“Feasts delivered at your command,” she continued. “Jetting about the globe in a private plane. Palaces scattered about several countries, yours to occupy at will.
This is the third one I know about in Khatan alone. And when I met you in Melbourne you drove that Ferrari and I know you thought that was fun.” She’d thought it was fun too, though she hardly let herself think about things like that any longer. She’d been so determined to think only about the difficulties, the impossibilities. The expectations and demands. The agony of all of this.
But beneath all of that, she still remembered the way the sleek, luxury car had hugged the famous curves along the Great Ocean Road. She remembered how Azrin had held one hand on the steering wheel and one resting high on her thigh, and how close she’d felt to flying there, the limestone cliffs on one side and the aching beauty of the sea against the rocks on the other.
She’d had the notion that she was as close to really flying free as she would ever get with this breathtakingly beautiful man, in such a heart-stoppingly perfect machine, on the very edge of the world. Together, she’d thought then, and it had felt as if they were truly soaring, the powerful car racing beneath them, as smooth and as sexy as he was and yes, fun.
When was the last time she’d thought about fun?
“You are talking about the privileges of wealth,” Azrin said after a moment. He reached forward to dip his bread in the hummus. “That is not the same thing as being a king.”
“Isn’t it?” She was skeptical.
And she had to remind herself to breathe again, her heart racing as if she was still in that car, five whole years and half the world away on the prettiest road she knew, falling head over heels in love with the man who’d driven them with such easy grace and careless competence. She had to shake her head slightly to remind herself where she was, and more than that, when.
“There are a great many wealthy men who are responsible to no one but themselves,” Azrin pointed out. “That is not an option when you have a country to run and would prefer not to run it into the ground.”
His eyes narrowed slightly, as if he could see how far away she was, and where she’d gone. Which, she told herself sharply, he certainly could not.
“So what you notice most about your throne is the weight of it,” she said, focusing back on this conversation, and not the phantom weight and heat of his elegant hand holding her against her seat so many years ago now, both promise and sensual threat. “Not the bowing and scraping. Not the fact that your every word is both command and law. Not the great good fortune of having access to all that wealth, that kingdom, the palaces that go along with it.”
“What makes you think all of that is not, in itself, the weight I mean?” he asked softly.
Kiara didn’t like the way that question resonated inside her, and directed her attention to the food instead, ignoring the small voice within that whispered she was little more than a coward. That she didn’t want to know any more than she already did—that what she knew already was too much and would take too much getting over as it was.
She started with forkfuls of a fish she couldn’t identify, grilled to perfection with the tang of lime and deeper, more complex flavors beneath. She closed her eyes for a moment, savoring it.
“And you?” he asked. She opened her eyes to find him regarding her with heat in his gaze, kicking up an answering fire inside her. His mouth crooked. “What is it you do?”
“I’m a winemaker,” she said.
She heard the way she said it, with that undercurrent of something very near belligerence, and saw that he heard it, too. But he only looked at her. She felt herself flush, and was unsure if it was from some kind of embarrassment or something else, something more closely tied to that molten heat that moved in her simply because he was near, no matter how she wanted to deny it.
“How did you become a winemaker?” he asked.
As anyone on a date would, she supposed. There was no reason it should have agitated her the way it did, like a splinter into flesh.
“It’s the family business,” she said automatically, shifting against the pillows. “I grew up on a vineyard.” She let out a sigh as that impossible heat and everything else inside her seemed overwhelming suddenly—or was it that she felt too exposed? “This feels silly, Azrin. You know all of this. I know all of this. Nothing we’re going to say tonight is going to change the fact that you want things I can’t give you.” She had the impression he sighed, too, though she couldn’t hear it over the sound of the white noise in her head.
“You have been my wife for five years,” he pointed out, his voice even. “It only became too onerous for you, apparently, in the past four months. Why are you so certain those four months outweigh the previous five years altogether? I’m not sure I agree with that assessment.” He shook his head when she started to speak.
“But this is hardly appropriate first date conversation, Kiara. Don’t force me to conclude that you want to sabotage this experiment before we even start.” She fumed. There was no other word for it. She stared at her plate for a moment and ordered herself to be calm. To breathe. She avoided looking at him for long moments as she loaded up her plate again. Fragrant rice, neither too soft nor too sticky. Perfectly cooked lamb with so many flavors packed into it. Tangy, rich olives, creamy hummus, and her favorite flatbread with garlic.
It was all so tempting, but she couldn’t bring herself to take another bite.
“So what are you looking for in a queen?” she asked, instead of all the things she wanted to say, all of which seemed to crowd her throat. “If that’s the kind of thing kings like to talk about on first dates. With perfect strangers like me.”
His eyes gleamed silver, as if he found her amusing or possibly edible, and she had to repress a shiver of automatic reaction to either possibility.
“I like wine,” he said, his mouth curving.
“Congratulations,” Kiara replied crisply, refusing to find that comment endearing on any level. Damn him. “If that is your only criteria, you should have no trouble finding the perfect queen. You need only click your fingers and a queue will appear before you, wineglasses at the ready.”
“You are right, of course.”
He drew up one knee and leaned his arm against it. He could not have looked more like what he was—a mysterious desert sheikh, king of everything around them and for miles in all directions—if he’d tried. Perhaps he had tried.
He was dressed in the loose linen trousers he favored in private and a short-sleeved, buttoned shirt in the same whisper-soft fabric, both in shades of deep cream that made his olive skin seem that much darker, his long body that much more sleekly muscled. He looked cool, confident. Power seemed to emanate from him like heat, as if even his own casual clothes did not dare attempt to contain him.
Kiara found her throat was dry.
“My queen will be a symbol,” he said after a moment. “Whether she wants to be or not. She must acknowledge the traditional values of my country, yet infuse her role with her own modern flair, her own achievements and strength. I want both and I would not be happy with anything or anyone less.”
“And what if this … infusion can’t exist?” Kiara asked, her voice harsher than it should have been, than she wanted it to be. “What if real women cannot be symbols, only imperfect spouses, and your lofty expectations will crush her where she stands?”
“My queen must be strong,” Azrin said, his voice as quiet as his eyes were intent on hers. His voice seemed to ring in her, through her.
“Strong enough to be rendered completely silent?” Kiara countered. “Strong enough to be marginalized and forgotten, shoved aside, unable to complain or even comment on what is happening to her for fear she will be told she is but one more fire her king—not her husband—must put out?”
“Strong enough to know that none of those things are happening, even if it feels as if they are in a time of such confusion, right as her husband takes the throne,” he retort
ed, his voice even, his gaze hot. Direct. Nothing so simple as anger there, she thought almost helplessly, but something deeper, far more raw. It made goose flesh rise over her arms, the back of her neck. “Strong enough to wait. Strong enough to keep from running.”
“Most women are not psychic, Azrin,” Kiara told him, her voice low and shaking with all the things she was trying so hard not to say. Not to scream. “They cannot divine intention from the ether, only from behavior. From what you say and how you treat them, in fact. And then act accordingly.”
“Some women, upon marrying the crown prince to a kingdom, would not be quite so surprised when he became a king,” Azrin said, his voice deliberately slow, as if she might have trouble understanding him. Trying to provoke her, she was sure, and seethed. “It is in the job description, after all. It’s right there in the title, the kingdom. The simple fact of who I am.”
“While some princes, upon marrying a woman not from their culture, might make it clear what their expectations are before there is any risk of ascending a throne.”
“You make it sound as if you were chained to my ankle and dragged along in my wake,” Azrin snapped then, his control clearly deserting him, which Kiara should not have felt like some kind of victory.
should not have felt like some kind of victory.
Hadn’t she watched him really lose control in Washington—and hated it? What was the matter with her? She felt as if some great wave was rising in her, about to crest, but she had no idea what it was. She didn’t want to know.
“I don’t recall all this torture and torment, Kiara. When was this great silencing? Did I ask it of you or did you decide it all on your own? All I asked was that you support me. Was that really too much for you?”
“I don’t want to be your mother!” she cried, the words ripped from somewhere inside her. The wave crashed into her, over her. The words she hadn’t known she meant to say seemed to echo back from the night sky, the rock walls, even the pools. She lifted her hands in the air and then dropped them back down to the table.
“I’m sorry, but I don’t. It’s as if she exists only as a projection of your father. A painting of his, maybe. A shadow. I don’t want to be like that. Or like your sisters.” She shook her head. “I won’t.”
“Nor do you seem particularly interested in being your own mother.” He leaned forward then, and his dark eyes pinned her to her seat, made her feel paralyzed.
And he knew it. She knew he did. “Yet isn’t that exactly what you’re doing? Choosing that vineyard above all else, and damn the consequences? Damn me, damn our marriage—when you don’t even really know that it’s what you want, after all?”
“Of course it’s what I want!” But she felt breathless, suddenly, as if she’d run a race, and with that churning in her stomach, too, as if she’d lost. By miles. “It’s what I’ve always wanted!”
Yet even as she said it she remembered what she’d said to her mother in her old bedroom in the chateau—what she’d all but hurled at Diana’s head. And she couldn’t help wondering if it was possible that Azrin knew things about her that she didn’t, however much she wanted to deny that he could. Did he see the things she’d always been too afraid to say before? Did he know, somehow, exactly what she’d said to Diana? Maybe the wine business was the price I had to pay to make you treat me like a daughter every once in a while.
But she hadn’t meant any of that, had she? She’d only wanted to strike out, strike back, at her mother. She’d only wanted to make a point. An unkind one, perhaps, but that didn’t make what she’d said true.
Of course she hadn’t meant it. Not really.
Azrin’s gaze was pitiless then. And still so uncomfortably direct, seeing deep into her. Far too deep. Seeing things she would have sworn weren’t there. Because they aren’t there, she told herself fiercely.
She watched, holding her breath now, as an expression she didn’t recognize moved over his face. Something she might have called sadness, had that made any kind of sense. As if he grieved for something, and she was suddenly much too afraid to ask herself what that could be.
He ran a hand over his face as if he was tired. When he looked at her again, his eyes were almost kind. And she thought he might have shattered her heart, just like that.
“Is it really what you’ve always wanted?” he asked quietly. “Are you sure?”
CHAPTER EIGHT
KIARA barely slept.
At a certain point, tired of turning this way and that without end, the fine linen sheets wrapped around her like instruments of torture, she’d stopped trying.
She’d half expected Azrin to appear with the dawn to start in with his particular brand of torment all over again. She’d braced herself for it, scowling hollow-eyed and sleepless at the gently billowing canopy that hung above her until the light outside her windows was the blue of just before dawn and she’d finally fallen into an exhausted, restless sort of doze.
But he didn’t come. Not when her attendant brought her a steaming cup of strong, dark Khatanian coffee to herald the start of the new day. Not as the morning wore on, the sun streaming in the old windows, lighting up the oddly shaped chamber with its one wall of wholly unfinished rock, the rest seeming to simply hang from the mountainside, old woods and fine tapestries scattered here and there and thick, colorful rugs stretched over the smooth floors.
The night had ended abruptly. She’d simply stood up and walked away without another word, leaving him at the table without so much as a backward glance.
She told herself now that it had been necessary—that once again, she’d needed space. From him. From the things he made her think about. Both.
“Until tomorrow, then,” he’d murmured, the dark irony in his low voice following her as she’d retreated, yet another fresh hell to add to her collection.
Kiara told herself she was thrilled that he was otherwise occupied today. Delighted, in fact. She could lounge about this lovely, sun-drenched suite of rooms she’d been given, stuff herself with figs and almonds and sweet dates drenched in honey, and not spend a moment turning over everything that had been said the night before in her head.
But that, of course, proved impossible.
She found her way outside, onto the small, private balcony off her suite. She welcomed the day’s warmth in the stones beneath her bare feet, a simple pleasure that felt more healing, perhaps, than she wanted to admit. She couldn’t help but sigh as she looked out over the series of pools, a breathtaking view down the canyon that had grown no less stunning, even if she knew to expect it this time. She rested her hands on top of the sun-baked iron railing, and let the light from high above dance over her face.
And admitted to herself that she had never felt so lost. So alone. And empty, too—as if she’d been hollowed out, as if she was no more than a shell erected around all the things she’d held to be true, all the beliefs she’d had about herself. Her whole life and all she’d worked for. Her goals, her dreams. Azrin and this marriage of theirs. Even the past few months.
Did she use sex as a weapon, as he’d claimed? Did she really not know what she wanted from her life? Was she truly as uninterested in being like Diana as she was in becoming Queen Madihah, and if so, what did that mean?
The questions seemed to thud through her like heavy stones, one after the next.
Azrin was a forceful, commanding man. He had been groomed since birth to lead. To be the king of this country and all that entailed. To rule. He was dark sometimes, even brooding. He had a temper, certainly. He was fierce. Demanding. Arrogant and ruthless. What he wanted he took, he’d told her once, and she knew it was true. She’d experienced it personally. But he was more than all of that—there was that flashing intelligence, that dry wit. His intense, shattering sensuality. His strong sense of duty. His kindness. He was a complicated man, by any reckoning. On some level, still a mystery to her.
sensuality. His strong sense of duty. His kindness. He was a complicated man, by any reckoning. On some leve
l, still a mystery to her.
But she had never known him to be anything but honest.
She didn’t want to think about what that must mean. There were so very many things, she realized then, that she didn’t want to think about. That she went out of her way to keep from thinking about, in fact. Not that it worked. Not entirely.
Strong enough to wait. Strong enough to keep from running.
That was what he’d said he wanted from his queen. From her. But she hadn’t given him that, had she? She hadn’t waited. She hadn’t even attempted to give him the benefit of the doubt. She’d left on the very first morning she could without causing an international scandal, right after their official tour was finished. She’d run, despite the fact she’d always believed herself to be the kind of person who would never do such a thing. Yet she didn’t know what she was basing that belief on, when she’d run again, last night. When in every way that mattered, she was still running.
So the only question was, what, exactly, had she been running from?
And where would it end? Where would she stop?
She didn’t know. As ever, she wasn’t sure she wanted to know.
But she did know she couldn’t sit here, marinating in all of these revelations, without exploding. Or worse. She had to do something to escape her own head.
Kiara studied the collection of statues in the high-ceilinged, arched gallery that snaked along the outer lip of one of the lower levels of the palace. She’d wandered out of her rooms and through the palace, following whatever passage seemed most appealing, and had ended up here.
It was a striking, impressively unique room. The interior walls were rough and old, but the rest of the gallery was a modern confection of latticework and glass, showing the old clay statuary and assorted relics within to their best advantage. She leaned closer to a display of ancient-looking daggers, still deadly so many centuries since they’d been made.
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