by Angel Payne
“Hmm.” He wasn’t convinced. One bit.
Time for the deflector shields. “Okay. Why did you leave?”
He pressed a little closer. Correction: loomed. Holy shit, he was so big. And chiseled. And gorgeous. So much for the deflection tactic. My heart kicked into a sprint. My lungs couldn’t catch up. And the ache in my sex was a throb I didn’t even try to stop anymore. No wonder all those women concocted such crazy stunts to get closer to him.
He pulled away a little, allowing me a respite—but also breathing like he needed one himself. He leaned outward, bracing an elbow on his knee, but still looked at me as if a question brimmed on his impossibly full lips. Yet when he spoke, it was again with reflective confidence.
“A little more than three years ago, I accompanied my father on a journey to the United States. He wanted me to help select a university for my sister, Jayd, to attend.” Regret crinkled the corners of his eyes. “We fought bitterly about the trip.”
“Why?”
“I would have preferred dental surgery to going. I had finally earned my master’s degree in Paris but done it between official duties back here and trips to Finland to check on Shiraz, who was studying science and math at university there. For many years, my life had been nonstop traveling and studying. All I wanted was some freedom before the selection process for the Distinct began, and my life was officially no longer my own.”
Curiosity stabbed. “What about Samsyn? Was he at university, too?”
It was good to see him chuckle again though I was clueless where the joke lay. “Samsyn passed through the Arcadian version of high school by the skin of his teeth and the prayers of my mother—to anyone in the heavens who listened,” he explained. “And likely a deal my father made with the lord of the other side, as well.” Against the background of my giggles, he added, “Syn was born to be a warrior, not a scholar, a fact I am grateful for every day as I watch him build our military capabilities. While it is unlikely we will ever rattle our sabers in a world war, we can at least defend the island against any outside invasion.”
I straightened a little. “That’s a possibility?”
His expression clouded. “More than you may think.”
“Wow.”
“Yes.” His tone edged toward grave. “Wow.”
“Because you’ve been pushing to relax the borders?”
“Just the opposite. Syn wants the borders more fluid.” He caught my questioning look and responded, “If we start trading our natural resources, it would make the—how do you Americans say it?—‘baddies’ less motivated to invade and steal them.”
“Ah.”
He let a long stillness pass—but didn’t release me from the force of his stare, thickening with intensity…and sensuality. “I do not want to talk about war right now.”
“Me neither.”
He still didn’t blink. Literally. What the hell was transfixing him so deeply? I’d only had some soup tonight, not enough for food between my teeth. Crap. Had I developed one of my too-stressed out zits at the base of my nose?
My runaway nerves finally took over. “Well, make love not war, right?” Take head. Plunge into hands. “Annnd I did not just say that.”
He chuckled, throwing me off yet again. Dammit, he wasn’t supposed to be making me feel like the wittiest thing on the planet for that. “One of my job requirements is the ability to listen well. To everything.”
“Fine. Then you’re hereby ordered to forget you ‘listened well’ to that.”
There was the line he should’ve chuckled at. Instead, Evrest went so still, I wondered what invisible line I’d accidentally crossed.
“It is impossible to forget anything about you, Miss Saxon.”
Take turbo key, insert into chest. Along with it, a thousand other senses revved. I couldn’t fight the instinct that once again he spoke a handful of words standing proxy for hundreds more…hinting at a connection between us, beyond tonight, that I still couldn’t comprehend. And like before, I had nothing in return but a blank stare and a frantic-pumping chest—both only seeming to feed his serenity.
Dammit.
“Perhaps I should elucidate,” he murmured.
“Perhaps you should,” I snapped.
Evrest pivoted back, resting both elbows on his knees. “As I said, touring the US with Father was not my first choice of ways to spend a month.” He meshed his fingers then studied their juncture. “I was young and selfish, wrapped in foolish needs to sow a few wild oats, instead of acknowledging the opportunities of my life.”
I shoulder-bumped him. “You’re allowed, you know. Sounds like you were just a little fried.”
He frowned. “Fried?”
“Yeah. You know, burned out.” That didn’t help. I racked my brain for the British or French equivalent. “Umm…knackered?”
That earned me a grin. “Right. Knackered. Here, we just say bit. It’s a short version of the Turkish word for ‘exhausted’.”
“Hmm. Works in English, too.”
“Better than comparing yourself to a basket of fish and chips.” When I took my turn at a confused glance, he added, “Fried? Burned?”
I let the rest of my laugh out. “Okay, point made. You were dragged against your will. I’m sure that made things very interesting for your dad.”
He cocked a brow. “Why do you say that?”
I pulled my knees against my chest then rested my head on them. “You don’t strike me as the kind of guy who feels things halfway.” I smirked. “I’ll bet you were as much fun as an eight year-old having to sit through church.”
He returned the look, though showed a peek of white teeth—and a devilish glint in his gaze. “Church is not so bad sometimes.”
“Try telling that to an eight year-old.”
A nod, surrendering the point to me—but taking back his seriousness in exchange. “We toured a number of campuses during our trip,” he revealed, “though we were discreet about it, at Father’s strict bidding. His choice to let Shiraz and me study abroad was already a sore point with many of the High Council members.”
“The retro brigade, huh?” When his brows hunkered all over again, I amended, “The old school funk?”
“Old!” He nodded eagerly. “Yes, yes. The…old school funk.”
As he finished the echo, I detected a bunch of meanings in his tone. More than anything, a lot of conflict. He was probably tight with many of those men, who’d likely known him since birth—but who now held his country back from surviving in a world that sped farther ahead with every passing day. Ish. Couldn’t be easy to be him right now.
“So they’d already popped a few gaskets about you and Shiraz going to school in Europe. And the fact that your dad was thinking of the same for their kingdom’s sole princess, this time in the wicked wasteland of America…” Heavy exhale of comprehension. “Yeah; discretion would’ve been my call, too.”
“Of course it would have.”
He said it with confidence, like confirming the sky was blue. A stupid grin tilted my lips. Weirdly, it was one of the hugest compliments anyone had ever given me. Not that my world view depended on such bullshit. Okay, so it had been fun to be Audrey Hepburn for a night, especially when recognizing that Evrest wouldn’t gawk at me once my hair and face were back to basic makeup and a double-pencil bun—but to have him see that I could think on my own, too…it felt good. Really good.
Too good.
Time for a stand-down, girl.
I forced myself to mean it, ignoring the carved, perfect allure of him as I straightened back to Diane Sawyer decorum. With a respectful tone to match, I prompted, “Okay, so there you were, on the great father-son college road trip…”
He broke in with a wry twist of lips. “How loose do you play with great in that assessment?”
“How loose should I be playing?” When both his brows arched, I plunged on, “All right, all right. I’ll play along. What happened?”
His expression dipped deeper into cryptic.
I fought a huff, feeling as if I worked to identify a ghost hanging out between us, waiting for the ideal moment to materialize. He’d thrown a lot of specters at me tonight but this one was the biggest. The feeling wasn’t foreign. I normally called it anticipation—except anticipation didn’t cut my breath short and make my palms get all sweaty.
Finally, in that voice like a panther treading across velvet, he answered. “Not what happened. Who happened.”
Just like that, the ghost materialized.
Only it was he.
Hell. It had been him all along. It explained the enigma that really wasn’t. The shadows in his words, beyond reach yet so touchable. The connection to his presence…and the clarity of what he implied now.
You happened.
I asked him a hundred questions with my stare alone. Evrest dipped closer. His smile was so serene, it truly belonged on a panther.
“I should be freaking out.” I dragged frantic fingers through my hair. “This should be freaking me out. You should be freaking me out. Why am I not freaking out?”
He laughed softly—shit, his lips looked good when he did that—before pulling my hands down and intertwining our fingers. “You are very fascinating when you are ‘not freaking out’.”
So warm. So strong. Dammit, what his touch alone did to my bloodstream…like soaking in a bubble bath at the end of a shit day. Entrancing to the point of addicting—and impossible to walk away from. “I sure as hell hope there’s more to this story,” I snapped.
He should have laughed again. Instead, he turned my hand over and stroked its inner lines, wrist to fingertips, over and over across my sensitive palm.
Shivers…everywhere. Good ones. Too good…
He spoke with equal deliberation, every word soft and steady. “The morning we were scheduled to visit the Chapman campus, I was an especially huge ass to my father. What we fought about, I do not even remember. It is distant, irrelevant…but seemed so important then. Important enough that he rearranged the day’s itinerary to let me cool off.”
Ohhh, he kept up the caresses. He needed to stop. I’d make him stop. In just another moment…or fifty.
Despite the torture-that-really-wasn’t, I managed a coherent reply. “You know, your dad doesn’t seem like a half-bad guy.” I thought back to Harry’s first mention of King Ardent, of his struggles to guide his people to modern prosperity despite being thwarted by a high council who couldn’t pull their heads out of their asses.
Evrest’s soft smile backed my claim. “He was a great man,” he asserted. “Greater than I gave him credit for most of the time, especially for putting up with a hothead wanker of an offspring like me.”
Giggle. “Gee. Don’t sugar coat things on my account, Your Majesty.”
Once more, my slang clearly flew past him. My delivery in the key of snark seemed to help on the communication—though the reaction I expected was still a no-show on his features.
He gave me something better. A knowing, sexy-as-hell grin. “For the first and only time in my life, my temper worked to my advantage. Because of the change in our schedule that day, we arrived at Chapman during the lunch hour. We were walking across the plaza in front of the library just as another visitor made his way on campus—another father, arriving for a surprise visit to his daughter.”
Whoa.
Chain reaction of shock, cluster bombs across my psyche. But right after the explosions, a bizarre wave of relief. Suddenly, all the jagged confusion about this man began to smooth…a connection that elevated everything into some real sense…
The memory was easy to yank up. It had been the one and only day Dad visited me at school, a surprise drop-in when a Brazilian rainforest expedition ended early. Best moment of that school year, hands down—and now that it flared so fully in my mind, every second blazed as clear as a memory from days ago instead of years. My excited scream at Dad. His shit-eating grin in reply. Then all the craned necks and curious smiles from onlookers around the plaza…including the dark, exotic stranger beside one of the campus guides, with a gaze that pierced even across the fifty feet of concrete between us…so quickly forgotten when Dad and I followed it up by walking to Old Towne Orange to forage through antique stores and suck down old-fashioned milk shakes at the Watson’s Drug ice cream counter.
Scratch the “school year” designation. It’d been one of the best afternoons of my life.
“So was the girl surprised?” I let my grin go impish.
Evrest surprised me again with his reaction. Instead of the bigger smile I expected, his expression softened but intensified—though not back to panther mode. He was all man, hulking and masculine and edged in rough energy, as he dropped his head close once more. “She was indeed surprised. But there was more to it than that. At least to me.”
“More?” I yearned to lean in just as much as him, to get lost in the sea foam of his eyes. Not. An Option. Resisting him had been tough enough in a crowded ballroom, with the built-in buffer of his twelve would-be fiancées. Now we were alone, with nothing between us but words. His words, filled with such sincerity and strength, about to justify why we’d really been drawn so strongly to each other earlier. If that was the case, verifying we’d just repeated the cosmic coincidence, I had every right to a full freak-out. And still I muttered, “What do you mean, more?”
His lips quirked again. “I will not lie. At first, it was sheer lust that locked my attention to her.”
“Excuse me?” I laughed it out—past my disappointment. Maybe I’d gotten this way wrong. Maybe he wasn’t referring to me, after all.
Evrest squared his shoulders. “It has been a few years,” he charged, voice growly, “but I shall never forget that part of things. Her smile…it lit the whole plaza, even in broad sunshine. The contrast of her hair, falling over her shoulders like a cascade of midnight. And her skin…it gleamed like cream turned to silk, making me wonder if it was really as soft as it looked…”
As he spoke of each feature, he studied over the corresponding one—on me. When his topic switched to my skin, he expanded the study, poring his gaze over every inch of my body. Holy shit. This man’s stare gleamed like Kryptonite, and was rapidly becoming that to every inch of me. Weakness in my limbs. Fire in my blood. Even the spaces between my toes were ignited.
“Okay.” Rickety syllables. By divine grace, I avoided profanity—though hell, was I tempted. “L-let’s say that’s the way it did go down—”
“Well, nothing fell.” His brows pushed together, working to decipher my phrase. “But if you are asking about how things happened, I assure you the account is accurate.”
“All right, all right; I believe you.”
“But you still have questions.”
“Just one.” Perplexed sigh. “So for all her brilliance, the woman didn’t notice you standing there,”—beautiful trouble, come to life—“gawking at her? How? Why?”
There it was, without filter. While his story answered a lot of questions, it created another—so important, it counted for double points. How did he remember that day so clearly, when I didn’t? When I should have. Okay. it’d been three years ago, but no girl in her right mind would forget eyes like his, part of a face like his, making her the sole subject of his entrancing focus…
I racked my brain once more. Zilch on the recall. My sole remembrance was the joy I’d felt at having Dad to myself for an afternoon. I didn’t even tell Mom about it until months later. It had been our time, special and sacred. When one had been sired by the real-life version of Indiana Jones, afternoons like that were truly once-in-a-lifetime.
“I think you already know the answer to that.” Evrest’s stare didn’t waver. “I see it in your eyes. They shine now just as they did that day, when you greeted your father. You did not notice me ‘gawking’ because Father and I were not there to be noticed. Our security team followed us at a discreet distance, and our campus guide was instructed that we required a low profile, to observe what the school was like on a typical day.
”
“Well, you sure did that part right.”
“I was glad for it, too,” he replied. “Especially after that day.”
I frowned. “Back in the weeds of confusion here.”
He let out a little breath, not quite a sigh, while lightly venturing his fingers across the back of my hand. “Watching you with your father…it was, for me, like—how would you phrase it?—lightning? Getting…zapped?”
A laugh bubbled out. Couldn’t be helped. He linked the sensation to me, when his touch wreaked the same havoc? “Why?”
“It woke me up. You woke me up, Camellia Saxon.”
Hard gulp. The intensity of his words, coupled with the tingles from his touch…shit, I was really going to melt. “But you didn’t even know who I was.”
“I did after that day.”
Harder gulp. “You…investigated me, or something?” My “freaked out” should’ve morphed into “creeped out”—but didn’t. That should’ve set off alarms, but also didn’t. What the hell?
“No.” He shook his head, dipping into boyish awkwardness with it. “I might have…asked about you. Maybe…checked on you through the Internet every once in a while. That was all.”
Hell. He was just as captivating without the elegance as he was in full wolf mode. That was a good thing, since my own throat seemed to be suffering a rockslide, too. “You…Googled me?”
He shrugged. “Once. Or twice…when I was traveling and could get better web connection than what we had here.” He averted his gaze.
“So you knew I’d be with the film crew?”
His stare locked back to me. On me. Like a damn laser slicing open a diamond. “No. But I sure as hell hoped it.”
Ohhh, it was so time to change the subject.
“Tell me more…about that day. Why did you say I ‘woke you up’?”
His nod was resolute. “It happened inside a moment. I looked at Father and suddenly realized how fleeting my time was going to be with him. It had been a long time since I perceived him as simply a man, instead of the king of our country—who also happened to be my father. Watching the joy you shared with your father brought back the awareness of mine. His humanity…and his mortality. He had never been a man to take care of his health. He worked too hard, drank too much, and loved his cigars nearly as much as his country.” He chuckled, emphasizing the exaggeration. “But the truth of it all—as I said, it zapped me. I realized that he would not be in this world forever, perhaps not for much longer. My instinct turned out to be right.”
