In Defiance of Duty

by Caitlin Crews

  And when she straightened, Azrin was beside her.

  Her skin seemed to tighten over her bones, even as that familiar heat bloomed within her. Her body had no confusion where Azrin was concerned. Her body simply wanted.

  “You have your very own museum here,” she said before she knew she meant to speak, surprised to hear that light, sunny tone she would have said was lost to her trip from her lips so easily.

  “It is part of the family collection,” Azrin replied. When she glanced at him beside her, his gaze was narrow on hers. Considering. “Periodically we show pieces of it in the Royal Museum in Arjat an-Nahr.” He reached down and ran a fingertip along the edge of an ancient scabbard. Kiara felt sensation swirl inside of her as if he’d touched her instead. “Though some pieces have been here for centuries.”

  He looked tired, she thought, her traitorous heart melting, even as her stomach twisted in a guilty little knot. His near-blue eyes seemed too dark, and his black hair looked rumpled, as if he’d been running his fingers through it. He wore another version of his all-black casual uniform, more warrior today than desert king—a pair of dark trousers and another torso-hugging T-shirt that made her hands itch to touch him. She smoothed down the front of the floor-length, casual sundress she wore instead, and found it a poor substitute.

  “You certainly know how to hit on a girl.” She tilted her head back and smiled slightly as she gazed at him. “Who can resist a man who claims an entire museum is only part of his family’s private collection?”

  His eyes met hers. Held. A moment passed, then another. Then, slowly, that almost-blue gaze began to gleam silver.

  “It takes artifacts to win you, does it?” He spread out his hands, taking in the whole of the gallery. “Then I am your man.” His mouth curved. “I can offer you the plunder of several museums.”

  “Tell me more,” she said, aware of the way her heart beat a little bit harder, a little bit faster. She decided she might as well play the game the way they used to.

  Bold lies and brash claims. Whatever came to mind, purely to entertain. “I am nothing if not avaricious. I might as well be a magpie.”

  “My favorite quality in a woman,” he said drily.

  “I should think so,” she agreed, and even laughed. “After all, you always know where you stand, don’t you? When in doubt, throw some more priceless gems into the mix.”

  “Be still my heart.”

  She hadn’t meant to move, hadn’t realized they’d started walking together, until Azrin was gesturing for her to precede him out of the great glass doors that led out to a patio ringed with tall shade trees and a tall, gurgling fountain in the center. Kiara couldn’t help but sigh in pleasure.

  She walked to the fountain and sat on the wide lip of its basin, then trailed her fingers in the clear water. It was cool against her skin, but when she looked up at Azrin again, she knew the water was not why she had to restrain a shiver.

  He stood with his hands thrust deep in his pockets, his uncompromisingly fierce face intense, his hard mouth merely hinting at the possibility of a curve. And his gaze seemed to move inside her like her own overheated blood. He was too beautiful, and somehow forbidding, too, and she couldn’t quite bring herself to look away as she thought she should.

  “I like that you’re a king,” she said in that flippant way that usually made him smile, and nearly did today. “It matches the palace. It’s all very fairy tale-ish. And as a stereotypical magpie, I can’t help but approve of all the implied royal shininess.”

  “Fairy tales tend to be inhabited by princes, not kings.” There was that silver glint in his gaze, his mouth that little bit softer. “I think you have your happily ever afters confused.”

  “Are you saying I’m not Cinderella?” she asked in mock horror. She looked down at her sundress, the bright red fabric threaded through with hints of white flowers, all cascading to the feet she’d slipped into thonged sandals. “Does that make me Little Red Riding Hood instead?” She arched her brows when she looked back at him. “I think we both know what that makes you.”

  “You have no idea,” he said, his voice like silk, as warm as the bright sun far above.

  Time seemed to slip, to heat, to disappear into that sensual promise that hummed between them. Kiara had to look away to gain her balance. To remind herself why she should not—could not—sink into that promise and disappear.

  “It must be better to be a king than a prince,” she said instead, her voice huskier than it should have been. She found her teasing tone and matching smile hard to

  “It must be better to be a king than a prince,” she said instead, her voice huskier than it should have been. She found her teasing tone and matching smile hard to come by, but she managed both, somehow. “Everybody loves an upgrade.”

  Azrin looked at her for another long moment, this one threaded through with something far darker, a kind of smoke across the more familiar terrain of their wild chemistry.

  “I’ll share this with you,” he said, as she’d begun to wonder if he planned to speak at all, “since you are a complete stranger to me. Just a girl I met in a museum, by chance, yes? It will be like confessing to the wind.”

  “You’ll never see me again,” she agreed, smiling. “As of tomorrow morning it will be like I never existed. You can tell me anything.” He rocked back on his heels, a curious sort of look on that powerful face, and a tension she didn’t understand drawing the magnificent lines of his body tight. She felt her smile falter. He shrugged then, though he never looked away, and made a sound that was near enough to a laugh.

  “I don’t want to be king.”

  It was such a simple sentence. Such unremarkable words. He said it so quietly, almost casually, but Kiara knew better. She could feel the words like the bullets they were, one after the next. She felt every hair on her body seem to stand on end, and found it suddenly hard to swallow.

  “But this is your destiny,” she said, her voice little more than a whisper. “You have been preparing for it all of your life.”

  “It is my duty,” he corrected her. His mouth curved then, but it was not a smile. “I have always done my duty, you understand. It defines me. Cambridge, Harvard Business School, the Khatan Investment Authority—all of these were carefully calculated steps toward the throne, decided upon by my father and his advisors, to make sure to craft me into a just and capable monarch, a credit to my family name in every respect.” His hard mouth twisted. “My every move has been mapped out for me since the day I was born.”

  “Lucky for you that you excelled at all of those things,” she said, trying to keep her tone light and not sure she succeeded.

  “It wasn’t luck,” he said, not arrogant then so much as matter-of-fact, which made her heart seem to contract, then ache. “It was what was expected.”

  “Then I suppose we should be happy that you are so good at living up to expectations.” She smiled again, though she suspected it was not a happy smile. “Some of us are not.”

  She searched his face, hardly recognizing the expression he wore, barely understanding the way he was looking at her.

  “And then one day I met a girl in a café,” he said quietly. Devastatingly. More bullets, and these hit hard, burrowed deep. “And she was completely unexpected.”

  “You should be careful about these girls you meet in all these public places.” It was hard to sound teasing, mildly chastising, when there was such a great lump in her throat. When her chest hurt. “It can’t possibly end well—and your reputation is sure to suffer.”

  “You are the only thing I ever wanted purely for myself,” Azrin said, cutting through the game that easily, that sharply. Cutting it off. “The only thing that was not simply expected of me.” His gaze was like fire, searing into her, until she felt all but cauterized. And breathless from the sting of it. He did not look away. He did not seem to move at all. “You are the only thing I chose.”

  She opened her mouth to speak, but no words came. And she felt
that panic inside her, pushing through her limbs, making her shaky. Making her feel impossibly fragile. She wanted to move, to outrun it before it drowned her completely.

  And she knew in a moment of perfect clarity that if he had not called her on it just the night before, she would have closed the distance between them and tried to soothe his words away with her mouth. Her hands. Any weapon at her disposal.

  The revelation that he was absolutely right stunned her.

  She had to blink it away like hot tears, burning at the backs of her eyes. Her heart was pounding too hard now, echoing in her ears and making her feel as if the whole earth, the stone palace and the pools beyond, rocked wildly beneath her. Even though she knew they did not. Even when she could hear the cheerful, oblivious splash of the fountain, like a merry little song that mocked what was happening inside her. She found herself on her feet, braced to run again, to bolt.

  Only the fact he’d called her on that, too, stopped her.

  And Azrin simply stood there, entirely too close, his arms crossed over his chest now, and watched her as if he could see this fight writ large across her face. She had no doubt that he could and that, too, made her wonder how she could possibly keep all the tears inside.

  “You made me wish I could be a different man, Kiara,” he said in that low voice that rolled through her, setting off more of those small earthquakes, leaving only debris and rubble behind. “I let myself imagine that we could simply be normal. Like anyone else. You made me forget, for five years, why that could never be.

  Left to my own devices, I would have played that game with you forever.”

  His gaze was hot, far hotter than the warm winter sun above them, and seemed to incinerate Kiara where she stood. She felt it—him—like a touch. As if he’d taken his elegant hands and run them all over her body. And as if he really had done exactly that, she felt her breasts grow heavy, the core of her grow damp. She felt that deep, low ache that only he could ease.

  As if she could only process how much she wanted him, all the different layers of it, through the simplest, most direct method. As if sex could say everything she couldn’t. As if it could bridge all of the spaces between them.

  She felt frozen there before him, as surely as if he held her in his palms. Or pinned her to some wall somewhere.

  He sighed slightly, as if he’d lost his own battle. As if he recognized hers. Then he reached over and curled his hands around her upper arms.

  Don’t, she thought desperately. Please don’t.

  But she didn’t say the words out loud. Because she had no idea if they were directed to him—or to herself.

  She could have moved away from him. She could have told him to stop. She knew she should have.

  “Azrin …” she whispered.

  But she didn’t know whether she meant to beg him to stop, or to never stop, and the fact that she didn’t know—that she couldn’t tell—made her shake inside.

  Again. Anew.

  And that was when he bent and fixed his mouth to hers, hot and sweet and irresistible, and everything went wild and white.

  He should not have tasted her. It was madness. He was a fool.

  But he couldn’t bring himself to stop.

  But he couldn’t bring himself to stop.

  He only knew that it took forever to claim her mouth with his. It had been so long. Too long. An eternity since he’d kissed her, held her. He exulted in the perfect fit of her against him, the sweetness of her curves beneath his hands, the promise in the tiny noises she whimpered into him as he slanted his mouth over hers and drank deep.

  What could possibly matter, save this?

  His body shouted the usual demands, as desperate for her as ever. But this time, he ignored the wild clamor of need. The driving beat of that passion that he could feel burning between them. The overpowering urge to drive deep inside of her and ride them both into blissful oblivion.

  This time, he simply kissed her.

  He sank his hands into the soft waves of her hair, anchoring her head into place, angling her face so he could find the perfect, slick fit of his mouth against hers.

  He let the kiss slow, go deep. She moved even closer, looping her arms around his neck and pressing her pert, plump breasts against his chest, making that demanding fire within him blaze ever higher, ever brighter.

  He loved all of it. Her. He wanted to taste her from head to toe. He wanted to take that bright sundress off with his teeth. The ways he wanted her played on an endless, infinite loop inside of him, stoking that burning need, making him harder and wilder and that much more desperate for her.

  And still he kissed her. As if there was nothing at all but this. But them.

  As if there was no world at all, no demands. No throne. No winery. No hotel room in Washington, shrouded in all that bitterness.

  Only the shimmering, magical pools, the quiet song of the fountain behind them. Only the taste of her mouth. Only the perfection of the curve of her cheek beneath his palm.

  Skin to skin. Her mouth under his. The sun and the sky and this. Them.

  Her hands moved to stroke his jaw, his neck. He let one of his hands make that dangerous descent from the back of her head to the wickedly tempting line of her spine, tracing his way down until his fingers rested proprietarily at the small of her back.

  My wife, he thought, a fierce and almost savage feeling pumping through him. My queen.

  And he kissed her, over and over, endlessly, until he was drunk with it, intoxicated by her taste, by her closeness, by the small sounds she made, by the way he could not help but want her, love her, need her.

  My Kiara.

  He moved her away from him, settling her against the edge of the fountain again and moving to kneel before her. He ran his hands down her legs, all the way to her ankles, where he found his way beneath the hem of her dress. Then he retraced his path, skin against skin this time, and heard the ragged way she pulled in her next breath—so ragged it nearly qualified as a moan.

  He’d take it.

  He pulled the dress out of his way, baring her long, silky legs to his view. He followed the elegant line of one, using his lips and tongue, finding his way over the perfection of her calf to the sweet curve of her knee—and the delicate place behind it that made her shiver when he stroked it with his fingers. Then he moved higher, kissing his way up the delectable curve of her inner thigh. He found the scrap of silk and lace that stretched across her hips and pulled it down and then off, tossing it aside.

  He looked up at her then. Her chest was heaving, her eyes wide. Her hands gripped the lip of the fountain so hard he could see a hint of white at her knuckles, and he could feel the way she trembled. He ran his palms up her legs again, shifting her slightly as he moved closer, then pulled up her legs to drape them over his shoulders, opening the very heart of her femininity to him.

  She made a noise that could have been his name, her brown eyes black with passion. With the same need that clawed at him, dragging steel-tipped talons through his gut and demanding he take her, taste her, glut himself on her.

  He leaned forward and licked his way into the molten core of her.

  She shuddered and shook. She sobbed out his name, unmistakable this time. She moved against his mouth, riding his tongue, and he loved it, all of her. He anchored her hips with his hands and let her go wild against him, her back arching as her lovely body tensed. He worshipped her, lips and tongue and the faintest hint of his teeth, reveling in her incomparable taste. Her scent. Her hot, writhing pleasure.

  She cried out his name once more—louder—and then she burst into flames all around him, nearly incinerating him, too, in the force of her sweet release.

  It was not enough, Azrin thought then, as she slumped against him. It was never enough.

  He moved to sit on the edge of the fountain beside her, letting her lean heavily against his shoulder as she fought to come back to him.

  It took two breaths. One, then another, and then her face paled.

/>   She sat upright, pushing herself away from him. Her beautiful eyes darkened, and not with passion this time. She made a small, panicked sort of noise that seemed to hurt her, and thus him, and then she shoved herself away from him. She staggered slightly as she got to her feet, and the male in him found that leftover reaction far more satisfying than perhaps he should.

  “Where are you going?” He could still taste her. It made him hard and edgy, neither of which he suspected would help him here. He wanted to pull her back against him and hold her, pull her down to the ground and take her until they were both limp and happy, but he imagined she wouldn’t want that, either.

  “Is this your plan?” she asked, her voice shaking. Her dark eyes looked haunted, despite the sunshine that poured down from above them. “You predicted this, didn’t you? My token protest followed by sex … Isn’t that what you said? How pleased you must be that I’ve fallen into line, just as you expected I would.”

  “Kiara.”

  There were spots of color high on her cheekbones now, and he saw the way she shivered, though it was nowhere near cold in the patio. She ignored him.

  “Worst of all, you broke our agreement,” she said in the same uneven voice. Her lips trembled. “And I let you.”

  “Was this not a gift?” he asked. “It was the very definition of a gift, I would have said.”

  “You know perfectly well that it was not.” She bit at her lower lip. “The strings attached are practically visible.”

  “Kiara …” He said it again, as if her name would soothe her. Reach her. He had to order himself not to move, to simply sit and wait, and not use his body in a way she would claim was deliberate. As she claimed everything he did was deliberate. And so he only watched her, even as temper galloped through him, burning way she would claim was deliberate. As she claimed everything he did was deliberate. And so he only watched her, even as temper galloped through him, burning him alive. “I can’t pretend I’m not in love with you.”