A Royal Engagement: The Storm WithinThe Reluctant Queen Read online

  Adel moved closer, putting out his hand to hold the door of her car open as she went to get in. He did not crowd her—but he also did not step back when she whipped back around to face him. He stood there for a moment, waiting until her breath came faster, and her gaze dropped to his mouth. He could feel the tension wind between them, and longed to close the distance between them—longed to take her mouth with his and reintroduce himself in the best way he could.

  “I spoke of facts, Princess,” he said, when she dragged her gaze back to his. “Let me share a few with you. I have every intention of marrying you, as we both swore to do in our betrothal ceremony twelve years ago. That is a fact.”

  “Your intentions are your business,” she replied calmly, though her eyes flashed blue steel. “They have nothing to do with me.”

  “If you do not honor your obligations,” he continued as if she had not spoken, “I will not simply be forced to take measures to secure the bride price owed to me. I will also have no choice but to have your deceitful mother arrested and returned to Alakkul, where her theft of so much money and so many jewels—not to mention her kidnapping of the Crown Princess—will no doubt result in an extremely long and unpleasant jail term. If not death. As your husband and your king, of course, I would be willing to forgive such criminal acts on the part of your relative. But why would I extend such a courtesy to a stranger?”

  “And again,” she said after a long moment, her mouth trembling slightly, as if he’d hurt her. “What words do you think come to mind when you say such things?”

  “I cannot compromise,” he said softly. Fiercely. “I will not.”

  “And that is what kind of man you’ve grown into,” she replied in the same voice, as something like an ache, a need, swelled in the warm summer air between them. Adel wanted to touch it. Her. “So much for the boy who promised he would never hurt me, that he would lay down his life to avoid it.”

  He wanted to smile—did she not realize how much she revealed with that memory? How much room she gave him to hope? But he refrained.

  “I wish I could place your feelings above all else,” he said, inclining his head slightly. “But that is not who I am. I cannot pretend that I will not do anything and everything in my power to secure you. And thus the throne. I owe nothing less to the people of Alakkul.” He moved slightly, closer, unable to keep his distance as he should. She was too much—too magnetic, too proud. Too…everything he’d dreamed. “Your people, Princess.”

  “You can call me Princess all you like,” she said, strong emotion cracking across her face, in her voice. “That doesn’t make it so. I left all of that behind. I have no interest in a foreign country I can hardly remember.”

  “What will spark your interest, I wonder?” he asked, hearing the danger in his own voice, even as he saw her awareness of it, of him, in her gaze. “Are you as cold-hearted as you would like me to believe? Are you prepared for the consequences of your refusal? Not just to your faithless mother,” he said coldly when she began to speak, “but to the very people you claim to care nothing about. If you do not take the throne with me, I will have to fight for it. That is not a euphemism. I am talking about civil war.”

  She rocked back on her feet, and dragged in a deep, ragged breath. Her eyes were unreadable when they met his again, dark gray now instead of blue.

  “Why ask me at all?” she demanded, her voice strained. “Why pretend that I have a choice to make if I do not?”

  He wanted to trace the shape of her delicate cheekbones, the bold line of her nose, the full swell of her lips. He did not understand what he felt then—tenderness? Affection? Need? All of the above at once?

  “Here is what I will promise you,” he said abruptly, called somehow to fix the darkness of her expression. “I will honor you and respect you, a claim I do not make to many without cause, but one I made to you twelve years ago. I will not take lightly the sacrifice you are making today. I doubt I am an easy man, but I will try to be fair.”

  He saw tears at the back of her eyes, making them shine too bright. But she did not let them fall. He saw the panic, the uncertainty, the fear. But then she swallowed, and let her hands drop to her sides, and he knew it was as much a surrender as a challenge.

  He could handle both. He’d been waiting for her for over a decade. For the whole of his life. He was amazed at how much, how deeply and how completely, he wanted to handle her. In every sense of the term.

  “Congratulations,” she said bitterly. “You’ve won yourself a completely unwilling queen.”

  Adel did not, could not care if she thought she hated him now. He would win her. He had won her years before—and she had already showed him she remembered more than she claimed she did. He would build on those memories, and he would win her all over again. And this time, in the way a man won a woman he meant to keep.

  “I will take you any way I can get you,” Adel said now, and extended his hand, keeping the hard, bright triumph that flared inside of him under tight control. She was his. Finally. “Come,” he said. “Our future awaits.”

  He saw her pulse go wild in her throat, saw her remarkable eyes widen a fraction. He saw her waver. He saw her legs shake as if she fought against the urge to bolt. Still, he held out his hand, and waited.

  She bit her lip, surrendered, and slid her hand into his.

  She had no choice.

  Everything seemed to burst into speed and color, exploding all around her.

  There was the feel of his warm, strong palm, his skin against hers, arrowing deep into her, making her soften and yearn. Just like before. There was his strong, dangerous body too close to hers—so close she imagined she could feel his heat—and the way she wanted to lean into him even as her mind shrieked in denial of everything that was happening. Her body had already decided. Her body had chosen him years ago, and was now exultant at his return. It was her mind that reeled, that was desperate for an out.

  But what was her alternative? Her mother jailed? War? How could she possibly live with any of that, knowing she’d had the power to prevent it and had refused?

  And she did not doubt that Adel Qaderi was more than capable of the things he’d promised. She could feel his ruthlessness taking her over like an ache in the bones, making it impossible for her to breathe. It was his ruthlessness, she told herself firmly, and nothing more—certainly not that old, demanding heat that only he raised in her. Certainly not that.

  Adel raised his hand, and they were suddenly surrounded—by a fleet of hard-mouthed, serious-looking men who spoke in staccato tones into earpieces and herded Lara into a limousine she had not seen idling nearby.

  It was only when she was tucked inside the car and it was speeding away, while her head spun wildly, that her eyes fell on the pieces of luggage on the seat opposite her. She recognized them at once. She had last seen them in the hall closet of her apartment.

  She stared at them for a moment, her brain refusing to make the obvious and only connection, and then whipped her head around to stare at the man who sat with such devastating confidence beside her.

  He only raised his dark brow, and watched her.

  He had known she would surrender.

  He had planned it.

  “Your belongings have been packed up and are being shipped,” he said without the slightest hint of apology in his tone. But why should he apologize? He’d won. “But should you wish for anything else, it is yours.”

  “Except my freedom,” she said with more bitterness than she’d intended. “My life.”

  “Except that,” he agreed, his voice moving from that exotic steel to a softer velvet.

  He shocked her then by reaching over and taking her hand in his far bigger one, holding it between his palms.

  Lara jumped, a shudder working through her body, as she stared at the place they were connected, her fingers curling toward his. She felt herself blush, hard, the heat prickling over her and casting her in a hot, breathless red.

  “Is it so terrible?�
� he asked softly, very nearly amused, his voice a caress in the stillness of the car’s plush interior. “I am not a bad man.”

  “You’ll understand if I choose to reserve judgment on that,” she said in a voice that sounded so much stronger, so much crisper, than she felt—and yet she did not pull her hand away from his. “Given that you are currently blackmailing me into marrying you, as if we are in some gothic novel.”

  “You intrigue me, Princess,” he said, his voice insinuating itself in places it should not have been able to reach. Heat moved between them, or she simply burned, and she could not pretend that she was not at least partly as motivated by that as she was by her concern for the rest of it. What did that make her?

  “That sounds like a fantastic basis for a marriage,” she managed to say. “You are intrigued, I am forced into it against my will, and the fate of my mother and all the citizens of Alakkul hangs in the balance. How delightful.”

  “Ah,” he said in a voice that made her think of much darker delights, skin against skin, long, hot nights, all those things she’d long imagined with him but thought would never come to pass, “but will is a delicate thing, is it not?”

  He lifted her hand to his mouth. Trapped, captivated—appalled, she told herself!—she only watched. As he turned her hand in his. As he brought her palm closer to the hard line of his full lips. As his thunderstorm eyes met hers, electric, demanding.

  And as he kissed the center of her palm, sending a lightning bolt of impossible desire directly into her core.

  CHAPTER THREE

  LARA snatched her hand back, jumping in her seat as if he’d bitten her. And then she felt herself melt into a wild heat, imagining what it might be like if he did exactly that.

  “What are you doing?” she demanded, horrified at herself, curling the palm he’d tasted into a fist and shoving it into her lap. Would she fall for him so easily, so quickly? After twelve years and far too much water under the bridge? “You can’t—you can’t possibly—”

  “We are to be married,” he said, leaning back in his seat, his gray eyes gleaming silver now, his hard mouth allowing the smallest curve. “What do you think I’m doing?”

  She could not think at all—that was the problem! Her mind was a loud, buzzing blank, like static, and it was all too much to take. Adel’s unexpected appearance in the parking lot. The threats, the compulsion. The news of her father, which she could still hardly bear to think about, could still barely bring herself to accept as real. Her own capitulation that had led to her presence in this car. And it was his fault! She could not seem to form a single coherent thought, save that. He had done this. Lara was perfectly clear about the fact that Adel Qaderi was capable of anything. It was just as her mother had always said—Alakkulian men could not be trusted.

  Hadn’t he just proved that? What decent, honorable man would behave as he had done, under these insane circumstances?

  Her own pounding need, her own desire—Lara could not let herself consider.

  “How can you possibly imagine that I would welcome your advances?” she hissed at him. “I will never—”

  “Never is a very long time,” he said, with a soft laugh, as if she delighted him. “Be careful how you use the word. It might come to haunt you.”

  Suddenly, the future she could not escape yawned open in front of her, a deep, black hole. It was one thing to offer to make a sacrifice, knowing it was the right thing—the only thing—to do. But how was she meant to survive this? The day-to-day, moment-to-moment reality of being in this man’s possession? Being a wife? A queen? A lover, a voice inside whispered, and her stomach clenched again.

  “Are you so delusional that you truly believe that a woman in my position would ever want you to touch her?” she asked, her voice rasping over everything she could not say, everything she feared—including her own reactions to this man. Especially her reactions. The heat between her legs. The ache in her too-heavy breasts. Her inability to draw a full breath. The car seemed too close around her. He was too close.

  “I don’t know about a woman in your position,” he murmured, stretching his arm out along the back of the seat and in so doing, drawing her attention away from her own panic and bringing it to his electric physicality. “That is far too abstract for me. I can only tell you what is concrete.” His hot gaze dropped from her eyes to her mouth. His voice lowered. “What I see, what I smell, what I know.”

  “That I can barely remember you?” she supplied in desperation, shifting to be sure she avoided even the faintest brush of contact with his arm. “That I want nothing to do with you?”

  “That your body wants me, no matter what you might say to the contrary,” he said, seemingly unperturbed by her acidity. He even smiled, as if he could see the way her breasts firmed, her thighs clenched. As if he knew her treacherous body better than she did. As if he understood the potent, wild combination of emotion and arousal that made Lara feel like a stranger to herself.

  “You know nothing about me,” she threw out, desperately. “We might as well be complete strangers!”

  He leaned forward, and Lara had to force herself not to squeak like a mouse and shrink away from him. But pretending to be strong only left her far too close to him. Close enough to see the faint hint of his beard along his strong jaw. Close enough to find herself mesmerized by that hard mouth she now knew could be devastatingly soft, if he chose. Close enough to smell the faint hint of sandalwood that clung to him, and something else, something male and only his, beneath.

  “We are not strangers,” he said, his eyes gleaming pure silver now. “We never were. I am the man who will be your husband, your lover, the father of your children. These things will happen, Princess. Perhaps not today. Perhaps not even soon. But believe me, they will happen.”

  “I said I would marry you,” she breathed, locked in his uncompromising gaze, lost in the spell he cast around them. “I can’t do anything else, can I?”

  “No.” His eyes seemed to warm, and to warm her, too. “You cannot do anything else.”

  “I never said anything about…the rest of it,” she continued, deeply unnerved. She was aware of him—every part of him. The way he looked at her, the heat that seemed to emanate from his tautly muscled form, even the places his gaze touched as it swept over her. She had to force herself to breathe. And then again.

  His smile deepened, as if she was precious to him somehow. As if she was more than merely a pawn in his game. But how could that be?

  He reached down with the hand he’d laid against the back of their seat and traced a line along her jaw, from temple to lip, until he held her chin in his fingers.

  She knew she should jerk away. She told herself hers was the fascination of the fly for the spider, the moth for the flame, and it would be suicidal to pay more attention to the unfamiliar heat and want that scorched her than to her own mind—

  But she did not move.

  She only watched him. Helpless. Caught. And unable, in that moment, to think of a single reason she should fight him.

  “We will work it out, you and I,” he said. Quiet command rang in his voice, through her. “It was foretold when we were children. Never doubt it now.”

  “Of course,” she said, aware of his fingers like hot brands against her skin—aware, too, of the rich, wild heat that washed through her because of it. Of how much she had always wanted him, even when she’d believed him to be no more than a dream. “Because you say so. Does the world always align itself with your wishes, according to your commands?”

  “Of course,” he said, echoing her, that smile of his lighting up his eyes, broadcasting that calm confidence, that deceptively graceful strength of his. “I am the King.”

  The shockingly luxurious private jet hovered somewhere high in the night sky above the Atlantic Ocean, the world shrouded in black on all sides, but Lara could not sleep as she knew she should. She stared blindly out the window as the plane cut through the dark clouds, shivering slightly as reality sank into h
er like a great weight.

  What had she done? How could she possibly have agreed to this?

  She had spent her whole life avoiding exactly this—her return to Alakkul. Marlena had spoken of it as if it was the worst possible scenario, the ultimate pit of doom and despair. As if they would die should it happen—or, worse, wish to die. “Azat will hunt us down and drag us back there,” she had told the young Lara again and again. “He will make you one more of his little puppets, who live only to serve him!”

  They had taken Marlena’s mother’s maiden name as their surname. No more Princess Lara. No more Your Highness. Marlena had moved them whenever she felt threatened, whenever she had reason to think the King’s goons were drawing near. Always, King Azat was the boogeyman, the monster they sought to avoid. Lara wasn’t sure when the crushing fear had started to recede—or why Marlena had finally permitted them to settle down in Denver. She only knew that once she’d finished college, Marlena had seemed far less worried than she’d been before, and far happier to make herself a home in nearby Aspen.

  Lara wasn’t sure when she’d first started to wonder if, perhaps, Marlena had simply been overreacting. Perhaps there had never been any goons—any escape. Perhaps Marlena had simply wanted a divorce. But thinking such things had always felt deeply disloyal to the only parent she had access to, and felt doubly so now. Lara pushed the thoughts away.

  Adel sat not far away, frowning down at the documents before him, a soft reading light surrounding him in a warm halo. Lara could not help but watch him. He was so much more than the cascade of her teenage memories, her teenage feelings, and the simple fact of his commanding presence. He was everything she had been taught to fear about Alakkul—and Alakkulian men in particular. Autocratic bullies, Marlena had said—content to use their power to crush, maim, destroy.

  Wasn’t that what he’d done today? Wasn’t that what she’d let him do? Emotion rose like bile in her throat, and she had to struggle to keep from crying out. She squeezed her eyes shut and tried to breathe.