In Defiance of Duty (19 page)

“I know.” He held her closer, tighter. “I know.”

And there was a peace, somehow, in the promises he didn’t make, the future he didn’t pretend to know. The tacit admission that no one could know. It seemed to soothe something raw that had lived inside her for far too long.

His strong, magnificent body surrounded her, and Kiara couldn’t help but revel in it. She might have been conflicted all this time, but her body was not. As ever, it molded to him, took his strength and heat and wrapped it around her, making her feel safe. Protected. Loved.

She understood, then, what she hadn’t before. What all their heat, their white-hot chemistry and deep sensual connection, had disguised. Or helped confuse. That she had always felt safe with this man, from the moment she’d met him, or she would never have let him buy her that long-ago coffee.

she had always felt safe with this man, from the moment she’d met him, or she would never have let him buy her that long-ago coffee.

And it was that very feeling that had always terrified her so profoundly. Because if she lost the man who made her feel like this, as if she was finally home whenever and wherever they were so long as he was near, then what? How could she recover from that kind of body blow? Look at what had happened to her mother. How shut down and closed off she’d become, even from her own daughter.

So she had prepared for his loss in advance. She had kept herself at arm’s length, emotionally and physically, which had been easy to do with their demanding schedules over the years. They’d been on a perpetual honeymoon. But come the real marriage, the day-to-day living together, the reality of duties and responsibilities with no escape? It had all become that much more dangerous for her. That much more terrifying.

She’d had to face the fact that if she let herself go—if she relinquished her escape hatch—she would be entirely at the mercy of this man. Utterly submerged in him, as she’d always fought so hard to prevent.

And if he left when she’d given up everything else? When she’d finally let herself become dependent on him emotionally—finally allowed herself to trust him?

How could she possibly survive it? She’d never wanted to find out.

The insight shook her down her toes.

“Azrin …”

She said his name as if she was tasting it for the first time, and his hard mouth curved. His near-blue eyes saw too deep, too far, but this time, she didn’t fear what he might find. This was the beginning of their marriage, she thought. Five years later than it should be, a bit hard-won and battle scarred, but it was theirs.

And she would fight for it with everything she had. Everything she was.

Even if she didn’t know how.

“I don’t even know what to promise you,” she whispered now, holding his beloved face in her hands. “I don’t even know where to start.”

“Try to do this with me without running away from me every time you get scared.” His voice was rough, his gaze intense. He brushed her hair from her face, then pressed a slow, sweet, intoxicating kiss to her mouth. It was like a vow. “All you have to do is try, Kiara. That’s where we start.” And so she tried. They tried together.

One day bled into the next, golden sun and crisp blue sky. They ate grand Khatanian feasts in the shade and swam in the pools. They sat out on the balconies and wrapped themselves around each other every night as they slept together in the grand old bedroom reserved for the king.

They talked. Of everything and nothing. They played their old, familiar games and they carefully, cautiously, built new bridges between them in the fragile peace they’d found. And they wanted. She knew exactly how much he wanted her, because she wanted him in the same way. It was sex and need and that tautly wound, inexhaustible passion that burned between them and was never fully sated. Never burned out.

And they loved each other with it, again and again. They explored each other’s bodies as if they were brand-new to each other. Azrin took her with his usual command and inventive flair wherever they found themselves. She had her way with him in the dark, intimate embrace of the hot pools deep in the mountainside, quiet and fierce, surrounded by a hundred candles. He returned the favor in the bright white heat of midday, her hands braced against the balustrade while Azrin moved, so hot and so devastatingly sensual, behind her.

And all the while, the pools sighed and murmured all around them. Birds sang strange and lovely choruses from the trees and the winter sun beamed down bright and warm, surrounding them in a bright cocoon of sunshine and song. It was magical. Some kind of sorcery, and he was in the center of it.

Kiara felt as if she’d been transported to a different world. A fantasy world, where a place like this could exist at all and a man like this could look at her with that silver gleam in his eyes that she knew was a smile, and she could let herself feel nothing at all but treasured. She had to keep reminding herself that this was no fantasy—this was real. This was their life.

This is where it starts, she told herself every day, like a prayer. This is our marriage.

And slowly, carefully, she started to let herself believe that it might work. That she could trust him, and love him, and that there was no need to hold some part of her in reserve. That she could trust in what they had enough to do without her escape route.

Every day they spent together, she believed it a little bit more.

Then, one day, as they sat together on the great slab of smooth rock that served as the palace’s beach, beneath the rustling palm trees, there was a noise from high above them. At first it didn’t make sense, to hear such a strange, mechanical sound in the midst of so much natural splendor. Kiara had the mad notion that it was her heart, so loud this time that even he heard it and frowned. But then she recognized the sound she was hearing and looked up.

A helicopter. Sleek and black and clearly military.

And it was coming down for a landing.

By the time it did, Azrin had turned to stone. It didn’t matter that he wore nothing but a swimming costume. He might as well have been draped in finery and sitting amidst the gold and precious stones in his throne room, complete with his crown and a selection of royal advisors.

He was once and again the king, Kiara thought. The reality of their lives had intruded once more. As it always will, she reminded herself. She watched the way he stood there, so coldly regal and detached, waiting to hear whatever terrible news they had come in so dramatic fashion to deliver to him here in this secret corner of his kingdom.

And this time, when she told herself she could do it, she believed she really could. She would. Because what mattered was not what life threw at them, but that they lived it together.

Surely if she’d learned anything, it was that.

“Your Majesties,” the soldier intoned respectfully, sinking to his knees in front of them when he climbed out of the helicopter, but when he lifted his gaze from the ground he looked only at Azrin. Who nodded as only a king could, no more than a supremely arrogant tilt of his head.

“A thousand apologies for disturbing you, Sire, but you are wanted in Arjat an-Nahr.” The soldier cleared his throat, his agitation plain, making Kiara clench her hands into fists against the tension—but Azrin only waited, as if he already knew whatever news the man brought. As if nothing could shock him. “It is your father.”

The old king had slipped into a coma, far sicker, it turned out, than he had been prepared to admit when he’d relinquished the throne.

“It is difficult to say,” the doctor told Azrin as they stood next to the old man’s bed. Azrin could hardly look at the frail figure before him; in his head, his father was still so large, so colorful. Belligerent and bombastic. Occasionally cruel. Not this tiny man, finally succumbing to an illness he’d already beat back once before, was still so large, so colorful. Belligerent and bombastic. Occasionally cruel. Not this tiny man, finally succumbing to an illness he’d already beat back once before, reduced to tubes and machines and hovering medical personnel. “It’s possible he could pull out of this, but it would only be a reprieve. Your father, Your Majesty, is gravely ill.”

“How ill?” he asked, his tone short. The doctor did not seem to notice—or think it unusual if he did.

“I would be shocked if he wakes up from this coma,” the doctor said after a brief pause. The man shifted position, as if he fully expected to be struck down for what he was about to say, but squared his shoulders and went ahead anyway, and Azrin found he liked him for it. “And it would be nothing short of miraculous if he lives out the week.”

Azrin stared down at his father for a long time.

“I understand,” he said.

And he did. He understood his role, his place, his duty, in a way he hadn’t before. It was as if a fog had suddenly lifted to reveal the bright glare of the desert sun, and he could see clearly for the first time in years. He could see exactly what he was doing, and what he needed to do.

He could see far too much.

It had been a shock for him to take the throne so soon, when he hadn’t thought he’d have to face that responsibility for years. Decades, even. Perhaps he’d even panicked, loath as he was to admit that even to himself. He had lost himself in those five years with Kiara, and he couldn’t regret it even now. He’d loved that fantasy version of himself—a man who could travel the world on some kind of an extended honeymoon, only intermittently accountable to his people. Before her, there had been only his duty and his future. But with her, he’d wanted nothing at all save that beautiful present to continue indefinitely.

He had let himself forget.

And then, when it was time, he had taken the crown knowing full well his father was still here. Sick, but capable of offering his opinions, the canny insights that had helped make him so formidable over the course of his reign. Even if Azrin disagreed with him or thought him depressingly hidebound, as he often did, the old man was there. It wasn’t all Azrin’s responsibility. For all intents and purposes, he’d had a king in reserve.

It had allowed him to make promises about reforms while concentrating instead on his own marriage above all things. On some level, he had still been lost. Still behaving like the prince he’d been.

But now there was only Azrin. It was life without a safety net, a reign all his own, whether he was ready for it or not.

He stood back as his father’s wives came into the room. He caught his mother’s gaze, not surprised to see she’d broken with her customary impassivity and was sobbing like the others. She came to him, burying her face against his shoulder. He almost wished he could allow himself that kind of release, but then, he was no longer a son, a brother, a husband.

He was the king. First, last, always. It was time he came to terms with that.

“I am lost!” his mother wailed against his shoulder. “We are all lost!”

Azrin murmured something soothing, his eyes on his father’s other two wives. They, too, looked as destroyed as his own mother sounded. It was more than grief, he thought; it was a sharp, encompassing panic, and an anguish, as if they were lying in that bed along with Zayed. Or as if they wanted to be.

“We will get through this,” he told his mother, as more of that unwelcome clarity hit him.

“There is no through,” she said dully, her face twisting into something unrecognizable. And Azrin realized he had never seen his mother without his father. That she was unintelligible to him without the force of his father behind her. “What am I without him?” He could not answer her.

Out in the private waiting room the hospital had set aside for the royal family, all of his sisters gathered with their husbands and children, all of them focused on each other and their shared worry, their grief. Some of his sisters wept. His brothers-in-law, most of them high-ranking members of his government, spoke in low voices to each other. They were indistinguishable from one another in their particular high-class Khatanian way. He could close his eyes and pick out their roles, each person’s status, their place in the family, simply by the way they spoke.

And in the corner, sitting on her own, her hands clenched tightly before her, standing out from the crowd like a beacon of light, his light, was Kiara.

She would never fit in here, not completely, and there was no pretending that was not precisely why he’d been so drawn to her. She would never blend. She’d been a vibrant splash of color against the wet and gray of the Melbourne laneway all those years ago. Against the demands of his life. She still was.

She was nothing like his sisters, his mother, his father’s other wives. She was not from this world, his world, and she never would be. She had been right to accuse him of trying to force her into a role that didn’t fit her at all. She’d been right about a lot of things.

I don’t want to be your mother, she’d told him.

And if he was honest, if he listened to her rather than his own selfish need for her, he didn’t want her to be his mother, either. He didn’t want her to face the prospect of his own death with so little strength at her disposal. He didn’t want her to face anything like that. He wanted her strength, her fire. He couldn’t imagine her without it.

If you love me, she had told him in Washington, let me go.

He had still been holding on to so many things then, and she was one of them. She was the emblem of the life he might have lived if he was someone else. And he’d had the opportunity to live it for five glorious, perfect years. But there were far greater concerns than his heart. It should never have been a factor in the first place.

It was long past time he grew up.

As if Kiara could feel him, her gaze rose and met his from across the room, and he felt it like a touch. Like her hands across his skin, teasing and tormenting him, bringing him ever closer to that sweet madness. Like those perfect, endless days at the pools that he understood, too late now, were their last.

Because he knew what he had to do. What he should have done from the start, had he not been so weak. So inexcusably, damagingly selfish.