In Defiance of Duty

by Caitlin Crews

  Or did I misunderstand your suggestion that I take a second wife? And perhaps even a third?” He did not imagine the way she stiffened then, the way her lips pressed tightly together.

  “Are you here to tell me you’ve found a few good candidates?” she asked, and he did not imagine the edge in her voice, either. Good, he thought, a dark satisfaction running through him then. Why should he be the only one to take exception to that particular suggestion?

  satisfaction running through him then. Why should he be the only one to take exception to that particular suggestion?

  “Perhaps I should ask you the same question,” he replied, suddenly far calmer than he’d been. “Wasn’t that my supposed replacement I saw out in the kitchen?” Kiara closed her eyes briefly, then opened them again. They were too bright, but she made no attempt to hide that from him, she only looked at him. He thought he saw the faintest tremor move over her lips, but she rubbed her hand over her jaw and he could not be sure.

  “I don’t want to do this,” she said in a low voice. “I don’t want to fight with you. It only proves how little we know each other after all this time, and it breaks my heart.” She pulled in a breath. “We come from very different worlds, Azrin, just as everybody warned us. Our parents, the papers, angry strangers on the internet.

  Maybe we should end this now before we wind up hating each other. I have to think that would be even worse.” He moved then, leaning toward her but not quite closing the distance between them. As ever, he felt the burn of it. The fire, the connection. Her eyes widened, but she didn’t shrink away from him. He was desperate enough to think that might be progress.

  “What would it take?” he asked. “What do you think could fix this?”

  She shrugged helplessly, a gesture of surrender that he found stuck into him like something sharp. He didn’t want her to give in, this strong, stubborn woman. To give up. He wanted anything but that.

  “I don’t think we can, unless you have access to a time machine.” She let out a small sound. “How else could we go back and really figure out who we are?”

  “Do you think I don’t know who you are, Kiara?” he asked, aware that his voice was little more than a rasp in the quiet room.

  “I know you don’t,” she said, some of the hardness returning to her gaze, her mouth. But then she seemed to shake it off. “But the truth is, I thought you were someone else entirely. I knew a man who was only a prince as an aside. I was completely unprepared for what you’d become when you became a king.”

  “I am the same man,” he said. His voice was too harsh, too sure. The words seemed to fall between them like stones.

  “You are not.” Her voice was firm. When her eyes met his, he saw the gleam of something he didn’t fully understand and certainly didn’t like.

  This was worse, he thought then—worse even than gestures of defeat. This quiet, soft-spoken talk of the end of them, as if Kiara was conducting a pale, distant postmortem. The wildness was easier; the passion and the pain. The fight. This was intolerable.

  “I think you misunderstand me,” he managed to say in a voice somewhere near even. “In fact, I know you do.”

  “See?” She opened her hands wide. “You are making my point for me.”

  He had to move then and he did, rising from the sofa and somehow not going to her, not touching her, not showing her the vivid truth of them that he could feel arcing between them even now, even as she talked so resolutely about an ending he could not, would not accept. He prowled to the window and stared out, seeing nothing. No acres of vines, no blue sky above, no distant hills.

  “What if we could make our own time machine of sorts?” he asked without turning around to face her. “You made a lot of claims in Washington. That I pushed you into dating me, into sleeping with me, into marrying me. What if we dated on your schedule instead?” There was no sound at all for a beat, then another. Then she made a sort of scoffing noise. Azrin turned then. There was a hectic color splashed across her cheekbones that could as easily be temper or desire. Or some potent combination of both.

  He raised his brows at her, daring her, and waited.

  “What are you talking about?” she asked after another long moment. “That’s ridiculous.” Her voice was cross. Annoyed. But he was sure there was something beneath it. He could feel it. He knew it—because she was wrong. He knew her.

  “Why is it ridiculous?” he asked, finding to his surprise that he was suddenly able to project a great calm he did not feel. At all.

  “We can’t just pretend that nothing’s happened between us!” she threw at him, her eyes wide, that color deepening in her cheeks. “That we’re not married, that you’re not … you. We can’t date!”

  “We don’t have to pretend that we’re not who we are—that would defeat the purpose.” He spoke with such authority, as if he was not making this up on the spot.

  As if this was not a last-ditch attempt to talk her into something he knew neither one of them would ever forgive him for simply taking. Though perhaps only he knew how close he was to doing so—simply throwing her over his shoulder like some kind of barbarian and to hell with what she said she wanted.

  “We can pretend that we have just met,” he continued like a civilized man would. “You say I don’t know you and I say that if that’s true, we can fix it. Introduce yourself to me. Tell me who you are.” He shrugged. “Perhaps you will find you don’t know me as well as you think you do, either. Perhaps we will find there are whole worlds yet to discover between us.”

  She stared at him.

  “You’re serious,” she breathed.

  She swallowed, then shook her head as if she couldn’t believe it. As if she doubted what she was seeing, hearing. Or perhaps she only wanted to doubt it.

  “Come, now, Kiara,” he said silkily. “What do you have to lose?”

  CHAPTER SIX

  SHE had everything to lose, Kiara thought some time later. But that wasn’t something she could tell him, not without admitting how lost he made her feel, or how easily he could have made her stay with him in Washington, had he only pressed the issue.

  They sat together out on the wide stone terrace that overlooked the gardens and the winery’s busy cellar door, watching the summer tourists come in flocks and buses and even on foot to sample the Frederick wines and the food they served in the small, adjacent restaurant.

  The day was impossibly perfect all around them, as if it was colluding with Kiara to show off the beauty of the valley to Azrin, to demand he take notice. They had debated Azrin’s absurd idea in the sitting room for a long time, until Kiara had been sure her head was going to break into pieces, and they’d agreed, finally, to take a break from it. A small negotiated oasis of peace.

  “Surely,” Azrin had drawled in that sardonic way of his, “we are not so lost to each other that we cannot enjoy each other’s company. If only for a little while.”

  “Surely,” Azrin had drawled in that sardonic way of his, “we are not so lost to each other that we cannot enjoy each other’s company. If only for a little while.” There had been no particular reason for that remark to set her teeth on edge, and yet it had.

  Nevertheless, Kiara had taken Azrin on a tour of the vineyards, showing him all the ways Frederick Winery had changed since he’d last been here for any serious length of time, back when they’d started dating. She couldn’t pretend that there wasn’t a huge part of her that was trying to prove something to him as she did it.

  Look at the scale of our operation, perhaps. Pay attention to how I’m needed here, and why, she’d said without using the words, with every single vine and barrel she’d pointed out to him.

  Azrin, of course, had said nothing. He’d only watched and listened, had seemed to consider the things she’d showed him, with that intense focus of his that made her heart seem to work harder in her chest.

  After the impromptu tour, they’d sat down for a simple lunch full of local flavor that Kiara had pulled together from the usua
l reserves in the chateau’s kitchen.

  She’d put thick slices of freshly baked bread, a few German sausages and a selection of local cheeses on a platter. Then she’d fished a bit of pear chutney from the pantry and, after a moment’s thought, a particularly spicy beetroot relish, as well. She’d added small bowls of almonds and olives, and a dish of salted olive oil to dip the bread in.

  Neither one of them wanted wine despite the fact there was so much of it available; a necessary precaution in her case, Kiara reasoned, given Azrin’s historic ability to run roughshod right over her even without any wine involved.

  Or was it more accurate to say it was usually her decision to give in to whatever it was he wanted, whether he asked her for her surrender or not? She wasn’t sure she liked that thought, and concentrated on the food instead.

  For a long time, they simply ate together at one of the small tables nestled there in the shade, in a silence she might have thought was peaceful, even companionable, had she not known better. Had the tension between them not added some kind of indefinable seasoning to each bite she took, a sort of prickle to the breeze that played over the table, even a certain heat to the measuring way his storm-tossed eyes moved over her when he thought she wasn’t paying attention.

  “You can’t really want to walk away from our marriage without at least trying to fix it,” he said after one such look in that darkly seductive way of his—breaking the silence and the peace between them that easily, though there was a part of Kiara that welcomed it the way she welcomed the onset of a storm after too long beneath threatening clouds. “That doesn’t sound like the Kiara I know.”

  She decided she hated him for that. It explained the acrid taste in the back of her mouth, that unpleasant rolling sensation in her gut. Hate. Clearly.

  “They will say you could not handle being queen,” he continued, seemingly unperturbed. “There will be wild speculation. Is it because you secretly detest my people, my country, as we always suspect Westerners will? Or is it simply because you could not be expected to be sophisticated enough to handle the position, having come from what is, essentially, a glorified farming community?”

  She had to bite back the sharp words that crowded her throat—and then she saw that almost silver gleam in his gaze, that slight curve of his hard mouth. Of course. He was pushing her. Deliberately.

  “You are manipulating me,” she said stiffly.

  “I am trying to manipulate you,” he corrected her, his voice suspiciously mild. Was he amused? That made her stomach twist. Anger, she told herself. This is nothing more than anger.

  “Then you’ve lost your touch completely,” she said. “If I cared what other people thought, I wouldn’t have married you in the first place, would I? I doubt I would have so much as had that first dinner with you. I’d have been far too cowed by all the dire predictions about harems and compulsory burkhas.” Azrin only smiled, but, in spite of herself, she found herself thinking back to those wild, early days as she looked at him.

  She’d fallen for him so hard and so fast that she’d spent months pretending otherwise out of simple fear. Terror, even. That he’d know. That he’d leave. She hadn’t been able to decide which would be worse, which would hurt more. She hadn’t wanted to find out.

  It had been so intense—and so physical. A simple look from him and she’d turned to flame. A kiss, a brush of his fingers, being held against that hard body of his, and she’d detonated. It had been almost overwhelming when she’d realized—when she’d finally allowed herself to believe—that he felt the same way.

  Meanwhile, everyone she knew had weighed in with their opinions. Everyone had known a great deal about the predatory nature of the average sheikh, apparently, despite none of them having known any sheikhs personally. She’d heard chapter and verse, again and again. And none of it had done anything at all except convince her that she knew better. That she knew him. That Azrin had been worth suffering through whatever silly fantasies her friends and family had wanted to concoct about him, simply because he hadn’t grown up with grapevines wrapped around his limbs and a good Shiraz running in his veins.

  She’d had so little doubt back then. She’d been so convinced she knew best. She’d been sure. Of Azrin, of herself. Of them. When had she lost that? How had it happened? Did the fact that she’d let go of it so easily mean it was never there in the first place?

  She shouldn’t have been surprised at how sad it made her to think so.

  “Are you reconsidering your position?” he asked then, as if he was able to see straight into her memories right along with her. “It’s easy to say one cares little about public opinion, and harder, I find, to actually live through it.”

  “I’ve lived through it already,” she pointed out quietly, as a flash of something bitter snaked through her as if it had been lying in wait, without her knowledge.

  “I’m living through it as we speak. The updates in the paper about the state of my royal womb, for example.” It was only after she said it, and Azrin only sat there with that expression on his face—as if she’d hauled off and slapped him with all of her strength, straight across the mouth—that Kiara acknowledged the possibility that she perhaps cared a bit more about public opinion than she wanted to admit. She jerked her gaze away from his, and only looked back when he reached over and took her hand in his. She observed, as if from a distance, that so simple a touch sent a jolt straight through her, searing her from neck to ankles.

  She missed him. She stared at their joined hands and pretended that wasn’t true, that it didn’t beat in her like a drum. But she knew better. She missed him so much she made up wild fantasies of hating him to try to distract herself. Fooling no one, least of all herself.

  “Do you still love me?” he asked.

  His voice was quiet, but the simple question echoed through her as if he’d shouted it. She flinched as if he had. Still, she focused on their hands, not on his face.

  Not on those too-knowing eyes.

  “I’m not sure that matters,” she said, aware of how choked she sounded, of how that, in itself, undercut her attempt to shrug this away.

  He only waited.

  She heard the usual, familiar sounds of summer all around her. Rainbow lorikeets chattered in the trees above them, while the laughter of the kookaburras floated on the breeze. The tourists at the other tables on the terrace were laughing and talking, reveling in the shade and the sunny day all around them. She could smell fresh cut grass and oak barrels, the tang of grapes and the rich, fertile earth itself, the particular perfume that told her she was here and nowhere else. Home.

  But that was not as comforting as it ought to have been. As she thought it should be.

  Finally, unable to put it off any longer, unable to stand her own pathetic diversionary tactics, she looked at him.

  It shouldn’t hurt this much. He shouldn’t feel like coming home, when he was anything but that. When he was the opposite of that, in fact, and well had she learned that lesson these past months.

  “Do you?” he asked again, a certain implacable note in his low voice, a hint of his formidable will.

  She let out a breath. Or it escaped. Either way, she knew he would not stop asking. That there was no hiding from him. From this.

  “You know that I do,” she whispered, knowing even as she said it that it was a kind of surrender. Or, perhaps, no more than a simple, overdue acceptance of a painful truth that somewhere along the way she’d decided didn’t matter anyway.

  He knew it, too. She saw the knowledge of it in his gaze, could feel the heat of it between their hands. She only wished she did not wonder if it was some kind of curse. Something they should have run from, all those years ago, rather than toward.

  She supposed this was the time to find out, once and for all.

  “I love you, too,” Azrin said quietly, all of their history like a rich current pulsing between them, impossible to ignore, as his mouth moved into something not quite as simple as a smile. His hand tig
htened around hers. The curve of his mouth deepened. “So, Kiara, please. Date me.”

  “I can’t help but notice that this is not Madrid,” Kiara said drily.

  They stood together out on the nondescript tarmac of what was little more than an airstrip. If she had not been looking out the window as Azrin’s private plane had descended toward the shift and roll of the endless desert, she would have had no clue at all to tell her where they were. There were no markings, not even on the faintly military-looking set of buildings off to one side.

  The air was hot and shockingly dry, and yet she knew she was lucky it was still winter here; in the summer, in the desert, the temperature climbed so high it would have felt like a physical blow to step into it. The wind whipped into her, around her, and there was the faint sting of sand in it, making her wish she was wearing the headscarf she usually donned when she knew she would be arriving in Khatan.

  She’d recognized the towering cliffs and the sea as they’d flown in, circling inland to land on this dusty little tarmac. She knew the picturesque village that was arrayed along one of the gentler cliffs, stretching down toward the pristine white sand beach beneath. She even knew that its name meant something like beautiful dwelling place in Arabic.

  She should—she’d seen it featured on a thousand postcards in Arjat an-Nahr, and throughout the rest of the country.

  Not that she’d ever been here before. Nor had she had any plans to change that.

  “No,” Azrin agreed, finally sliding his mobile into his pocket. She couldn’t see his eyes behind the dark sunglasses he wore, but she could feel the dark caress of them making her skin prickle. “We are not in Madrid.”

  He beckoned for her to proceed him as he started across the tarmac. Kiara started walking, noting the absence of the hand he usually held at the small of her back, and finding that she mourned its loss.

  “I’m trying to figure out what part of our discussion, in which I clearly stated we should have our so-called first date in Madrid and you agreed, led you to think I instead wanted to come back to Khatan,” she said, shoving the odd sense of some kind of grief aside. “Oddly, it’s not coming to me.”