Her voice was clipped and not exactly polite, and she decided on the spot that she would rather die than tell Orion that she’d enjoyed much of it. Not the endless corrections, but the scope of a queen’s role—and all of it to be performed with grace and wit.
Assuming such attributes are at your disposal, the mustache had sniffed.
If she’d been planning to remain his queen, she might have found it a challenge in the best way to rise to the levels expected of the king’s consort. The deft ability to influence ministers without appearing to do so. The political machinations hidden behind an easy smile. She would have loved getting to do those things—
But she wasn’t going to be queen.
And she could be just as patronizing as he was. “I have heard a great many lectures on state dinners, for example. I have been informed that I must learn a certain fluency in the language of flowers, which is apparently very important, even though I have the blackest thumb imaginable. I have been forced to attempt every possible iteration of a curtsy, which should really be its own workout craze. Royal Squats and Noble Lunges has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? I have spent untold hours dissecting where, how, and to whom I may or may not incline my neck. All of this has been riveting.” There was a gleam in his hazel eyes that made that fury inside her seem to melt. And caramelize. “Absolutely riveting.”
“Yes, well. Not everything can be as exciting as prying into the personal lives of strangers with an eye to ripping their lives apart. It will no doubt be an adjustment.”
Was it her imagination or was Orion rather more testy than usual tonight? Edgy, she might have said. If he was someone else.
“Is something the matter?” she asked, and it was only after she’d asked it that she realized she would have been better served pretending not to notice.
Because she certainly shouldn’t care.
“Not at all,” Orion said. “Or nothing more than usual. Sometimes it is not possible to rule a country. You must rule yourself and hope the country follows afterward. Eventually.”
Calista had the urge to upend the nearest incidental table, scattering figurines and precious objects to and fro. She refrained. Barely.
She made herself breathe into the fury. “Self-control is admirable, I’m sure. Though I’m not certain it takes the place of, I don’t know, basic human rights.”
“Human rights?” He looked amazed then, and inarguably royal. As if he’d turned into a bust of himself. “Have human rights been violated in some fashion that I am unaware of, here on the quiet streets of Idylla?”
“Perhaps not on a wide scale. Not in Idylla, anyway.” Admitting that felt like a surrender, and she didn’t want to give up so much as a centimeter. “But I’m feeling rather concerned about my own rights at the moment.”
“Yes.” Orion eyed her. “I can see how you suffer.”
“There’s no need for sarcasm,” she shot back at him. “You don’t have the slightest idea what it’s like to have your whole life taken away from you at a whim.”
“Calista. I must beg of you.” He shook his head. “Do you really think that I’m likely to lend a sympathetic ear to my blackmailer?”
“I’m not the one who blackmailed you.”
“No, worse, you are my blackmailer’s instrument.”
There was something in his gaze, then. She didn’t understand it. It was a glittering, dark sort of thing, and it made her skin prickle. Everywhere. It made that melting, caramelized mess she wanted to call fury...very distinctly something else, especially as it sank lower.
“Now you live beneath my roof. I receive daily reports of the ways you challenge my staff. You treat me with rampant disrespect, so I am not particularly shocked that you are not the biddable girl they might wish you were. And none of it matters. I will marry you all the same, come Christmas Eve, because that is the tradition. You may not have been my choice, but you are my betrothed, and I do not break my promises.” Orion’s eyes gleamed, while his voice seemed to get tangled up in all that fire and fury within her. “But by all means, stand before me and tell me what it is like to have the life you’d planned snatched out of your fingers.”
She blinked. Then again. “I suppose you have a point.”
And to her surprise, he smiled. “You are the one who decided we must be enemies, Calista.”
“Perhaps I was hasty.”
Suddenly, it was as if she couldn’t think what to do with her hands. Or her neck. She felt...outsized and awkward, and she knew, now, in no uncertain terms, that it would be inappropriate for her to sit until he did. That royal etiquette decreed that unless and until they sorted something else out for the two of them in private, she must continue to treat him with the courtesy due his station no matter how she felt about it.
The trouble isn’t that you know, a voice in her whispered. It’s that you care.
She rather thought she’d preferred it when she didn’t.
“Did your parents get along?” she asked. He stared at her, and this time, there was no hoping she didn’t flush. She did, and rather brightly, she feared. “I don’t mean at the end. Everyone knows how...sad she became, of course. But surely they could not have begun at the place they ended.” She swallowed, her throat suddenly dry. What had made her think bringing up the queen’s death—officially called an accident but widely regarded as the suicide it was—was a good idea? No matter how the old queen was pitied because who wouldn’t wish to escape from King Max? “Could they?”
Orion stalked over to the sideboard, and she watched as he fixed himself a drink with decisive, peremptory movements of his hands that made her feel a bit...fluttery.
He turned back, swirling liquid in a crystal tumbler, and eyed her rather darkly over the top of it.
“What is it exactly you are asking?”
“According to what I’ve learned in the past week, your mother was bred for the job,” Calista said, still standing there feeling foolish with her hands folded in front of her and her back pin straight. Not because she felt in control, the way she did in a boardroom. But because she felt ripped into a million little pieces and she didn’t have the slightest idea how to start putting them back together. So perfect posture it was. “She and your father were promised since the day of her birth. She was trained not only in how to be a queen, or how to be Queen of Idylla, for that matter, but how to be your father’s specific queen. His likes and dislikes, his strengths and weaknesses. Other girls learned about history, but your mother? She studied your father.”
“So I’m told, for her sins,” Orion said darkly.
“Well? Did it work?”
Orion tossed back his drink. “To a point. Yes.”
Calista wanted to fire questions at him, particularly because the look on his face then was troubled. But she bit her tongue. And though it was more difficult than it should have been to a seasoned negotiator, she waited.
Not at all sure he would reply until he did.
“While my grandfather was alive, it was different,” he said. “My parents were newlyweds and from all I have ever been able to ascertain, they got along well enough. This was no love match, but then, no one expected it should have been. My mother was an excellent support for a crown prince. She provided the heir and the spare in short order. She maintained a full slate of complementary interests. She took great care to create a certain image—elegant, yet approachable. But then my grandfather died. My father became king.”
“‘Heavy is the head...’?”
“Heavy was the ego,” Orion growled. “This is all documented history. It’s not personal. My father was spectacularly ill suited to be the king of anything. He surrounded himself with the worst people. Sycophantic courtiers who told him only what he wished to hear. He’d already secured the bloodline, so why not indulge himself as he pleased? He began to throw parties. He began to neglect his duties. And my mother, alway
s trained to think first and only of my father, went with him wherever he led. How could she not?”
“She was a grown woman,” Calista pointed out. Carefully. “A grown woman and a queen, in fact. With her own courtiers, advisers, and so on. Or so I am informed.”
His mouth twisted. “If you already know, why are you asking me?”
“I want to know how you see this role I am to take in a few weeks.” She lifted her chin and tried to understand why that severe look on his stark face made her want to do dangerous things. Like move closer. Or worse, touch him. “That’s really what matters, isn’t it? What do you want from a queen, Orion?”
She didn’t understand why the tension in the room was so intense. But she also didn’t move when he slapped his tumbler down on the sideboard with a decisive click, and then started for her.
Calista stood her ground. Somehow, she stood her ground, when he seemed to her like some kind of avenging angel as he bore down upon her.
And then his fingers were on her shoulders, pulling her close.
As if he wanted to flirt with the same dangers she did.
Because her secret shame was that there was not one single shred of resistance inside her. Not one, when she knew that this wasn’t real. That none of this was anything but elaborate staging.
No matter how it felt.
“I’ve already told you what I want,” he growled at her.
“Sex,” she threw at him, because challenging him was the closest thing she had to a wall and she needed a wall. She needed something between them. “That’s what you wanted from the start. You do know that you’re the king, don’t you? You can snap your fingers and have as much sex as you want with whoever you want. You don’t have to marry unwilling women to get it.”
She thought he ought to have been gripping her hard, as if he wanted to hurt her. The way her father would have done. But instead, his thumbs moved restlessly against the exposed skin of her clavicle. And she could feel the fire of it, the rhythm, the deep, drugging song as it spooled out inside her.
“I could snap my fingers, yes,” he agreed, and if there was a wall between them it was made of need. “And then before I know it, I could also have a collection of tabloid articles to my name, one for each new scandal that would rip this kingdom apart. I prefer to keep my private life private. And all scandals in the past.”
There was something in the way he said that. She tilted her head slightly to one side, trying to work it out. Something inside her longed to simply reach out her hand. To lay her palm against his cheek and feel the heat of him.
Another part of her wanted to bury her head against his chest, because she knew, somehow, that if she did, he would gather her against him and hold her tight.
But she could feel that song inside her, the pitch growing higher and more insistent.
And she thought of his mother, bred since her birth to play the supporting role. To disappear while standing in plain sight, there next to her husband. A woman created for the sole purpose of bearing children and smiling prettily beneath the weight of a crown that was never hers.
Calista understood something terrible about herself then. She understood exactly how she’d been lying to herself all this time.
She’d worked so hard, and sacrificed everything, but not only because she wanted to save her sister from her parents. Not only because she wanted to put her father in his place at last.
She’d been doing it for those reasons, yes. But more than that, she’d wanted her own power. She’d wanted to prove that she could do it. She alone. She’d wanted the life she knew she could have had if she’d been born the son her father had always wanted.
She had never trusted anyone.
She didn’t see herself starting now.
And it had all happened too quickly, hadn’t it? She’d been removed from Skyros Media. She’d been shunted off to the palace. She’d spent a week learning about all the ways she could better serve and support the king.
Calista didn’t know if it was galling or pathetic that she’d already drowned, had disappeared in her own mirror, and was the last to know.
“I’ve already said this to you once,” she said now, swaying closer to him because it felt like danger, and that felt like resistance. “You don’t have to go to all these lengths to have sex with me, Your Majesty. You could do it right now, if you wanted. All you have to do is ask.”
“We have a ball to get to,” he gritted out at her, but his thumbs brushed against her skin. And he didn’t let her go.
“My bad,” she replied, smiling because that felt meaner. Edgier and therefore safer. “I should have known. You only want me if it’s a challenge. If there’s some kind of hunt. Even kings are mere men, after all.”
“Hardly,” Orion growled. “I just want you, damn you.”
And then he slammed his mouth to hers.
CHAPTER SEVEN
ORION SHOULDN’T HAVE let her goad him. He should have been better than that.
More controlled. More in command of himself—and her.
But as Calista’s taste exploded in his mouth—far better than he remembered, far darker and wilder and more addictive—he found he didn’t much care.
He wasn’t the fool she thought he was.
Orion knew that she was acting out. That despite her performance that first day, she was in many ways a victim of her father the same as he was.
He knew all that. He simply couldn’t care about it the way he ought to have. Not just then.
Because she tasted like all the dreams he’d been having, one hotter than the last. Intense and demanding and astonishingly perfect.
She was every fire he’d ever known and denied himself, burning hot within him. Making him think she was something he could not possibly survive intact—
But immolation sounded good to him just then. And tasted better.
He knew that they had a schedule to keep. He knew that their car was waiting to take them to the ball, and more important, all the people who had bought tickets would be waiting for them, too. He knew that this particular holiday tradition, with or without a royal engagement in the mix, was beloved by his people. They looked forward to it all year, and it was part of their national character to note, with pride, that Idylla boasted a season for commoners and kings to dance and make merry together.
His father had started blowing off the holiday balls years ago, to no one’s great surprise. But Orion never had. In fact, as crown prince, he’d never missed one.
Orion was always where he said he would be. He was always on time and prepared. If his schedule decreed that he would set foot on a certain flagstone at 6:37 p.m., that was precisely when his foot struck the earth.
“It’s easy to be a monk when you rid your life of any temptation,” Griffin had told him, years ago.
Orion had ignored him back then. He’d assumed that was no more than Griffin being provocative, as ever.
But tonight, Calista was in his arms, her mouth was open beneath his as she kissed him back, and Orion understood at last that he had never been tested before.
He had never come close to a test.
That should have appalled him, but it didn’t. It couldn’t. Because he was kissing her, and that was all he could manage to care about.
He kissed her like a dying man. He kissed her as if she alone could quench the great thirst he hadn’t known he had. He kissed her and he kissed her, moving closer and pulling her even tighter in against him. He angled his head, kissing her hungrily. Hotly.
He wanted to sink his hands into her hair. He wanted to throw her down on the nearest flat surface and truly indulge himself at last.
He wanted.
And that meant he was as weak as his father had ever been.
It was that thought that penetrated, dousing him like sheets of ice.
He thrust her away
from him, taking in the fact that she looked as wrecked he was. That her eyes were glassy, her mouth soft.
But he couldn’t process any of that.
All he could think was that after all this, after everything he’d done, after the years and years of keeping himself separate from the things that tempted other men because he wanted to be something better, something more, something worthy of the crown he now wore—in the end, it all came down to this.
Petty sins of the flesh.
A lifetime of control and commitment and all it took was one woman to ruin him. He almost laughed, though nothing was funny.
“Is this why your father sent you here?” His voice was rough and thick, two signs that he was already too far gone. “Is this the game you’re playing? Just like every other honey trap that has ever been set for me?”
For a moment, she seemed to vibrate. Her aquamarine eyes were wide and glued to his, but the look in them was haunting.
Because it was the same one he’d seen on her face in that hallway in Skyros Media. Right after her father had literally slapped her cheek.
Orion had now done the same himself, with his mouth.
Did he really need any further evidence that at the slightest provocation, at the first temptation, he became his father?
He remembered his mother, then, though he preferred not to think of her outside of a few stray, happy memories when he was small. But now he remembered those later years. How she would cry and wail, literally crumbling if King Max so much as glanced in her direction. Cringing and sobbing, until Griffin and Orion, though only boys themselves, had been forced to act as her protectors.
Deep down, Orion’s secret shame was that he’d grown impatient with her. His own mother.
You can’t cry in front of him, he’d told her once, furiously, with all the conviction of the overly serious child he’d been. You can’t show him that he’s hurt you.
But she had only done it more.
This time, he assured himself, he would do no such thing, no matter the provocation tonight. It surely wasn’t her fault that he was so tempted by her. He waited for Calista to cringe away from him, assuring himself that he would understand her. He would support her. He would do whatever was necessary to—
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