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An air of incredulity surrounded her. “You’re asking me to marry you, to walk into the enemy’s lair, where a powerful military faction might take control at any moment, and transform a country, a government, with you?”
“Yes. You have the courage, the strength and the compassion to help me take Carnelia forward into the future it deserves.”
Her eyes flashed. “And what about me? Am I supposed to lay my happiness down on the altar as I’ve done everything else? Marry a man I can’t stand for the sake of duty?”
He shook his head. “You don’t hate me, Stella. You know that’s a lie. And it wouldn’t be like that. You told me once your dream was to become a human rights lawyer, to effect widespread change. Becoming my queen would allow you to do that. You would be altering the course of history, bringing happiness to a people who have suffered enough. Can you really tell me that’s not worth it?”
Her lips pursed. “Pulling out your trump card, Kostas? Now I know you’re desperate.”
“We both know that isn’t my trump card. We’ve proved we could be very good together. More than good.”
A deep red flush stained her chest, rising up to claim her cheeks. “That was ten years ago and it was just a kiss.”
“One hell of a kiss. Enough you jumped into my bed in flimsy lingerie and waited for me until one o’clock in the morning, while the entire party thought you were ill.”
A choked sound left her throat. “You are such a gentleman for bringing that up.”
“No,” he countered softly, “I was that when I tossed you out. You were Athamos’s little sister, Stella. Eighteen. I was the son of the dictator. Kissing you was the height of stupidity when I knew the pedestal you put me on. I tried to end it there, but you wouldn’t take no for an answer. Sometimes cruelty is kindness in its most rudimentary form.”
Her sapphire eyes blazed a brilliant blue beam at him. “You should have spared me the pity kiss, then.”
“It was far more complicated than that between us and you know it.” She had been wrecked by her parents’ refusal to allow her to accept the Harvard Law School admission she’d been granted, where Nik had studied. Devastated, as her dream had evaporated. He had not been prepared for the chemistry that had exploded between them.
“Would you have preferred I’d taken you?” He held her stormy gaze. “Walked away with a precious piece of you and broken your heart?”
“No,” she huffed, fingernails digging into the armrests of her chair. “You did me a favor. And now that we’ve confirmed you’re a heartless piece of work I’d never consider marrying, I think we’ve said all there is to say.”
He studied the emotion cascading through her beautiful eyes, regret sinking through him. He had hurt her. Perhaps more than he’d thought.
She stood up in a whirlwind of motion, snatching up her purse, pushing back her chair, as if a hurricane was sweeping down the Atlantic headed straight for them.
“Breaking our deal?” he drawled.
“The deal was to hear you out. Suddenly, I find myself without an appetite.”
He stood, then reached into his pocket, pulled out his wallet and extracted a card from the marina where he was staying. She flinched as he tucked it into the front pocket of her jeans. “Don’t make this decision because you hate me, Stella. Make it for what you believe in. Make it for Akathinia. If the military isn’t handcuffed, they will seek to finish the job they started when they took that Akathinian ship last year. Lives will be lost.”
Her chin dropped, her lithe body tense, caught in the middle of a storm. “I know you,” he murmured. “You’ll do the right thing.”
“No, you don’t.” She shook her head slowly, a wealth of emotion throbbing in those blue eyes. “You don’t know anything about me.”
CHAPTER TWO
KOSTAS COULDN’T KNOW her because she clearly didn’t know herself at this moment in time. The fact that she was even entertaining his proposition was ludicrous.
Stella paced the terrace of Jessie’s oceanfront villa, smoke coming out of her ears. How dare he come here? How dare he throw that guilt trip at her? She had come to Barbados to get her head together, to figure out what she wanted to be. Instead, he had dumped the weight of two countries on her shoulders; issued that parting salvo that had her head spinning...
If the military isn’t handcuffed, they will seek to finish the job they started when they took that Akathinian ship last year.
Her stomach plummeted, icy tendrils of fear clutching her insides. Five crew members had died when a renegade Carnelian commander had taken an Akathinian ship during routine military exercises in the waters between Akathinia and Carnelia last year. If Kostas lost control of Carnelia and the military seized power, Akathinia was in danger.
But to marry him to protect her country? Commit herself to a union of duty, something she’d vowed never to do?
She halted her incessant pacing. Leaned her forearms on the railing of the terrace and looked out at the dark mass of the sea, a painful knot forming in the pit of her stomach. At least she knew the truth about Athamos now. It didn’t explain why Cassandra Liatos had been so special that he’d engaged in a death race with Kostas over her—why he’d been so foolish as to throw his life away over someone who didn’t know her own mind.
Unless he’d loved her...
Frustration curled her fingers tight. Had he? Was that the answer to the mystery that plagued her? She wanted to pound her fists against the big barrel of her brother’s chest and demand an answer, but Athamos wasn’t here. Wouldn’t ever be here again.
Bitter regret swept through her, hot tears burning her eyes, threatening to spill over into the sorrow she’d refused to allow herself to feel lest it disintegrate what was left of her. Somehow she had to let him go. She just didn’t know how.
She was pacing the deck again when Jessie came home, high heels clicking on the wood, a bottle of wine and two glasses in her hands.
“What is Kostas doing here? He nearly blew your cover. I had to convince a regular you were a friend from church.”
She could use a little higher guidance right about now. “He wants me to marry him.”
Jessie’s eyes bulged out of her head. “Marry him?”
“Open the wine.”
Her friend uncorked the bottle, poured two glasses and handed her one.
She took a sip. Rested her glass on the railing. “It would be a political match.”
“Why?”
“I am the symbolic key to peace and democracy in the Ionian Sea. A way for Akathinia and Carnelia to heal. A vision of the way forward.”
“Are you expected to walk on water, too?”
A smile curved her lips. “It would be a powerful statement if Kostas and I were to marry.”
Jessie fixed her with an incredulous look. “You can’t commit yourself to a marriage of duty. Look what it did to your mother. It almost destroyed her.”
All of them. Her parents’ marriage may have been a political union, but her mother had loved her father. Unfortunately, her father had not been capable of loving anyone, not his wife nor his children. The king’s chronic affairs had created a firestorm in the press and destroyed her family in the process.
“Kostas worries about the military junta that backed his father. He plans to hold elections to create a constitutional monarchy in the fall, but he’s afraid the military will seize control before then if he doesn’t send a powerful message of change.”
“And you being the poster child of global democracy will give him that.”
“Yes.”
Jessie eyed her. “You aren’t actually considering this?”
Silence.
Jessie took a sip of her wine. Leaned back against the railing as she contemplated her. “Can we talk about the elephant in the room? You were in love with him, Stella. Mad about him. If this isn’t you repeating history, I don’t know what is.”
“It was a childish crush. It meant nothing.”
Jessie’s mouth twisted. “You two spent an entire summer with eyes only for each other. It was predestined between you two... Then you finally act on it and he slams the door in your face.”
She shook her head. “It was never going to happen. It was too complicated.”
“Does that discount you measuring every other man by him? This is me, hon. I knew you back then. I know you now. You looked shell-shocked when he walked into that bar. You still do.”
“I can control it.”
“Can you? You once thought the sun rose and set over him. He was the newest superhero to join the party, sent to rescue all of us from the bad guys.”
What an apt description of her teenage infatuation with Kostas... Of the heroic status she’d afforded him for his determination to bring a better democratic way to his people. Her belief he was the only one who could recognize the bitter, alienating loneliness that had consumed her, because, she’d been sure, he’d carried it with him, too.
But that had simply been a manifestation of her youthful infatuation, she conceded, her chest searing. Her desperate need to be understood, loved, rather than seeing the real flesh-and-blood man he had been.
“I know his flaws now,” she said, lifting her gaze to Jessie’s. “His major fault lines...” She no longer harbored the airbrushed image of him that had once steered her so wrong.
“The thing is,” she mused, her subconscious ramblings bubbling over into conscious thought, “I haven’t been happy in a long time, Jess. I’ve been restless, caged in a box I can’t seem to get out of. Everything about my life is charmed, perfect, and yet I’m miserable.”
Jessie gave her a rueful look. “I was working my way around to that. But why? You do amazing work. Meaningful work. Doesn’t it give you satisfaction?”
“Yes, but it’s not truly mine. Other than my support for the disarmament issue, it’s the sanitized, gilded, photo-op version of philanthropy the palace directs.” She shook her head. “You know I’ve always felt I have a higher calling. The ability to effect widespread change because of who I am, the power I have. And yet every time I’ve tried to spread my wings, I’ve been reined in. Athamos and Nik have taken precedence. I was the one left to toe the line.”
Jessie was silent. “I hear what you’re saying,” she said finally. “But this is big, Stella. Irreversible. If you marry him, you’re going to be queen. You will be taking on a nation. You’re going to be walking into a very delicate situation with no real control.”
But weren’t those the kind of challenges that made her feel alive, despite the inherent risk involved? Wasn’t this what she’d been craving all her life, a chance to make her mark?
She and Jessie talked late into the night. When her friend finally pleaded exhaustion and drifted off to bed, Stella stayed on the terrace, tucked in a chair, the fat half crescent of a moon, tossed in a sea of stars, her silent companion.
She didn’t question her ability to do what Kostas was asking of her. She’d walked through war zones to promote peace in countries where young people were the innocent victims of conflict. She’d met and challenged tribal leaders to find a better way than destroying each other. What she was afraid of was Kostas. What he could do to her in a political marriage with her as his pawn.
Tonight had proved, a decade later, she was far from immune to him. In fact, it had illustrated the opposite; revealed the origins of her stunningly bad mistake with Aristos Nicolades last year.
She had worked her way through a series of men whom she’d discarded one after another without allowing any of them to get close. When that had proved unsatisfactory, she’d fixed her sights on Aristos to prove she could win a man every bit as unattainable as Kostas; as elusive and undeniably fascinating. She’d sought to exorcise the ghost of her most painful rejection, to prove she was worth more than that. Instead, Aristos had broken her heart and, worse, fallen head over heels in love with her sister and married her.
She wrapped her arms around her knees and hugged them to her chest, the pang that went through her only a faint echo of what it once had been, because she’d anesthetized it, marked it as mindless self-pity.
She was destined to be alone. Had accepted that love was unattainable to her. That she’d been too badly scarred too many times to view the concept as anything but a destructive force. Which would almost make the suggestion of a political match bearable. Practical. If it was with anyone but Kostas.
Tying her fate to a man who could destroy her, if the forces threatening to splinter Carnelia apart didn’t do it first, seemed like another bad decision in a long list of many. Unless she neutralized his effect on her.
If she was to do this—marry Kostas—and survive, she would need to bury her feelings for him in a deep, untouchable place where he couldn’t use them against her.
The question was...could she?
* * *
“The princess is here to see you, Your Highness.”
Kostas looked up from the intelligence briefing he was reviewing, his heart climbing into his throat. It had been two days since he’d thrown all his cards at Stella, hoping she’d see the light. Two days with no response. Due to return to Carnelia tomorrow for a regional summit of leaders, he’d started to think his penchant for risk taking had been his downfall. That he had overrated his negotiating skills when it came to a princess who harbored a very personal anger toward him.
He betrayed not one ounce of the relief flooding through him as he nodded to his aide, Takis. “I’ll go up.”
Taking the steps to the upper deck of his old friend Panos Michelakos’s yacht, anchored in Carlisle Bay while its owner took care of business in the West Indies, he found Stella standing at the railing of the impressive seventy-foot boat, looking out at the ocean.
She was silhouetted against the dying rays of the sun, her hair, the color of rich honey, hanging loose down her back. Her slim body was encased in a white skirt and caramel-colored tank top. She looked every inch the cool, sophisticated golden girl she was reputed to be, except he knew from experience Stella was anything but cold. She brought passion to everything she did.
He was fairly sure the image of her in bloodred lingerie, curled up in his bed at the Akathinian palace, would forever be imprinted on his brain. Stored there to torture him with the memory of the one woman he had never allowed himself to have; the one who had never left his head.
A slow curl of heat unraveled inside of him as the erotic image painted itself across his brain. It had been late, the early morning, when he’d climbed the stairs to his room after a palace party, head hazy from too many shots of tsipouro. He’d let himself into his suite unaware anyone else was there, stripped off his clothes, left them in a pile on the floor and collapsed onto the king-size bed.
It was only when his splayed arm had touched silky soft female skin that he’d become aware he wasn’t alone. He’d thought maybe he had drunk too much and dreamed up the lingerie-covered Stella until she’d started talking, telling him he was the most exciting man she’d ever met, that their kiss earlier in the library had been incredible and she wanted him to be her first.
His twenty-three-year-old brain had nearly exploded. She was every red-blooded male’s fantasy come true with her high, perfect breasts and mile-long legs. His body had definitely not been in tune with his head. She’d been too innocent, too pure, too full of her ambitions to change the world for a man caught in a struggle to define himself as different from his autocrat of a father to ever pursue. A man unsure he could ever live up to the lofty ideals she’d built around him.
Somewhere in his liquor-soaked brain, he’d summoned up the sanity to scoop her up, carry her to the door and deposit her on the other side, telling her to go kick sand in her own playground. He’d been sure someday the shattered look on her face would be worth it when she realized he’d spared her a broken heart. That women, for him, were fleeting pleasures meant to be enjoyed, then discarded in the must-win, must-conquer existence that had characterized his life.
But after that night, he sensed his callousness had dug far deeper than he’d believed in a tough, resilient Stella. That his need to underscore he was not the man for her, not the man for any woman in their right mind, had hurt her deeply.
* * *
She sensed his presence before he revealed himself. Turning, hands curling around the rail, a charge rocketed through her. Her soon-to-be fiancé was studying her with an intense curiosity in his hawk-like gaze that seemed to strip the layers from her skin, deconstructing every one of the protective barriers she’d come armed with.
Her chin dipped as he moved toward her. “Planning your next move, Kostas?”
“Admiring you. You still have the power to stop me in my tracks.”
Her stomach folded in on itself, a renegade wave of heat spreading through her in places that needed to remain ice-cold. “No need for flattery,” she said, injecting some of that much-needed, cool composure into her tone. “You know why I’m here.”
“Honesty,” he countered as he came to a halt in front of her, “is something you will always get from me, Stella. Whether you like what I have to say or not.”
Another veiled reference to his humiliating rejection of her? A current of awareness zigzagged through her as she took him in. In a short-sleeved shirt and trousers today, the fading light of the sun illuminating the deep lines etching his eyes and mouth, there was a life experience imprinted on the hard contours of his face that lent him a somberness she didn’t recall. A knowledge.
If those deeply embedded marks that had taken purchase on him made her wonder what the forces had been that had changed him so, had driven him to Tibet on a soul-searching expedition, she pushed that curiosity aside. She was here to negotiate her future.
“I’m good with honesty,” she drawled, holding his dark gaze. “It’s always been my forte. Along with sticking to my principles and reaping the messes I sow.”
He ignored the gibe. “What changed your mind?”
“You were right. Notorious dissident that I am, I cannot turn my back on our two countries. Nor on my big dreams, because yes, I do still have them. But there are conditions attached to my becoming your queen.”
He leaned against the rail and folded his arms over his chest. “Let’s hear them.”
“I will not be a figurehead...smothered by the patriarchal establishment. You will give me real power and status.”
“Do you have any advance thoughts?”
“A seat on your executive council.”
His gaze flickered. “That would be most...unusual.”
“Say yes, Kostas, or this isn’t happening.”
He gave her a long look. “Kala. You can have a seat on the council. But I warn you it will not be an easy ride. Akathinia may be enlightened, but Carnelia is still stuck in the Dark Ages.”
“I like a challenge. Clearly. Second, I will continue my work with the current organizations I support unless my schedule proves to be excessive.”
“I have no problem with that. You do great work. What you cannot do is waltz around active war zones. It’s too risky.”
Heat lanced through her. “I do not waltz, Kostas. The photograph of me with those children raised millions of dollars toward the support of a regional disarmament treaty.”
He tilted his head. “An unfortunate choice of words. But the fact remains, I need my queen alive.”
Not because he cared, because she was of value to him.
“Third,” she continued, “you will not take a mistress. Should you do so, I will have the power to divorce you immediately. It will not require a decree signed by government.”
“I’m not your father, Stella. I have no intention of indulging in affairs. Why would I when I have a woman like you in my bed?”
Her gaze rested on his. “Speaking of which, this will be a political marriage. As such, I will not be under duress to sleep with you.”
His gaze narrowed. “That might be a problem given the fact I need to produce an heir quickly in order to secure the Laskos line. Also, your fourth point seems to be in direct contradiction to your third. I can’t have a mistress, but we aren’t going to have sex?”
She waved a hand at him. “The heir—we can make that happen.”
“How does that work?” He took a step closer, dwarfing her with his height and breadth. “We have conjugal visits? I seek you out when the temperature is right?”
She tilted her head back to look up at him, every cell in her body going on high alert at the proximity of such blatant masculinity. “Something like that.”
A dark glitter filled his gaze. “Setting yourself up as a martyr, Stella? The sacrificial lamb sent to slaughter for the king’s pleasure?”
Her chin lifted. “I would not be the first princess to sacrifice myself to the call of duty. History is littered with them. We are valued for our beauty and poise, our compassion and empathy, but in the end are viewed as nothing more than glorified broodmares.”
He gave her a long look. “I am offering you far more than that. This would be a true partnership.”
“Along with the heir you so urgently require.”
He flicked a hand at her. “What happens when you are not acting as my broodmare? When I have normal male urges?”
Her cheeks flamed at the erotic image that spurred in her head. She knew what he looked like from that night she’d waited for him in his bed...knew how heart-stoppingly virile he was in every respect. It made the blood coursing through her veins fizzle with heat. Singe her skin.
Diavole, but this was not how this was supposed to go. She lifted her chin higher, a belligerent expression on her face. “That’s not for me to figure out, Kostas. That’s your job.”
“Is it?” His gaze touched her fiery cheeks. “I think when you let go of the past, when you finally forgive me, when you acknowledge how good we are together, we will be as potent a match in the bedroom as we will be ruling my country.”
“No,” she said, even as a pulse of electricity ran between them, magnifying the sizzle in her blood. “That isn’t going to happen. Women are objects to you. I am a means to an end. I would be stupid to forget that and cede power to you.”
“You will be my wife, the woman by my side, not an object.” His dark lashes arced over his cheeks. “And who said you would be ceding power? Just because I walked away from you that night didn’t mean I didn’t want you, Stella. That I haven’t replayed that scenario in my head with a far different outcome. You would have equally as much power over me if we went to bed together, maybe more.”
Her stomach muscles coiled. It was a seductive, beguiling thought to imagine he might want her. That her desire for him hadn’t been as one-sided as she’d imagined it to be. That by exploring that revelation, she might wipe away the rejection that stung even now in a place that had never healed. But her head, the part of her she was operating with now, realized his tactics for what they were. Negotiation. Manipulation.
She lifted her chin. “It will be an act, conceiving your heir. Nothing more. I’ve lost my taste for megalomaniacs housed in beautiful packages.”
“Megalomaniacs?”
“Yes—you.”
He studied her for a moment. “Are you including Aristos Nicolades in this esteemed group?”
She lifted a brow. “Following my love life, Kostas? Aristos was simply the last kick at the can.” Her voice took on a nonchalance that hid the steel underpinning her insides. “I’ve decided to make myself as impenetrable as you when it comes to relationships, as unaffected, because I’ve found, in the end, it’s just not worth it.”
He frowned. “That’s not you, Stella. You live by your passion.”
“Not anymore I don’t. You should be happy about my new outlook, by the way. It’s the only reason I’m marrying you.”
“That and your desire to do the immense amount of good I know you will.”
“Don’t patronize.” She took a step back because oxygen was necessary for breathing and she couldn’t do that near him. “I’m already on board if you agree to the conditions I’ve laid out.”