In Defiance of Duty (12 page)

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 tightened 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.”

“Did I agree?” he asked in that mild way that made her far too conscious of that ruthlessness he hid beneath his usually more accessible exterior. “Are you quite sure?”

Kiara opened her mouth to assert that he most certainly had, and then closed it.

She had been the one to talk about Madrid, in fact, once she’d agreed to this plan of his. It was a city they’d barely visited in all their crisscrossing of the globe. A blank canvas, she’d said, on which they could paint anything they liked as they played this little game. Privately, she’d thought it was the perfect choice—it lacked any markers of their complicated personal history, yet was big enough and not too remote, which meant that they could part without too much trouble should either of them wish it.

Should she wish it.

Yet all Azrin had said, now that she thought about it, was that Madrid was, indeed, a lovely city.

“You know I wanted to go to Madrid,” she said, as if it was important. As if the city itself mattered, when she knew what truly bothered her was that he he’d made the decision without consulting her.

He looked down at her, and again she felt the look in his eyes even if she couldn’t see it. She felt it move through her, making her whole body clench around the sensation. His hard mouth curved as if he could feel it, too.

None of this was fair.

“You agreed to the game, Kiara,” he said, that heat in his voice seeming to stroke them both. She didn’t think that was fair, either. “I merely chose the venue.” They were respectfully handed into the second in a trio of kitted-out jeeps with four-wheel drive by Azrin’s usual team of bodyguards, then driven over roads that seemed to Kiara like little more than suggestions or, perhaps, intentions, across the high, empty desert. Eventually, they made their way toward the cluster of palm trees and greenery that started at the very edge of the cliffs and then followed the often-photographed village down toward the gleaming sea beyond.

It took long, hard hours to drive across the desert to reach this particular stretch of coastline. There was no commercial airport—until today, Kiara would have said there was no airport at all. Travelers had to be hardy and determined to make their way here, but Kiara could see that it was well worth the trek.

The village boasted a collection of houses that seemed hewn from the cliff face itself, clustered very nearly on top of each other as they straddled the single road that wound through the town. There were two hotels next to each other steps from the bright white sand beach. The locals were reportedly friendly and welcoming, and those who made it here almost universally considered it the jewel of Khatan’s mostly inaccessible and proudly inhospitable northern coast.

Kiara had read all about this place in the books she’d devoured while she and Azrin had been dating and then engaged, when she’d been so determined to soak up all the information she could about his country. About him. As if she’d expected there might be some kind of exam.

up all the information she could about his country. About him. As if she’d expected there might be some kind of exam.

“I’ve always wanted to come to this village,” she said now, remembering those long nights in her graduate school flat, reading about a place that seemed more fantasy than reality, all shining sun and gleaming sand, as the Melbourne winter had thrown rain and fog against her windows. “Though I did not imagine you would have to abduct me to make that happen.”

Next to her in the backseat of the Jeep, Azrin merely shrugged. He had one hand braced against the door as the vehicle jolted down the rough cliff side road while he frowned down at the mobile that was once again in his other hand.

“You got on the plane of your own volition,” he pointed out, that undercurrent of amusement making his dark voice rich in the confines of the Jeep. He didn’t bother to look at her as he said it. He didn’t have to.

Kiara rolled her eyes. She should be furious. She should feel betrayed, kidnapped, taken advantage of. But she was forced to admit to herself that she felt none of those things. What she felt was vulnerable. And she knew herself well enough to know that it didn’t matter what corner of the world they might have gone to for this little game Azrin wanted to play. It was Azrin himself who made her feel so … at risk. So threatened.

And not by him but, far worse, by her own damned feelings.

She’d thought for some reason that a big, bustling city might dampen her reaction—might help dissipate the intensity of it—though she realized now that that had just been wishful thinking. When had the location made a bit of difference? It didn’t matter if they were in Hong Kong or the Napa Valley. Azrin was like some kind of sorcery, and she was, apparently, helpless to resist him.

She could feel him, as usual, taking up too much space in the back of the Jeep. Dominating all of the air around him as well as the seat itself. He even sat with that air of total command, his lean and powerful body seeming to infringe upon her, to take her over, without his having to move a muscle in her direction. And Kiara knew that it was all of this that she feared, all of this that made her feel so terribly weak.

It was not that he touched her, she knew; it was that she surrendered to that touch so completely. So totally. Without a single moment’s hesitation or forethought.

It was not that he demanded she forget everything that mattered to her when she looked at him; it was that she let herself forget it. She let herself fall.

She couldn’t help but think that it was a terrifyingly easy step from submitting to the sensual spell he wove with so little effort to surrendering to him totally—