.
“But are you?” he asked.
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