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MILLS & BOON
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About the Author
CAITLIN CREWS discovered her first romance novel at the age of twelve. It involved swashbuckling pirates, grand adventures, a heroine with rustling skirts and a mind of her own, and a seriously mouthwatering and masterful hero. The book (the title of which remains lost in the mists of time) made a serious impression. Caitlin was immediately smitten with romances and romance heroes, to the detriment of her middle-school social life. And so began her lifelong love affair with romance novels, many of which she insists on keeping near her at all times.
Caitlin has made her home in places as far-flung as York, England, and Atlanta, Georgia. She was raised near New York City, and fell in love with London on her first visit when she was a teenager. She has backpacked in Zimbabwe, been on safari in Botswana, and visited tiny villages in Namibia. She has, while visiting the place in question, declared her intention to live in Prague, Dublin, Paris, Athens, Nice, the Greek islands, Rome, Venice, and/or any of the Hawaiian islands. Writing about exotic places seems like the next best thing to moving there.
She currently lives in California, with her animator/comic book artist husband and their menagerie of ridiculous animals.
Look for new novels from Caitlin in Mills & Boon®’s Modern™ series.
CHAPTER ONE
“I’M leaving you.” Lucy Qaderi forced the words out before she could convince herself not to say them. Even if she had not yet dared to turn around and say them to his face.
She’d sensed the moment he’d stepped into this opulent bedroom suite they had once shared, high up in the mountains over the tiny Eurasian country of Alakkul. His country.
She would know him anywhere, this brooding, ruthless man. Rafi Qaderi. The leader of his ancient family, responsible for maintaining the Qaderis’ many international interests and vast wealth while his celebrated cousin prepared to take over the throne of Alakkul from the ailing King Azat. Rafi was a financial wizard, a shrewd businessman. Noble and proud. Her husband.
“Thank you, Lucy.” His tone was dark, sardonic, with that undercurrent of patience sorely tried. “I was able to gather as much from your packed luggage in the front hall.”
She should hate him. At times, she did. And yet that voice moved over her like a wave of heat, making her feel itchy, her chest tight.
Lucy stared out the window. Fiercely. The great Alakkulian Valley was like something out of a fairy tale for a girl who’d grown up with nearly nothing in a small village near Manchester. The crystal-blue mountain lakes shimmered with ice, the bright fields were piled high with the latest December snowfall and far, far below was the rush and clatter of the ancient capital city, bristling with white-capped heights as it stretched out from the foot of the royal palace.
The Qaderis, Lucy thought, preferred to look down on the country they’d helped guide and rule for so many centuries from the remove of this house that was very near a fortress, so high above it all.
Just as Rafi looked down on her, and always had. She was a fool.
“Am I to discern secret messages from the way you present your back to me?” His tone was like a lash, rich and bitter, and she stiffened against it. “Or is it your silence that I should pay attention to this time?”
Hateful man. Hateful, beloved man. Lucy gathered her shaky courage as best she could, and turned to face him.
And wished she hadn’t. Seeing him was a blow. Hard, hot. Straight to her midsection.
Rafi lounged in the doorway, his mocking gray eyes trained on her, the expression on his implacable face grim. She was shocked anew by the power that emanated from him, like an electrical current. It made him seem much bigger—broader and taller than he already was—and he was dressed impeccably in a dark suit that clung to his lean, strong body. He was like some lethal angel, she thought wildly, all that ink-black hair and harsh black brows drawn low over his stormy eyes. She shivered in helpless reaction and her traitorous heart stuttered in her chest. She bit at her lower lip.
“Where exactly will you go?” His voice seemed to caress her even as it taunted her, moving over her like silk. She shifted on her feet, and wished he did not have the power to do this to her—to make her fidget as if she were an errant child.
“Do you care?” She threw the words back at him. But, sadly, she already knew the answer.
“I am an extraordinarily busy man,” he said, his voice harder. Darker. His gray eyes connected with hers. She caught her breath. “I do not have time to dance attendance on you simply because you are having another one of your little attention-seeking fits. My aide told me this was an emergency.”
“Your aide tells you whatever he thinks you want to hear,” Lucy said, unable to keep the bitterness from her voice. She thought of all the calls she’d made to Rafi that had been blocked by his aide, Safir, of the man’s snide and smug tone, of all her messages that she suspected had never been delivered at all. But Rafi would hear no word against Safir, and certainly not from her. “He is an excellent gatekeeper, and no doubt keeps you adequately protected from anything you might not like. You chose him well.”
“I appreciate the vote of confidence in my business decisions.” His voice was sarcastic. Cool. It made her throat ache with tears she would not shed, words she dared not say. “But I still don’t see anything that I would classify as an emergency.”
He moved into the room, and Lucy regretted suddenly that she was already standing with her back to the wall of windows. There was nowhere else to go. She swallowed and felt her pulse race, as if she were nothing more than prey. He stalked toward her, dangerous and male, and Lucy could do nothing but watch him and pretend she didn’t wish for all the things she could never have. That she knew she shouldn’t even want. Not with him.
“That depends on your definition of an emergency,” she said, as he drew close and loomed over her, making heat bloom in her cheeks—and in other, secret places. “It is Christmas, after all. And your wife is leaving you. Some men might consider that an emergency.”
“I don’t see a head wound,” he said, his voice that same sardonic lash, his eyes flicking over her, cold and cruel. “No trauma of any kind. You appear to be in perfect health, Lucy. As ever. And for this I raced home from Berlin.”
For a moment she couldn’t speak. His fingers rose, almost brushing against the skin of her cheek, making her want to weep. It had been so long since he’d touched her. It had been so long. But she couldn’t let herself think about that. About the sweet madness of his kiss, his touch. Of the incandescent heights she had never dared dream of before this man had taken her there.
He dropped his hand. She told herself he had no doubt meant to check for a fever.
“I’m surprised you remembered this place at all,” she managed to say, calling on some deep well of determination and courage she hadn’t known she possessed. That he had forced her to find. “You haven’t been here in so long I had begun to think you’d forgotten about it entirely.”
“I see your flair for the melodramatic is with you still,” he said evenly, his gaze hard on hers. “What do you really want, Lucy? What is the purpose of all this theater?”
“I told you,” she snapped at him. “I’m leaving you, Rafi. And unlike you, I am not doing it the cowardly way—by inference. I’m not making sure to be ‘away on business’ for the better part of three months. I’m not going to make you sit and wonder what it means when I disappear, or take exactly one phone call from you and then be unavailable ever after. I’m saying it to your face. Right now.”
His dark eyes moved over her, and his mouth twisted.
“Did you just call me a coward, Lucy?” he asked, his voice deceptively light as his jaw knotted—warning signs she knew she should heed. “Did I hear that correctly? Shall I share with you my thoughts regarding pots versus kettles?”
“I am your wife, Rafi,” she ventured. “And yet you haven’t set foot in this house in months. You refuse my calls. Your horrible aide speaks to me as if I’m part fractious child and part evil, scheming witch.”
“Is this your rendition of the neglected, sorely abused wife?” Rafi interrupted coldly, his brows raised. “The performance needs work. And an audience unaware of the truth.”
“I’m not like you!” Lucy cried, unable to control herself, to keep all of her misery at bay. Not when she could feel the heat of him—see the light at the back of those mysterious, impossible eyes. “I can’t pretend!”
Rafi let out something resembling a laugh, hollow and frozen.
“On the contrary,” he said, shaking his head slightly, his gaze trained on her face—making her feel so small, so alone. “All you do is pretend.”
“I’m not the liar you’ve convinced yourself I am, Rafi!” she hissed at him. “I never have been!”
He was too close, then. His eyes like fire, his mouth a grim, condemning line.
“I know every lie you’ve ever told, Lucy,” he said. “And most of them to me. You should just count yourself lucky that I have a particular weakness for the lie of your body.”
CHAPTER TWO
“I DON’T care what lies you think I’ve told you,” Lucy said bravely.
Rafi almost admired her. Almost.
“And it doesn’t matter anyway,” she continued. “I’m still leaving you. I should have done it a long time ago.”
She looked so small. So fragile. Her arms were crossed over her chest as if she were holding herself together by sheer force of will. Her coffee-colored eyes were huge and dark beneath her pale blond curls, giving her the look of an innocent. That was her deepest deception, the one that he had believed so fiercely no matter what those closest to him—including all of his staff and Safir—had told him when he’d first fallen under her spell. No matter what proof they’d claimed to have of her manipulative ways.
Until that phone call three months ago when she had revealed the truth in that hollow, shameless way, and he had been more devastated than he could remember ever being before.
Sometimes he thought he still was.
Rafi stepped away from his wife before he did something he would regret. Like taste her again. Hadn’t that been what had caused all this trouble in the first place?
He was a man who prided himself on his rigid code, his steely commitment to his duty. He lived for his name, his honor, his family and the responsibilities that were his by virtue of being the oldest male Qaderi of his generation. His cousin Adel might have been the current king’s chosen successor, but Rafi was charged with making sure the future king’s family maintained its wealth and power, the better to serve and support Adel when he ascended the throne. Rafi considered it an honor.
More than that, he was a man hewn of the very mountains of Alakkul itself, like his ancestors before him. Many empires had tried—and failed—to take this little valley, to use it for their own ends. But Alakkulians did not bend. They did not break. Rafi felt the truth of that like the very blood that ran through his veins, marking him, defining him.
And then one day he’d glanced up at a cocktail waitress in a club in Manchester, England, and lost his head. Lost himself. It was those damned eyes, soft and vulnerable, over a mouth that made him hard every time he looked at it. Even now.
And what a pretty mess she’d made of him, hadn’t she?
“I know it’s important to you to believe the worst of me,” she said, her voice clipped, color flooding her porcelain cheeks. “After all, how better to excuse your own appalling behavior?”
“My behavior?” Temper pounded through him, threaded with that desire for her that never left him, no matter how much distance he put between them. He bit out a laugh. “I’m sure that in your mind, your deceit and betrayal is as nothing.” He held her gaze until her skin reddened. “Unfortunately for you, Lucy, I live in the real world.”
He realized they were too close when his hands found their way to her upper arms, holding her there. He let go as if electrocuted. But he could not dismiss the beguiling satin feel of her skin as easily. He let his eyes travel over her.
It took a moment, but the difference in her appearance filtered through. She looked … perfectly appropriate. Her messy curls were tamed into a chignon, which only drew his attention to her mouth. The dress itself was exquisite, tailored to showcase her femininity without broadcasting her sensuality.
He felt a pang in the vicinity of his chest, but thrust it aside. She had been all bold colors, garish and exotic, when he’d brought her here. Hadn’t that been what had lured him in when he’d met her, in the midst of all that British rain? Her artless delight. Her simplicity.
But, of course, that had all been a lie, too. Hadn’t it? He shouldn’t mourn its loss. He should be pleased that his uncultured wife had bettered herself in his absence and now more closely suited the image of what his wife should be. So why did he want to thrust his fingers into her hair and shake it from its bonds, see it wild and free?
“Are you in costume?” he asked, without knowing he meant to speak. He indicated her clothes with a jerk of his chin. “You almost appear to be what you are not. The dutiful wife appropriate to my station.”
She flinched as if he’d slapped her and he felt as if he had, vile and low. Hot, red heat washed over her face, and her full lower lip trembled, but she did not bow her head. She did not look away from him, though he saw the hurt in her brown eyes. Rafi hated himself. But that never seemed to be enough to tamp down the poison inside of him, the great swell of bitterness and rage at what she’d done to him. He feared it defined him.
“You delight in being cruel,” she said, her words too careful, as if they cost her. “But I am not going to stand here and be your punching bag. I wanted to tell you I was leaving you to your face, assuming I ever saw it again, and now I have.” She pulled in a shaky breath, and her mouth twisted slightly. “Goodbye, Rafi.”
He let her walk away from him. He was barely aware of the room around them, so inured was he to the trappings of the Qaderi wealth and consequence. The ancient, sumptuous tapestries that cascaded down the walls were lost on him; they served only to frame Lucy in reds and golds as she moved over the deep carpet, past the magnificent four-poster bed that rose like an edifice in the middle of the room.
He watched that mesmerizing sway of her hips, and could not help but admire the perfect hourglass lushness of her body, her voluptuous curves. She had mesmerized him back in Manchester, and she bewitched him now.
She was a wild magic, this woman, and he had lost everything because of her. His self-respect. The politically advantageous marriage he’d been plotting for years. His standing in his particular Alakkulian circle of high-ranking ministers and power brokers, all of whom had expected better from Rafi Qaderi than a shotgun wedding to a woman like her. In some parts of Alakkul, it might as well still be the twelfth century—and to those of his countrymen, some of whom graced the halls of power for all that they were hidebound, a cocktail waitress might as well be a scarlet-painted whore. Even his own staff had been appalled that he could fall so low.
She had ruined him. But the greater sin was that he had let her.
“I appreciate the high drama of this performance, Lucy, I truly do.” He did not bother to raise his voice. She stopped walking, though she did not turn around. “But it is wasted on me. I fly back to Germany in the morning.” He shook his head. “Assuming your great emergency does not conveniently strike in the dark of night, of course.”
She did turn then. He had the strangest notion that she was someone else for a moment—the woman she was pretending to be, all elegance and affront, staring at him from across the lavish room as if he had gravely disappointed her. Again. It was no doubt the incongruity that made him feel something perilously close to shame.
“I am not playing games, Rafi.” Her voice was quiet, but he heard the faint tremor in it.
Why should that affect him? And yet something moved through him, acid and heavy, that felt too much like regret.
“My flight to Manchester leaves tomorrow,” she said, still in that cool, detached tone. “I’ve hired a car to pick me up and take me to the airport in the city. Soon it will be as if I was never here at all.”
“It is far too late for that, much as we both might wish it otherwise,” he said, and he almost did regret the coldness of his tone and the way she visibly steeled herself against it, as if she expected nothing more from him. “But I have no intention of letting you go, Lucy.”
“You have no choice—” she began, that hectic color working over her pale skin again, and he should not have taken such satisfaction in that.
“There will be no separation, no divorce, no hint of scandal at all,” he said softly, watching her brace herself against each word. “This is the marriage you wanted, Lucy. The one you worked so hard to achieve. I suggest you enjoy it. We are both stuck in it for the rest of our lives.”
She only stared at him for a moment, her expression unreadable, and then she turned and left the room.
CHAPTER THREE
LUCY settled herself in the small sitting room off the master suite later that evening, fighting to get her riotous emotions under control. She only had to make it through this one night, she reminded herself, and in the morning she would get on that flight and put all of this—this painful, impossible chapter of her life—behind her. She couldn’t wait. She curled up on her favorite settee, and let her thoughts run wild as she looked out at the thick, dark night that had fallen outside.
Rafi was her husband, and there was no denying that he was a powerful man—but he was not the god she’d believed him to be once upon a time, not by a long shot. If she wanted to leave him, to divorce him—and she did, she told herself fiercely, of course she did—then she would do so. He could not control her. He could not—
“What is this?” His voice was dry, amused. “A strategic retreat?”
Lucy stiffened. She turned to look at Rafi as he moved into the room in that low, confident way of his. He had changed and showered; he smelled of the scented soap he preferred and his dark black hair gleamed. He’d traded his perfect suit for dark trousers and a simple long-sleeved shirt that showcased his impossibly breathtaking physique. He was, quite simply, the most beautiful man she had ever known.
Lucy remembered, suddenly, the first time she’d seen him. She’d been covering a friend’s shift at the Manchester nightclub where she worked, and she’d been dead on her feet. Oh, she’d smiled and flirted with the punters by rote, but she’d been counting down the minutes to closing time. She hadn’t seen him come in; she’d only noted the new group of men at one of her tables. Corporate swells, from the look of them, she’d judged, and she’d plastered on her best smile.
Rafi had been sprawled across the banquette, careless and nearly regal in his indolence. She’d noticed that confidence first. And then he’d glanced up at her, and everything had stopped. The noise of the crowd, the music, the boisterous sounds of his friends. All gone. There had only been that arrested look in his thundercloud gaze, and that faintly dazed expression on his harshly masculine, impossibly beautiful face as they’d locked eyes. And that sweet, addictive pulse, long and low and insistent, in her blood. Her throat. Between her legs.
She’d asked for his drink order and lost herself, then and there.
It was no different now, Lucy realized helplessly. She jerked her gaze away from his body, wishing her own did not ready itself for him so quickly, so thoughtlessly. As if nothing had happened between them at all. As if none of it mattered.
“It’s almost Christmas,” she said instead of responding to him. She pulled the wrap she wore tighter around her, and looked out the window instead of at him. “Only a few days to go now.”
“That generally happens around this time of year,” he agreed, though she told herself his voice was not as cold as it had been before. “It is unavoidable, apparently.”
Lucy heard the derision in his voice, and thought, not for the first time, how little she knew this man who had changed the whole of her life. That should not have made her feel too big for her own skin, and yet it did.
“I love Christmas,” she said softly. She sensed more than saw him drop into the chair closest to her, and then he stretched out his long legs and she could scarcely avoid them. Even so, she kept her eyes trained on her own lap. “Growing up, there wasn’t any money for gifts, so on Christmas morning Mum would tell us stories instead. About how we would be princesses when we were older, how we’d never be cold again and how we would eat whatever we liked in golden palaces, bathed in sun and laughter.” She smiled. “That was my favorite part. Even when there were gifts, I preferred the stories. I used to lie by the fire and imagine they all came true.”
She didn’t know why she’d told him that. Surely she should have learned better by now. He was not at all what she wanted him to be, and she could not understand why she insisted on testing that theory. It never ended well.
“I suppose that your story did come true,” he said after a moment, and there was an odd note in his voice. She looked up and found herself snared in his dark gaze. She caught her breath. He waved a hand at the room surrounding them, the paintings on the walls, the lavish furnishings. But then his cruel mouth crooked into that smirk she recognized too well, and whatever warmth she’d started to feel disappeared. “How enterprising of you.”