by Trish Morey / Caitlin Crews / Nina Harrington / Raye Morgan
Because a man stood there, half concealed by the shadows deep in the room, watching her approach as if he’d summoned her.
Adel.
He could not remember being so angry before. Ever. Because he could not recall ever caring this much—about anything.
His gaze tracked her as she walked toward him, then stopped. She flinched as she recognized that she was not alone. She looked tired—dark smudges beneath her eyes and her skin too pale in the warm glow of the lamps that lit the large room. He was so furious it was all he could do to keep it locked inside of him. To keep from shouting at her. To keep from demanding she tell him that this was not really happening—that she would not leave him like this, taking so much with her. Surely she could not really do this. Surely it was a mistake—a misunderstanding.
“Be easy,” he said quietly, but even he could hear the lash in his voice. “I will not put my hands on you when I am this angry.”
Her gaze flared into a bright blue blaze, as if he’d deeply offended her. But how could he have done?
“I take it this is all some complicated charade,” she bit out. “There is nothing wrong with the plane, is there? There is no mechanical failure!”
“That rather depends on your definition,” he replied icily.
“I would categorize an abdicating queen as a failure of the highest degree.”
She let out a small noise, too rough to be a sigh, and turned her head away. She sank down on one of the butter-soft leather couches, but did not seem to see it. She wrapped her arms around her torso, and still, did not look at him. Something hard and heavy, like a stone, fell through him.
She was really doing this. She had done it, and he had only managed to engineer this stop at the last moment. She was leaving him, and taking his child with him. His child.
He was a man of action, of deeds and solutions, and he could only stand there, frozen. What had she done to him? How had he been reduced to this? Why could he think of nothing save how to comfort her?
“I cannot do this,” she said in a low voice. “I gave you your throne. What else can you possibly want?”
“I want you,” he said, the words torn from him. Painful. “My queen. My wife.”
“Your pawn,” she countered, her head whipping back around so that her gaze could meet his. He was shocked by the pain he saw there, the darkness. “Do you know something, Adel? I have been the pawn of one king or another since the day I was born. I am sick of it.”
“You are not a pawn,” he began.
“How can you say that with a straight face?” she demanded. She surged back to her feet. “Did you chase me across the world because you liked my personality? Because you thought about me at all? No—you wanted what only my particular parentage could give you. My special genetic make-up. If that does not make me a pawn, then I do not know the meaning of the word.”
“You do not understand,” he said, gritting out the words, because he did not like the picture she painted—and yet, given the option, he would do it all over again in exactly the same way. If he knew that, why should it eat at him? “I had no choice in these things, but that has nothing to do with what is between us now. What was always between us, even when we were young.”
“There is nothing between us.” Her voice was flat, her eyes unreadable. Like a stranger’s. “It was the madness of summer, nothing more. I gave you what you wanted. Now it’s your turn to return the favor.”
“What is it you want?” he asked, although he knew what she would say, and she did not disappoint him. She was so cold, and yet that dark anger shone in her silver-blue eyes and hinted at the turmoil beneath, the fire he knew burned within her.
“My freedom,” she cried at him.
“Perhaps that can be arranged,” he said, then prowled closer to her, noting the way her pulse jumped in her throat, and she swallowed—nervously, he thought. He moved even closer, making her tilt her head back to keep looking him in the eye. “But I have one question about this freedom of yours.”
“What?” It was as close to a growl as he’d heard come from her lips, and under other circumstances he might have found it amusing. But not tonight. Not here. Not when his whole life hung in the balance.
“What of the child?” he asked.
Lara felt herself pale, and thought she might have swayed on her feet—but then temper took over. She shook off the urge to collapse into some kind of decorative swoon, and glared at him.
“That doctor had no business telling you something private!” she hissed. “So much for confidentiality!”
“He is the royal physician,” Adel snapped. “Last I checked, he serves at my pleasure. Of course he told me—especially after I tore the palace apart trying to find out where and why you’d gone. How could you think to keep your condition from me?”
“How could you think I would tell you?” she threw at him, hearing the wildness in her own voice. The years of baggage. “So you could have one more bargaining chip to hold over my head?”
A muscle worked in his jaw. His gray eyes seemed to chill, and then turned to some kind of steel. Lara shivered, but she could not understand herself. Why should some reckless part of her want to comfort him? Even now? What was the matter with her?
“So this, then, is what you think of me,” he said in that low voice, and she realized, perhaps for the first time, that he was not as in control as he appeared. That the clenched jaw and deliberately controlled voice were smoke screens. That he was as furious as she’d ever seen him.
“It is nothing more than the truth,” she said, bravely, because the understanding that he was not the cold, controlled creature she’d imagined made her tremble deep inside. It changed everything, she thought—and yet, could change nothing. She could not let it.
“This is who I am to you,” he continued. “After all that has passed between us.”
“You mean sex,” she threw at him, heedless of the danger. Her temper—fused tightly to a growing feeling of despair— threatened to swamp her completely. “Threats and compulsion and sex—that is all that has ever passed between us!”
“I love you.” The words were like a slap—thrown down, harsh and abrupt, to lie between them. There was an expression she did not understand in his dark eyes, and a rush of joy she refused to acknowledge in her own heart.
“That is a lie.” Her throat hurt, as if too much lodged there that she could not bear to say.
“I have loved you from the start,” he said with a certain dignity, a quiet insistence. “From the first moment I saw you, when you were little more than a girl. I have loved you my whole life. Nothing has changed that. Nothing could.”
Oh, how her treacherous heart yearned to believe him! But she knew him—more than she wanted to, and better than she should. She knew his ruthlessness, his focus. In bed and in his pursuit of whatever else he wanted. Look at how quickly he had turned her from defiance to purring contentment in his arms! Look at the way her body warmed for him even now!
“You will say anything,” she said, appalled to hear the catch in her voice, but unable to stop it, much less the hot tears that followed. “Do anything. Do you think I don’t know that? You told me so yourself. This is who you are. The man who cannot compromise. The man who is not modern.”
“Lara—”
“I cannot do this again!” she cried, and there was nothing held back anymore, nothing hidden. She looked at him and she saw all the betrayals and disappointments of her youth. All the times she’d known, somehow, that Marlena was not telling her the truth. All the lonely days and nights spent waiting for Azat to come and claim her, to let her know she was worth something to him. Worth fighting for.
“There is no again,” Adel said fiercely. “There is only you. Me. This child. I cannot change the circumstances that have brought us here, Lara, but how can you doubt—”
“I won’t do it,” she threw at him. “I won’t subject my own child to this endless tug of war, this game with no end. I will not have this ba
by grow up wondering what she’s worth, and why, and have her squabbled over like a piece of meat in the market. Not this child!”
“This child will be loved,” he said, in that wild voice, low and throbbing. Uncontrolled. “Celebrated and adored.”
“Yes, far away from thrones and politics. And you.”
The silence seemed to hum between them. Lara was aware, suddenly, of the rain beating against the windows, and her own tears wet on her cheeks. She dashed at them with her fists, her breathing too fast, too hard. And all the while, Adel gazed at her, his beautiful, hard face open in a way it had never been before—shattered, a small voice inside of her whispered.
As if she’d destroyed him. As if she—or anyone—could have that power.
She wanted to turn away, but she could not make herself do it. She wanted to go to him, to press her lips against the uncompromising lines of his jaw, his brow. She did not do that, either. Could not let herself.
“I told you I loved you,” he said, as if from a great distance. “I have never loved anyone else in my life. Only you. Always you.”
“Prove it,” she heard herself say—harsh and fast. Before she could think better of it, or change her mind. “Let me go.”
She thought the bleakness in his eyes might have killed her right there, on the spot. She felt it pierce her heart, and shoot like fire through her veins, making her stomach lurch. She gasped for breath.
But Adel merely bowed his head slightly, as if the anguish she could see in his face was nothing at all.
“If that is what you want,” he said, his voice the barest thread of sound, and yet it still seemed like a lash against her flesh. “Then it is yours.”
And then Lara watched him turn and walk out of the hotel door, leaving her, just as she’d claimed she’d wanted.
So why, when the door closed behind him and the room was empty of everything save the rain against the windows, did she feel as if part of her had just died?
CHAPTER NINE
SHE walked back into the palace like a warrior, proud and strong, and Adel felt his heart stop in his chest.
Then begin to beat, hard. Something inside of him, granite and cold, began to ease as she stalked across the great marble floor of what had once been the throne room and was now the antechamber to his office.
“I did not expect to see you again,” he said, standing in the doorway between the two rooms, his arms folded across his chest. It had been two days. He knew, intellectually, that those forty-eight hours had been no longer than any other set of forty-eight hours, but it had not felt that way.
He had believed she was lost to him. Forever.
“I did not expect you to give up and slink away like a whipped puppy,” she threw at him as she closed the distance between them, going immediately for the jugular. He should not admire that as he did. She should not arouse him, with her temper and her daring. He should be furious that she had turned on him, run from him—and on some level he was.
But more than that, he wanted her. He wanted her, and she was here, and she was glorious.
And his.
“You told me to set you free, Princess,” he drawled. Surely she had come back in all ways, or why would she have come back at all? “I was only following your orders.”
She came to a stop before him, her remarkable eyes a mix of bravado and something else, something that made him long to touch her. It took all he had to keep from doing so.
Not yet, he thought. Not just yet.
“Since when do you listen to what I want?” she asked, a slight frown between her eyes. “I cannot recall a single instance of you ever doing so, in all the time I’ve known you.”
“I cannot follow this conversation,” he replied, his tone silky, his attention on her lush mouth. “I am a bully if I do not listen to you, and a whipped puppy if I do?”
She did not answer him. She only gazed at him for a long moment, her full mouth soft, her eyes big. Adel could feel the tension between them, the kick and the spark. He could see the truth of it reflected in the way she caught her breath, the way her body swayed toward his as if of its own volition.
Mine, he thought, deep inside. Like a perfect note played on a traditional balalaika, low and true.
“You said you loved me.” She said it so matter-of-factly, yet he could still hear the question. The uncertainty.
“I do.” And then he could not help but touch her, reaching across the space he did not want between them to hold her soft cheek in his hand. She shivered slightly, and then leaned into it, like a cat. “And I suspect you must feel the same, or you would not be here. You would have gone on to America. You would not have returned.”
“It seems I cannot stay away,” she said softly.
“Nor should you,” he said. “You are the Queen, Lara. You are my wife. This is your home.”
Lara blew out a breath, as a shadow moved over her face. “I do not want what my parents had,” she said, her silver-blue eyes so serious it made Adel ache. “I refuse to do to this child what was done to me. Or to you. I refuse.”
“Stay with me, Princess,” he said softly, raising his other hand to hold her face between them, looking deep into her eyes, into their future. “We will make the world whatever we wish it to be, together.”
Once again, Lara stood out on the terrace high in the mountains and looked out over the Alakkulian Valley. It sparkled in the bright morning light, the chill of the coming autumn already moving in from the higher elevations, bringing a sharper kind of light and a certain crispness to the air. She pulled her thick robe tighter over her torso and snuggled into it, flexing her toes against the cold stones beneath her.
She felt … alive. More alive than she had ever felt before.
Because she had chosen, finally. For the first time since Adel had appeared before her in that far-off parking lot, as if conjured out of the June afternoon, she had decided.
She had sat in that anonymous hotel room for what seemed like weeks, unable to process both what had happened and her own reaction to it. She’d wanted to die. She’d felt as if part of her had, as every moment stretched out and seemed to last forever, all of them resoundingly, painfully empty of Adel. She had not understood how she could yearn for him so much, hunger for him. How his absence could feel like a missing limb. How she could want him near her as much for the calm, quiet steadiness of his presence as for the desire he could stir in her with a single glance.
But then she’d realized that this time, it was up to her. He had let her go. His doing so had shocked her, but it had also freed her, as she’d wanted.
And once she was free, and could choose to be anywhere, Lara had realized that there was only once place on earth that called to her. Only one place on earth she could feel like herself anymore.
How had that happened? When had it happened? How had she put all of her past aside without even noticing it? Because while every word she’d thrown at him in that hotel room had been true, the truth was, there was no point being free, or strong, or alive, without him. None of that held any appeal.
She heard the French doors open behind her. She smiled slightly. They had hardly slept—reaching for each other again and again in the night. Re-learning each other. Revelling in her return, and renouncing their separation in the most intimate way possible. She leaned back into the warm, solid wall of his chest as he moved behind her, marveling at the way her body readied itself for his touch. Her knees felt weak. Her core melted. She even felt heat behind her eyes.
He was hers. He loved her.
Standing in his arms, looking out at the beautiful country of her birth, Lara realized that finally, finally, she’d found the home she’d been looking for all of her life.
She turned to look at him. That hard face. That uncompromising mouth. That tough, warrior’s body. And all of it hers, forever.
Because she’d been given the choice—a real choice this time—and she’d chosen him.
“I love you,” she whispered, though i
t felt like a shout, a howl, that could be heard from mountain to mountain across the great valley. His mouth curved.
“So you have showed me,” he said quietly. He let his hand trace a path down her body, slipping it inside her robe to her abdomen, where he placed it over the child they’d made. The child they would raise together, in this country they would rule.
And maybe, just maybe, just for them, if they worked hard enough to make it happen, the fairy tales would come true. Exactly as they’d dreamed together, so many years ago.
The Ordinary King
NINA HARRINGTON
Praise for
Nina Harrington:
Tipping The Waitress with Diamonds
“Witty, warm-hearted and wonderfully emotional, with this novel Nina Harrington once again balances pathos and humour so deftly that readers will be laughing and crying in equal measures as they get swept away by this tender, believable and heartwarming story.”
—Cataromance.com
Always the Bridesmaid
“Complex characters with terrific chemistry enhance Harrington’s simple plot. It’s a delightful effort from a new author to watch.”
—RT Book Reviews
About the Author
NINA HARRINGTON grew up in rural Northumberland, England, and decided at the age of eleven that she was going to be a librarian — because then she could read all of the books in the public library whenever she wanted! Since then she has been a shop assistant, community pharmacist, technical writer, university lecturer, volcano walker and industrial scientist, before taking a career break to realise her dream of being a fiction writer. When she is not creating stories which make her readers smile, her hobbies are cooking, eating, enjoying good wine—and talking, for which she has had specialist training.
Look for Nina Harrington’s new novel,
Her Moment in the Spotlight.
