“In ruins all around us?” he asked starkly.
“Clarified,” she said instead. “However harshly. So tonight, I went to the board meeting. It was exactly as I imagined it. I arrived late, to make an entrance. There were the expected whispers and mutterings when I walked into the meeting and took my place. My father looked apoplectic, because he expected me to be sequestered off in the palace, allowing him to cast my vote by proxy, as he preferred.”
She sniffed. “Only once every few years has he allowed me to attend the meetings, so I could have the pleasure of voting the way he told me to, but in person. In some ways that is a gift, as this is the sort of meeting that goes on for hours and takes a long while to get to the voting. At the first break, I knew that if I stayed, my father would become abusive. As usual.”
Orion heard himself growl. “The next time he puts his hands on you, Calista, there will be consequences.”
Her lips twitched and something in him warmed at the site. That optimism that he claimed came and went—but, in truth, only hunkered down within him, waiting for its moment—burst to life all over again.
Like fireworks.
But he tried to tamp it all down and assume his usual stern expression.
“I didn’t intend to give him the opportunity to put his hands on me,” she assured him. “I ducked out the door and slipped away because I knew that he would get caught up in conversation, and I needed to ready myself for the final act of this thing. At last.”
“Have you come here to tell me that you are breaking off our engagement?” Orion asked then, the fireworks starting to feel a bit more like gunfire. “I suppose I should thank you for doing it in person.”
His mind spun out, then. He thought of the scandal it would cause. The crowing in the papers that as they’d suspected, the king had been played for a fool by a member of the toxic Skyros family. And, really, how could anyone esteem a king who was a fool? Better, really, to be a villain. At least there was power in it instead of pity.
But Calista was talking again. “I went and hid in my office. It’s right next my father’s, so I knew there’d be no particular rush for someone else to take it over. I left all the lights out and stood there, staring out at that very same moon.”
“It is not quite full,” he heard himself say. “It will be full tomorrow.”
Again, that sheen in her gaze made his chest feel tight.
“There was something about the moon, full or not.” She looked down at the ring on her hand. That ring he’d put there, and now could not imagine gracing any other hand, ever. Everything in him rejected the very idea. “It was as if the moon and the sea caught the stones. And they all twisted around and around inside me. And all I could think about was last week. When we stood in the dark, with only the sea and the rocks as witness, and you asked me to make a choice I was certain was already made.”
“Was it not?” he hardly dared ask.
“I could hear it when they started calling the meeting back to order,” she said, her voice barely above a whisper. A rough, harsh whisper, her eyes fixed on his. “And everything I had always wanted was in that boardroom. Mine for the taking. I could hear my father’s voice, booming down the hall as he told one of his vile, off-color jokes. All I had to do was move. Turn on my heel, walk down the hall, and crush him beneath my foot the way I’ve always dreamed.”
“Calista.”
And then again, just her name, like a prayer.
“Instead, I went into his office.” She sounded as if she was running, but she stood still, there on the other side of the old desk that had once been his grandfather’s. “I went to his safe. It only took me three or four tries to guess his combination, because it never occurs to my father that anyone might be observing him. He thinks he’s too busy studying everyone else, looking for weaknesses, for anyone to return the favor.”
She looked down, then, and it felt like a slap. Orion blinked. But she was reaching into the bag she’d tossed on his desk. And she pulled out a very familiar portfolio.
Then she set it on the expanse of the desk between them tenderly, as if it was a bomb.
“Is that...?” But his pulse was going crazy in his veins. And he was staring at her as if she was a ghost, or the sun, or some beautiful, complicated combination of both. “Calista. You didn’t.”
“I made my choice,” she whispered, her voice thick. “The board voted to remove him, but in the end, I knew my place wasn’t there. It’s here. With you.”
And then, her eyes really did fill with tears.
More astonishing, she did nothing to hide them.
Orion had no memory of moving. But he was around his desk, with his hands on her, before his next breath was through.
“I want to be the woman you thought I was when you told me you could trust me,” she cried, her head back and her face...open. Tears in her eyes and nothing but stark honesty stamped across her features.
And in all his life, Orion had never been so humbled.
“I want the future,” she told him, her voice broken. “I want a future with you. I’ve spent my whole life battling the past, and it’s done nothing but make me sick and slimy, just like him.”
“Never,” he growled.
“I want those weeks we shared to become our life,” she continued, as if it scared her. But she kept going. “And I want you to know, Orion, that betraying you almost killed me. Because none of what happened between us was anything to me but sacred. And the thought that I destroyed it, forever, breaks my heart.”
She pulled in a ragged breath that sounded like a sob. “So I’ve proved it to you the only way I could. By setting you free.”
“Calista.” He pulled her closer to him, holding her tightly, the way he wanted. The way he always wanted—he, who had taught himself not to want at all, until her. “I’ve already told you. You cannot shame me with the truth.”
“I’m not ashamed of your truths,” she sobbed. “I’m ashamed of me. I’m ashamed that it took me right up to the eleventh hour to understand what I was becoming.”
“You were fighting fire with fire,” he said, surging to her defense without stopping to think about it. The way he always would. “There’s nothing wrong with that.”
“You found another way.” Her hands were braced against his chest and the way she looked at him made him feel like a god, not a king. “You always find another way. You never sink to anyone’s level, you make your own.”
“Of course I do,” he said, and allowed himself a small hint of a smile. “I am the king.”
“I only hope that you will help my sister in the way I tried to do, but couldn’t,” she whispered.
He pulled out his mobile and shot off a text to the head of his security. “She will be removed from your family’s home within the hour and installed in the palace. Will that do?”
“Orion.” And the way she said his name was like an ache. “I didn’t come here to tell you that I was calling off our wedding. I came to give you those pictures, so that part would be ended. And with the full understanding that once my father’s leverage over you was gone, you might be perfectly happy to see the back of me. I accept that.”
Though he noted, with some satisfaction, that she sounded wretched. Not accepting.
“If you wish to leave me at the altar, Calista, you will have to do it yourself,” he growled at her. “I will be there tomorrow in the Grand Cathedral, ready and waiting to make you my queen. All you need to do is show up. Or not.”
She pushed against him, shaking her head. “You can do so much better than me. You could have anyone. Why would you want the daughter—”
“I don’t care who your father is,” he told her, his face low, and his mouth against hers, like a vow. “I don’t care who my father is, either. It’s time for us to bury them, Calista. You and me, together. We will put them in the ground, one way or
another, and we will find our way into our own future. A future that has nothing to do with either one of them.”
She gazed up at him, looking caught somewhere between despair and hope, and so he kissed her.
Because words were only words, but this—
This was real.
This was them.
It had already changed both of them. So deeply that Orion doubted either one of them could ever go back to who they’d been before.
Good, a voice in him said. Smugly.
“I love you,” Calista whispered, there against his mouth. And the words made his heart thud. “I tried so hard not to love you. I told myself I couldn’t love anyone. But in the end, I thought of you and I emptied out my father’s safe, and I ran straight here.”
“Calista,” he said, like her name was a song. He rested his forehead against hers. “Tomorrow you will be my queen. But I believe I have loved you from the first moment I saw you, standing out on the balcony with your eyes on the sea. I loved you then. And if you will let me, I will dedicate my life to loving you forever.”
“I don’t know if I believe in forever,” she replied, tears pouring down her face. “But if you do, then I’ll try. I’ll dedicate my life to trying, and giving you every reason in the world to trust me. I promise.”
“And I promise you, I will give you the same.” His lips crooked into a smile. “And you know I am excellent at keeping promises.”
“Just as you know I’m terrific at keeping my focus,” she replied, the sparkle he loved so much returning to her gaze.
It felt like another song.
And then his mouth was on hers, she was wrapped around him, and he bore her down to the floor before the fire.
He kissed her and he kissed her, over and over, hardly able to believe that this was real.
“Orion...” she whispered.
He took his time, peeling her out of the sharp, sleek clothes that made her look so dangerous. Then he feasted upon her.
He took her breasts in his hands, tasting one hard nipple, then the other. She moaned, arching against him, and he wanted too much. He wanted everything.
Orion shrugged out of his own clothes, sighing with a kind of relief when her hands found the hard ridges of his abdomen, then moved lower to worship the hardest part of him.
Her eyes were wide with a kind of mute pleading as she shifted, moving lower so she could take him in her mouth.
A sweet promise. A wicked temptation.
A kind of vow, he thought, as she licked her way along the length of him as if tasting his heat was a sacred act all its own.
And when he could take no more, he pulled her up and astride him, settling her so he could feel the molten heat of her all over him, where her mouth had just been.
“You are mine,” he told her, like a vow. “Always.”
“Forever,” she agreed, and then she impaled herself upon him.
And they both groaned with the pleasure of it. The slick, hot glory that was only theirs.
She moved her hips, an endless seduction. And together, they made vows to each other that would last a lifetime. With their bodies and their words. With the deep thrust and breathless retreat.
With the spiraling heights he took her to, his hands gripping her hips as he took control, lifting and lowering her. He watched her shake apart, flying over that cliff into a thousand bright pieces. He kept going, flipping her over and driving himself in deeper.
His first. His last. His only.
He waited until the fire in her burned anew, and only when she cried out his name again did he let himself go, following her over the edge of the world.
Later tonight they would burn to ash the bitter legacy her father had collected. They would render him even more toothless and dismissible than he already was this night.
Here before the fire, they were new.
Come the dawn, it would be Christmas Eve. He would make her his queen.
And he was His Majesty Orion Augustus Pax, King of Idylla, so he did exactly that—and then he set about loving her for the rest of his life, because she deserved no less.
And because she loved him right back.
Hard and true, fierce and faithful, until they were both so happy it was hard to remember that they had ever been anything else.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CALISTA MARRIED KING ORION OF IDYLLA in the Grand Cathedral with the whole of the kingdom watching.
The people poured into the cathedral itself. They lined the streets, though it was a blustery day, which everyone said felt appropriately Christmassy, with the holiday decorations lighting up the trees and every house in the land bright with celebratory candles.
Inside, she took Orion’s hands. She gazed into his eyes and she said her vows.
Then she kissed him in front of the world and made it real.
And when he led her out of the cathedral again, she was a queen.
His queen.
Together, they sat in a carriage open to the elements, and though it was not warm, neither one of them felt the chill. The carriage led them up a winding road toward the palace, lined all the way with Christmas lights and cheering subjects.
And at the final ball of the Idyllian holiday season, always traditionally held in the palace, they celebrated their wedding—and more than that, their miraculous love for each other, where everyone could see it.
Feel it. Wonder at it, if they liked—or wonder why her parents weren’t at the ceremony, which would no doubt be in all the papers the next day.
Calista found she couldn’t care less. Melody was safe.
Her parents were the past.
Orion was the future.
This time, when Orion led her out onto the dance floor, he didn’t pretend to be stern and austere. He smiled down at her in her Cinderella dress, until she thought that surely every person in the whole of the kingdom of Idylla could see that he was besotted.
But then, so was she, and she didn’t care who saw it.
“My queen,” he said formally, as he swept her into his arms. “Your Royal Highness.”
“My love,” she said in reply.
And they danced.
They danced and they danced, and they celebrated the love they’d almost lost, before finding it at the very last moment.
They danced. They celebrated. The king made a speech, and outside the crowds cheered them by name.
Most of what Calista would remember of this night was him. Her beautiful Orion, his eyes gleaming gold, as they claimed each other at last.
And when the clock struck midnight, it really was Christmas, at last.
Her king and her love—her husband—dispensed with tradition and tedious royal decorum. He swept her up into his arms to the delight of the crowd, and then he carried her up the grand staircase, heading for the family wing of the palace.
He didn’t put her down when he’d climbed the stairs. Nor did turn toward her suite.
Instead, he carried her into the sprawling King’s Suite.
“I have already moved your things,” he told her sternly. “And I will tell you now, Calista, that I have no intention of maintaining separate lives. Or rooms. Or anything of the sort.”
“Perish the thought, my liege,” she said, smiling, with her head on his shoulder.
“It is clear to me that I am going to require access to my queen,” he said, as he strode into a chamber with a bed raised high on a dais, with four posters soaring high, as befitted a king.
“You have all the access you like,” she assured him. “As long as I can access the king in turn.”
He laid her down on the bed, came down with her, and for a moment, they both smiled so wide, so bright, it was as if they created their own full moon there between them. To watch the one outside that hung there, for them, lighting up the sea.
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“Merry Christmas, my love,” Orion said.
“Merry Christmas,” Calista replied.
And then, together, they set about unwrapping their gifts.
That night, each other.
And nine months later a red-faced, squalling crown prince.
Followed not long after by a fierce little princess.
And one more of each.
“For good luck,” Orion liked to say, gathering their children in his arms and looking at her over their heads with those beautiful hazel eyes gone gold.
Calista knew they had no need of luck.
Because they had each other and that was better and sweeter than luck could ever be.
But to make sure, she loved him with all her heart, and let him love her the same way in return.
Forever and ever, and that was just the start.
* * *
Swept away by Christmas in the King’s Bed?
Discover the next installment in the Royal Christmas Weddings duet: Griffin and Melody’s story,
available next month!
And why not lose yourself in these other Caitlin Crews stories?
Unwrapping the Innocent’s Secret
Secrets of His Forbidden Cinderella
The Italian’s Pregnant Cinderella
Claimed in the Italian’s Castle
All available now
Keep reading for an excerpt from Their Impossible Desert Match by Clare Connelly.
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