The Reluctant Queen

“You cannot tell me you do not remember me.” He saw the tell-tale brush of color on her cheeks, heard the catch of her breath. He remembered the sweet taste of their first, stolen kiss. The music of her sigh of pleasure when he touched her. He could see she did, too. “I can see that you do.”

“It might as well be a dream!” she said fiercely, though her flushed cheeks told a different tale. “That’s what I thought it was!”

“Life is often unfair, Princess,” he said, his voice low, his attention on the way she stood on the balls of her feet, as if she meant to run. Would she dare? “But that does not change the facts of things.”

“There are your facts, and then there are my facts,” she said in a low voice. She took a breath, and her silver-blue eyes turned to steel. He liked that, too. The warrior in him, who had fought and trained and gladly suffered to achieve all that he had done, sang his approval. “You can go ahead and sue me for your money. I won’t pay it. And whatever the courts in your tiny little country might say, the court of public opinion will have only one word for a king who chases down a defenseless woman like this. Bully.”

Adel smiled then, because she was so much more than he had dared imagine, when he’d thought of her growing up so far from her people, her traditions, him. She was not her mother’s daughter at all, as he had feared, no matter how that worthless woman had tried to poison her against all that was hers.

“You will make a magnificent queen,” he told her, though he doubted she wished to hear such things. “It is your birthright.”

She shook her head, as if he’d insulted her, and turned her back on him. It was a deliberate dismissal. And yet he felt it like a caress, shooting through him, desire and admiration coursing through his veins. Finally, something in him whispered. A woman who is worthy. A woman who is not afraid.

“Find another queen,” she threw back over her shoulder as she opened her car door. “I’m not interested in the job.”

Adel moved closer, putting out his hand to hold the door of her car open as she went to get in. He did not crowd her—but he also did not step back when she whipped back around to face him. He stood there for a moment, waiting until her breath came faster, and her gaze dropped to his mouth. He could feel the tension wind between them, and longed to close the distance between them—longed to take her mouth with his and reintroduce himself in the best way he could.

“I spoke of facts, Princess,” he said, when she dragged her gaze back to his. “Let me share a few with you. I have every intention of marrying you, as we both swore to do in our betrothal ceremony twelve years ago. That is a fact.”

“Your intentions are your business,” she replied calmly, though her eyes flashed blue steel. “They have nothing to do with me.”

“If you do not honor your obligations,” he continued as if she had not spoken, “I will not simply be forced to take measures to secure the bride price owed to me. I will also have no choice but to have your deceitful mother arrested and returned to Alakkul, where her theft of so much money and so many jewels—not to mention her kidnapping of the Crown Princess—will no doubt result in an extremely long and unpleasant jail term. If not death. As your husband and your king, of course, I would be willing to forgive such criminal acts on the part of your relative. But why would I extend such a courtesy to a stranger?”

“And again,” she said after a long moment, her mouth trembling slightly, as if he’d hurt her. “What words do you think come to mind when you say such things?”

“I cannot compromise,” he said softly. Fiercely. “I will not.”

“And that is what kind of man you’ve grown into,” she replied in the same voice, as something like an ache, a need, swelled in the warm summer air between them. Adel wanted to touch it. Her. “So much for the boy who promised he would never hurt me, that he would lay down his life to avoid it.”

He wanted to smile—did she not realize how much she revealed with that memory? How much room she gave him to hope? But he refrained.

“I wish I could place your feelings above all else,” he said, inclining his head slightly. “But that is not who I am. I cannot pretend that I will not do anything and everything in my power to secure you. And thus the throne. I owe nothing less to the people of Alakkul.” He moved slightly, closer, unable to keep his distance as he should. She was too much—too magnetic, too proud. Too … everything he’d dreamed. “Your people, Princess.”

“You can call me Princess all you like,” she said, strong emotion cracking across her face, in her voice. “That doesn’t make it so. I left all of that behind. I have no interest in a foreign country I can hardly remember.”

“What will spark your interest, I wonder?” he asked, hearing the danger in his own voice, even as he saw her awareness of it, of him, in her gaze. “Are you as cold-hearted as you would like me to believe? Are you prepared for the consequences of your refusal? Not just to your faithless mother,” he said coldly when she began to speak, “but to the very people you claim to care nothing about. If you do not take the throne with me, I will have to fight for it. That is not a euphemism. I am talking about civil war.”

She rocked back on her feet, and dragged in a deep, ragged breath. Her eyes were unreadable when they met his again, dark gray now instead of blue.

“Why ask me at all?” she demanded, her voice strained. “Why pretend that I have a choice to make if I do not?”

He wanted to trace the shape of her delicate cheekbones, the bold line of her nose, the full swell of her lips. He did not understand what he felt then—tenderness? Affection? Need? All of the above at once?

“Here is what I will promise you,” he said abruptly, called somehow to fix the darkness of her expression. “I will honor you and respect you, a claim I do not make to many without cause, but one I made to you twelve years ago. I will not take lightly the sacrifice you are making today. I doubt I am an easy man, but I will try to be fair.”

He saw tears at the back of her eyes, making them shine too bright. But she did not let them fall. He saw the panic, the uncertainty, the fear. But then she swallowed, and let her hands drop to her sides, and he knew it was as much a surrender as a challenge.

He could handle both. He’d been waiting for her for over a decade. For the whole of his life. He was amazed at how much, how deeply and how completely, he wanted to handle her. In every sense of the term.

“Congratulations,” she said bitterly. “You’ve won yourself a completely unwilling queen.”

Adel did not, could not care if she thought she hated him now. He would win her. He had won her years before—and she had already showed him she remembered more than she claimed she did. He would build on those memories, and he would win her all over again. And this time, in the way a man won a woman he meant to keep.

“I will take you any way I can get you,” Adel said now, and extended his hand, keeping the hard, bright triumph that flared inside of him under tight control. She was his. Finally. “Come,” he said. “Our future awaits.”

He saw her pulse go wild in her throat, saw her remarkable eyes widen a fraction. He saw her waver. He saw her legs shake as if she fought against the urge to bolt. Still, he held out his hand, and waited.

She bit her lip, surrendered, and slid her hand into his.

She had no choice.

Everything seemed to burst into speed and color, exploding all around her.

There was the feel of his warm, strong palm, his skin against hers, arrowing deep into her, making her soften and yearn. Just like before. There was his strong, dangerous body too close to hers—so close she imagined she could feel his heat—and the way she wanted to lean into him even as her mind shrieked in denial of everything that was happening. Her body had already decided. Her body had chosen him years ago, and was now exultant at his return. It was her mind that reeled, that was desperate for an out.

But what was her alternative? Her mother jailed? War? How could she possibly live with any of that, knowing she’d had the power to prevent it and had refused?

And she did not doubt that Adel Qaderi was more than capable of the things he’d promised. She could feel his ruthlessness taking her over like an ache in the bones, making it impossible for her to breathe. It was his ruthlessness, she told herself firmly, and nothing more—certainly not that old, demanding heat that only he raised in her. Certainly not that.

Adel raised his hand, and they were suddenly surrounded—by a fleet of hard-mouthed, serious-looking men who spoke in staccato tones into earpieces and herded Lara into a limousine she had not seen idling nearby.

It was only when she was tucked inside the car and it was speeding away, while her head spun wildly, that her eyes fell on the pieces of luggage on the seat opposite her. She recognized them at once. She had last seen them in the hall closet of her apartment.

She stared at them for a moment, her brain refusing to make the obvious and only connection, and then whipped her head around to stare at the man who sat with such devastating confidence beside her.

He only raised his dark brow, and watched her.

He had known she would surrender.

He had planned it.

“Your belongings have been packed up and are being shipped,” he said without the slightest hint of apology in his tone. But why should he apologize? He’d won. “But should you wish for anything else, it is yours.”

“Except my freedom,” she said with more bitterness than she’d intended. “My life.”

“Except that,” he agreed, his voice moving from that exotic steel to a softer velvet.

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.

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