He remembered his mother, then, though he preferred not to think of her outside of a few stray, happy memories when he was small. But now he remembered those later years. How she would cry and wail, literally crumbling if King Max so much as glanced in her direction. Cringing and sobbing, until Griffin and Orion, though only boys themselves, had been forced to act as her protectors.
Deep down, Orion’s secret shame was that he’d grown impatient with her. His own mother.
You can’t cry in front of him, he’d told her once, furiously, with all the conviction of the overly serious child he’d been. You can’t show him that he’s hurt you.
But she had only done it more.
This time, he assured himself, he would do no such thing, no matter the provocation tonight. It surely wasn’t her fault that he was so tempted by her. He waited for Calista to cringe away from him, assuring himself that he would understand her. He would support her. He would do whatever was necessary to—
But instead, she laughed.
It was scornful, bracing laughter, as much a relief as it was an assault.
Her hands found her hips, and she scowled at him, and all of that was better than cringing, certainly. Though Orion couldn’t say that it was comfortable, exactly. Or that he liked it much. Only that it was better than the alternative.
“Honey trap,” she repeated, as if he’d called her a filthy name. “You must be joking.”
“Your father could have used the leverage he had on my father to do any number of things,” Orion said, perhaps a bit gruffly. “He chose to force our marriage. You tell me why a honey trap isn’t the first thing that would come to mind under the circumstances.”
“First I’ll point out the distinct lack of honey in the trap,” she retorted, her voice arch. “Who knew that the King of Idylla himself could be lured in with this much vinegar? I don’t really know what that says about you, Orion. But I don’t think it’s good.”
He wanted to kiss her again. He wanted to peel her out of those clothes and keep his mouth on her until she melted against him. And then he wanted to taste every last inch of her skin, until both of them were immolated. Until there was no telling the difference between spark and flame, fire and heat.
Him and her.
He was so hard it hurt.
But the hurt was a good thing. It was like a hair shirt, to carry on with his brother’s favorite monk analogy. It reminded him who he was.
“We have a ball to attend,” he told her, taking a deep pleasure in the fact he could sound so mild. So unbothered. He could see temper flash over her, and enjoyed that even more. “I don’t say this to stop you taunting me. Carry on all you like. You’ll just need to do it in the car.”
When he beckoned for her to precede him out of the room, he thought she might balk. He waited, oddly primed and charged, as she stared back at him, her hands in markedly unladylike fists at her sides.
Inside, he wanted. He ached with it.
And what was the matter with him that there was a very large part of him that wanted nothing more than for her to launch herself in his direction? For her to take a swing at him, even—the way no one else would dare?
Because one way or another, that would allow him to put his hands on her?
Instead, Calista lifted her chin, gathered the skirts of her dress in those fists of hers, and swept out of the room.
And he was a little too aware of the tension between them as they sat in the car, building up their defenses again, brick by brick. He consulted his mobile. He took calls that could have waited, had he wanted them to wait. All the while, Calista pointedly repaired her makeup and hair. He wondered if she knew how it felt to him—like she was easing those iron bars between them back into place. And locking them up, separately, in their original prisons.
He told himself he ought to have been grateful.
Tonight’s event was at the Royal Botanical Gardens, with portable heaters everywhere to ward off what passed for the chill in this first week of December. The gardens were lit up, with little lights sprinkled everywhere, so that more than one person remarked that it was as if they’d been set down in their very own Christmas ball. The sort that one could hang on a tree, and build traditions around—
Not that Orion, raised as he was by wolves in royal form, had ever had anything of the kind. Trees festooned about the palace, bristling with decorations, certainly. But their only family traditions involved making themselves scarce while King Max raged, then collapsed in a drunken stupor.
He spent a long while circulating through the crowd, doing his best to mimic the sort of man who was filled with Christmas cheer.
Still, when the first waltz started, he knew his duty as king and therefore, always, the guest of honor. He wanted to touch Calista just then about as much as he wanted to punch himself in the face, but he swept her into his arms anyway, because it was expected.
And for a few moments, they danced in pointed silence.
But only for a few moments.
“This is really taking your martyr act a step too far,” she said when she could clearly take the quiet no longer, though she smiled joyfully up at him while she said it.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You do.” Her smile widened. “It really is so boring, Orion. It’s one thing to crucify yourself on every stray piece of wood that crosses your path in the palace. But it’s something else again, I think, to fling yourself upon the altar of your own self-importance in public.”
He took his time looking down at her, and if he held her a shade too close, well. The crowds would have to deal with it. He was the bloody king.
“I will repeat. I don’t know what you mean.”
The spark of challenge lit up those eyes of hers, and suddenly, he could think of nothing but her fists at her side in that private parlor. And how surprised he’d been that she didn’t swing then.
He should have known that, of course, she’d waited.
“Don’t you?” she asked, still looking—to someone not quite as close to her as he was—happy and filled with appropriate seasonal delight. “I thought you prided yourself on being such a rational man. Such a reasonable king after all our dark years with your father.” She made a tutting sound. “How tragic not to know yourself at all.”
“Perhaps a better conversation would be to investigate what it is you know about yourself, Calista,” he replied, and it was like a song inside him, almost as good as his mouth on hers. “As far as I can tell, you’ve made yourself your father’s handmaid. You prance around in your corporate costume. You shout at anyone who will listen about your importance. But at the end of the day, the first moment he could sell you, he did. Even pawns are treated better than that, surely.”
“You are the reigning expert on pawns, of course,” she replied coolly.
“Whose pawn am I?”
“My father’s, for one thing.” She smirked at him. “Look at that. We have something in common after all.”
He thought it wise, then, to finish off the dance with less talking. Because for the first time in his life, in as long as he could remember, he wasn’t entirely certain that he remained as in control of himself as he ought to have been.
And he wasn’t even kissing her.
That notion was so astounding—so hideous, really—that when the waltz ended he executed a stark, stiff sort of bow, and stalked away from her.
Better to leave his fiancée on the dance floor abruptly than to descend into...whatever it was that moved in him, dark and dangerous, that had everything to do with the taste of her, still there on his tongue.
Far more potent than wine or spirits.
The night wore on. Nobility and dignitaries danced attendance on him, as ever. He posed for a thousand pictures, trying to exude calm. Quiet certainty. As if his very presence was a happy ending. One the whole country h
ad been waiting for, all this time.
Not that he knew much about such things. Still, he tried.
Toward the end of the night, conscious that it was impolite for anyone to leave until he did, Orion once again sought out Calista. The gardens looked mysterious at night. All the sparkling lights and the glow from the heaters gave the winding paths an almost unearthly glow. Orion walked with no apparent haste, as if he was out for a stroll, enjoying that even he could find a measure of anonymity in the shadows. And when he was seen, he gave no indication that he was looking for a woman who, had she been anyone else, would have been stuck to his side all night to advance her position.
There was a part of him that liked her more than he should because she was nothing like the sort of socialite heiress he’d always assumed he would marry, all soft smiles to the face and a dulcet-toned knife to the back. Calista, he knew, would come at him from the front.
Something about that was deeply cheering.
He rounded a corner festooned with exultant shrubberies, then, and saw her. At last.
The soft light surrounded her, making her glow as if she was her own candle, and Orion felt...poleaxed. Frozen solid, there where he stood, though the Mediterranean night was nowhere near freezing.
As if he’d never seen a woman before.
His heart exploded inside his chest, so dramatic a sensation that he was half-afraid he’d suffered the kind of cardiac arrest that had claimed his father. But no, he realized after a breath, he was still standing.
It took him long moments—small eternities, really—to realize first, that Calista wasn’t alone. She stood with her father, here in a far-off corner of the gardens. Though she was still dressed like a queen—his queen—she had her arms crossed and a faint frown marring her perfect brow.
Unless he was very much mistaken, her father was threatening her. He recognized that particular bulldog-like expression on Skyros’s face.
“Whatever it takes, girl,” Aristotle said to her, sounding angry. “You understand me?”
“Perfectly,” Calista replied, her voice cool and crisp.
Orion should have stayed there, half concealed in shadow, to see what would happen next. He knew he should. But Aristotle reached out, as if to grip Calista’s arm, and he couldn’t stand it.
He couldn’t allow it.
“Careful there, Skyros,” he found himself belting out into the dark. “I believe we already covered this.”
Father and daughter jerked, then turned to gape at him. And he couldn’t say he cared that Calista looked faintly guilty, because what really mattered to him was that Aristotle dropped his hand.
“You do have a habit of popping up in the strangest places, don’t you?” Aristotle growled.
Orion ignored him, inclining his head toward Calista. “The hour grows late, my lady. It’s time to head back to the palace.”
“Indeed,” she said, shooting a look at her father that Orion wasn’t sure he wanted to be able to read. “I wouldn’t want to turn into a pumpkin.”
Orion held out his hand. And he didn’t know if she was performing for her father. He didn’t know far too many things when it came to this woman he was meant to marry, it was true. But he couldn’t worry about any of that as he should, because she stepped toward him and took his hand then, and for a moment, he almost thought she meant it.
For a moment, he was tempted to forget that he hadn’t chosen her himself.
He nodded at her father, his tormentor, and then swept her away so that she could join him in the endless ordeal of extricating himself from the ball.
By the time they made it to the car, he’d grown so used to her hand in his that he felt a flash of something like grief, though far hotter, when she took it away.
And this time, though they both sat in the back of the car just as they had on the way to the ball, it was different. It was as if the same heartbeat pounded through both of them. Orion was aware of the blood rushing through him. He was aware of Calista, as if she was wrapped tight around him. As if she was goading him directly, when all she was doing was sitting there beside him, staring straight ahead.
He was aware of her breath, the rise and fall of her chest. And of the faint scent of the perfume she favored, light enough and seductive enough that he was never quite sure if he was imagining it.
Once in the palace they walked side by side, their footsteps echoing against the marble floors as they headed, together, for the family wing.
“I will escort you to your suite,” he informed her, aware that his voice was gravelly. Low. Unduly serious.
And not quite his own.
“What’s this?” Her voice was bright, if forced. Tense, the same as his. “Are we suddenly observing dating protocols? However will my tender heart cope?”
He walked next to her, that throbbing, pounding beat inside him still insistent. Dark and stirring. And it only got worse with every step.
“I will not ask you why you are forever hiding away in dark corners, whispering with your father, a man already known to the crown as a bad actor. A legitimate threat.”
“I’m glad you won’t ask. Because I wouldn’t answer you anyway. He’s my father.”
“Nor will I ask you what it is he wants you to do, as I think we both know you wouldn’t tell me anyway.”
“That would defeat the purpose, surely, having gone to all the trouble to slip a king into a pocket in the first place.”
Her voice was tart, but somehow, he thought that darkness in her gaze was the real truth. Or maybe it was only that he felt the same darkness in him.
“But it does beg the question, Calista,” he said, as they drew up outside the door to her suite. “Which one of us is the greater martyr?”
She flinched at that, as if the question was another slap. And he watched, amazed—and something far darker than merely amazed—as her cheeks flushed red.
“I’m the very opposite of a martyr, thank you.”
“Not from where I’m standing. Don’t you have a sister? Where is she in all this?”
Calista surged forward, her aquamarine eyes clouded with some great emotion. And then, to his eternal astonishment, thumped him.
In the chest.
Hard.
“Don’t you mention my sister. Don’t you try to drag her into this. She has her own troubles, and certainly doesn’t need palace drama on top of it.”
“Are you sure?” Orion asked with an idleness he did not feel. “Are you protecting your sister because she needs protection? Or because you like how it feels to be the one forever in demand? The one forever spreading out the mantle of your many sacrifices far and wide, so you can complain about them?”
She thumped him again, and it was clarifying.
Because it was rage inducing. Though, if he thought about it, it wasn’t rage at all that surged in him then.
It was hot, dark and deep, but it wasn’t quite rage.
And the truth was, he felt that hair shirt disintegrating all around him. He could hardly remember the vows he’d made, or why.
Because even though she was thumping him, which would have bordered on a treasonous assault if anyone else had done it, all he could seem to focus on was that she was touching him.
Calista was touching him, and of her own volition.
That felt far stronger than any vow.
“You haven’t the slightest idea what it’s like,” she threw at him.
“Says a civilian to a king.”
Temper flashed over her face, and there was something almost electric about it. He could feel the same currents from earlier, but they were hotter now. Brighter.
As if the two of them, together, burned like a fever.
And she appeared to be just getting started. “You don’t know the first thing about real life. You don’t know about loss. You don’t know what it’s
like to work your whole life for something only to have it snatched away from you at the last second.”
“I am being blackmailed into marrying you, Calista, though I am the bloody king—and not my father. Perhaps it is you who do not understand.”
“I have fought my whole life,” she seethed at him. “Any sacrifices I made were not to martyr myself so I could feel better about my choices, but because they were necessary. Life and death, Orion. You weren’t the only one who grew up under the whims of a terrible father. And not everyone gets to be a crown prince in that scenario. Some of us have to suffer in private. But you wouldn’t know anything about that, because you live in a gilded palace, making laws and issuing commandments. You should try the real world sometime.”
“Lady Calista. Please. You are the daughter of a billionaire. You live in an island kingdom the poets call enchanted. Magical. A real-life fairy tale. Perhaps you are no more acquainted with the real world than I.”
She blew out a breath at that, as if she was deflating there before his eyes. And he had the impression she wasn’t entirely aware of it when instead of thumping him again, her hand flattened out, so that her palm was resting in the hollow between his pectoral muscles.
Calista might not be aware of it, but he could think of nothing else.
And for a moment, their gazes remained tangled together, and they...breathed.
As if they shared that same breath.
“I wish...” she began. “I wish that I could... You and I...”
But she didn’t finish.
Orion reached up and covered her hand with his, trapping her there against his chest.
And he couldn’t tell if that was her heartbeat he felt, or his own. Only that it rang in him like a warning. Like a new song.
“Then do something about it,” he told her.
A command. A plea. His own want.
He should have known better. He should never have risked it. The control he never, ever lost felt loose around him then, precarious and dangerously close to breaking.
Orion needed to take his leave of her. He needed to pretend none of tonight had happened. He needed to march off, regain his equilibrium, and remind himself who he was, and more, who he wanted to be.
Christmas In The King's Bed (Mills & Boon Modern) (Royal Christmas Weddings, Book 1) Page 10
