In Defiance of Duty

There could be nothing that suggested that Azrin was compromised in any way by what many in his country took to be the lax moral code of anyone not from their own part of the world. There could certainly be no hint that the passion between Azrin and his princess was still so intense, so all-encompassing, that some days they did not even get out of bed, even after all this time. He was hoping that this night might lead directly into one of those lost days, even though he knew there was so much to do now, so many details to take care of and so little time to do it all in…

He should tell her now. Immediately. He knew that he should—that there was no real excuse for waiting. There was only his curious inability to speak up as he should. There was only that part of him that didn’t want to accept this was happening.

He wanted this one night, that was all. This last, perfect night of the life they’d both enjoyed so much for so long that had let him pretend he was someone else. What was one night more?

“I missed you, Azrin,” Kiara whispered, her supple body flush against his, her arm around his waist as they walked. “Two weeks is much too long.”

“It was unavoidable.” He heard the dark note in his voice and smiled down at her to dispel it. “I didn’t care for it, either.”

He would be happy when this part of their life was behind them, he thought as they made their way through the usual crowds flocking to Sydney’s pretty jewel of a harbor to enjoy the mild evening, the restaurants, the view. He would be more than pleased to do without these weeks of separations that they tried valiantly to keep to ten days or less. The endless grind of international travel to this or that city, in every corner of the globe, to steal a day, a night, even an afternoon together. Meeting up with his wife in hotels that became interchangeable in the cities where they did not have a residence, and hardly noticing which residence was which when they were in one of them. New York, Singapore, Tokyo, Paris, the capital city of his own country, Arjat an-Nahr, on an endlessly repeating cycle. Always having to plan to see his wife around the demands of their calendars, never simply seeing her. Never really able to simply be with her.

He would not miss this part of their life at all. He told himself that having this part end would be worth the rest of it. At least they would be together. Surely that was the important thing.

“You should not have stayed so long in Arjat an-Nahr,” she was saying, that teasing note in her voice, the one that normally made him smile automatically. “I’m tempted to think that you care more for your country and its demands on your time than your poor, neglected wife.”

He knew she was kidding. Of course she was. But still—tonight, it pricked at him. It seemed to suggest things about their future that he knew he didn’t want to hear. That he could not accept, not even as an offhanded joke. It cut too deep tonight.

“I will be king one day,” he reminded her, keeping his voice light, because he knew—he did—that she was only teasing, the way she often did. The way she always had. Wasn’t her very irreverence why he had been so drawn to her in the first place? “Everything will come second to my country then, Kiara. Even you.”

And him, of course. Especially him.

She looked up at him, those marvelous brown eyes of hers moving over his face in the dark. He knew that she could read him, and wondered what she saw. Not the truth, of course. He knew even she could not know that, not from a single searching look, no matter how well she could read what she saw. No one knew the truth yet save his father’s doctors, his mother and Azrin himself.

“I know who I married,” she told him softly, though Azrin did not think she could when he felt so unsure of it himself. “Do you doubt it?” She smiled; soothing, somehow, what felt so raw in him that easily. As if she could sense it without his having to tell her. And then her voice took on that teasing lilt again, encouraging him to follow her back into lighter, shallower waters. “You always take such pains to remind me, after all.”

It was only change, he told himself. Everything changed. Even them. Even this. It was neither good nor bad—it was simply the natural order of things.

And more than that, he had always known this day was coming. Why had he imagined otherwise, these past five years? Who had he been trying to fool?

“Do you mean when I request that you keep your voice down while you are pretending that I am merely some overconfident stranger picking you up in a bar, lest the papers feel the need to share this game of yours with the whole world?” He couldn’t quite make his voice sound reproving, especially not when her brown eyes were so warm, so challenging, and seemed to connect directly with his sex. And his heart. “Does that count as taking pains, Kiara? Or is it simply a more highly developed sense of self-preservation?”

“Yes, my liege,” she murmured in feigned obeisance, laughter thrumming in her voice, just below the surface. She even bowed her head in a mock sign of respect. “Whatever you say, my liege.”

His almost equally feigned look of exasperation made her laugh, and the bright, musical sound of it seemed to roll through him like light.

He couldn’t regret the past five years. He didn’t.

He had always taken his duties as Crown Prince as seriously as he’d taken his position as the managing director of the Khatan Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds in the world. Kiara had always been wholly dedicated to her own role as vice president of her family’s famous winery in South Australia’s renowned Barossa Valley, a career that took her all over the world and kept her as busy as he was. Theirs had always been a modern marriage, the only one like it in the whole of his family’s history.

But then, he had long been his country’s emblem of the future, whether he wanted to be or not—and no one had ever asked him his feelings on the subject. His feelings were irrelevant, Azrin knew. While his father was very much and very proudly wedded to the old ways, Azrin was supposed to represent the modern age come to life in the midst of old-world Khatan, his small, oil-rich island nation in the Persian Gulf.

He knew—had always known—that once he took the throne he was expected to usher in the new era of Khatan that his father either could not or did not want to. He was expected to lead his people into a freer, more independent future, without the bloodshed and turmoil some of their neighboring countries had experienced.

And Kiara had been his first step in that direction, little as he might have thought of her in those terms when he’d met her. She was a twenty-first century Western woman in every respect, independent and ambitious, a fourth generation Australian winemaker and wholly impressive in her own right. Marrying her had been a commitment to a very different kind of future than the one his old school father, with his traditional three wives, offered their people.

Together, Azrin and Kiara were considered the new face of a new Khatan. That wouldn’t change now—it would only become more analyzed and critiqued. More speculated about. More observed and remarked upon. Their marriage would cease to be theirs; it would become his people’s, just as the rest of his life would. It was inevitable.

Azrin had always known this day would come. He just hadn’t expected it would come now. So soon. And perhaps because he’d thought he would have so many more years left before it happened, he certainly hadn’t understood until now how very much he’d dreaded it.

He didn’t want to admit that, not even to himself.

“Where have you gone?” she asked now, stopping, and thereby making him stop, too. The busy Sydney Pier bristled with ferries and commuters headed home for the evening, tourist groups and restaurant patrons on their way to an evening out. Her clever eyes met his as her palm curved against his jaw. “You’re miles away.”

“I am still in Khatan,” he said, which was true enough. He took her hand in his, lacing their fingers together, and tugged her along with him as he started to walk again, guiding her around the usual cluster of stalls and street performers making the most of the evening rush and the ever-present tourists. “But I would much rather be in you. Naked, I think you said?”

“I did say that.” Her voice was so proper, so demure. Only because he knew her well could he hear the mischief beneath the surface, that touch of wickedness that made him harden in response. “I thought you might have forgotten. My liege.”

“I never forget anything that has to do with your naked body, Kiara,” he said in a low voice. “Believe me.”

He wasn’t ready, he thought—and yet he must be. What he wanted, what he felt—none of that mattered any longer. What mattered was who he was, and therefore who he was about to become. He simply had to learn to keep his own desires, his own feelings, in reserve, just as he’d done for years before he’d met Kiara. In truth, it had been nothing but selfishness that had allowed him to spend the past five years pretending it could ever be otherwise.

He handed Kiara into the long black car that idled at the curb once they reached the street and climbed in after her.

Despite the fact that they were a prince and a princess, a royal sheikh and his chosen bride, they had spent years behaving as if they were like any other high-powered couple anywhere else in the world. They’d believed it themselves, Azrin thought. He certainly had.

The Prince and Princess of Khatan were relatable, accessible. Normal. They worked hard and didn’t get to see as much of each other as they’d like. Theirs was not a story of harems and exoticism, royal excesses and the bizarre lifestyles of the absurdly privileged. They were your everyday, run-of-the-mill power couple, just trying to excel at what they did. Just like you.

And yet they were not those couples, and never would be.

They were not normal. They had only been pretending. He told himself it was not a kind of grief that gripped him then—that it was simply reality.

He would be king. She would be his queen. There were greater expectations of those roles than of the ones they’d been playing at all this time. There were different, more complicated considerations. He knew with the kick of something like foreboding, deep in his gut, that there were great sacrifices that both of them would have to make.

It was only change, he told himself again. Everything and everyone changed.

But not tonight.

CHAPTER TWO

IT TOOK Kiara long moments after she woke in the wide, plush bed in the center of a room bathed in light to recall that she was in Sydney. In the penthouse in Sydney, she reminded herself as she stretched—that glorious multilevel dwelling high on the top of an exclusive building that only Azrin, who had been raised between several palaces, could call an apartment. Her lips curved.

She swung her legs over the side of the platform bed and rose slowly, smiling at the delicious feeling of bone-lessness all throughout her body. That was the Azrin effect. She supposed she should have been used to it by now. Images of the previous night swept through her head, each more erotic than the last. He was a sensualist, her husband; a demanding lover who held nothing back—and took everything in return.

She found herself in the opulent shower with no real idea how she’d got there, humming to herself as she used the delicately scented soap over the skin he’d tasted and touched repeatedly. That was what he did—he made her a besotted, airheaded fool. When he was near, she found she could think of very little else.

Just him. Only him.

She stepped from the great glass shower that she knew from past experience could hold both of them as well as some of Azrin’s more inventive fantasies, and toweled herself off, letting her hair down from the clip she’d used to secure it away from the hot spray. Sometimes she felt guilty that she often considered her demanding career a necessary a bit of breathing room between rounds with her far more demanding, far more consuming husband. There was just something about Azrin, she thought, smiling to herself, that encouraged complete surrender.

She found him out in the great room, lounging carelessly on the low sofa that sprawled out in the center of the sleek, modern space, speaking in assured and confident Arabic into the tablet he used for video conferencing. His fierce gaze met hers and though he did not smile, a flash of heat moved through her anyway.

Even after the night they’d shared, she wanted more. Her core warmed anew, ready for him at a glance. Again. Always.

He was lethal.

She made sure to keep out of sight of the camera, slipping into the open-plan gourmet kitchen that neither she nor Azrin had ever cooked in to fix herself a morning coffee from the imposing, gleaming espresso machine. A few minutes later she settled with the fruits of her labor—a flat white in a warm ceramic mug, perfectly made if she said so herself—on one of the chrome bar stools that fetched up to the shiny granite expanse of kitchen counter.

She still did not speak Arabic, though she’d picked up a few phrases over the years, none of them particularly repeatable outside of the bedroom. So she didn’t try to figure out what he was talking about in that commanding tone that reminded her that he was a royal prince who some called my liege without irony; she let his deep, sure voice wash over her like a caress. She sat and enjoyed a rare moment with nothing to do but look out the wall of floor-to-ceiling glass windows that faced north, the spectacular view stretching across the green lushness of Hyde Park toward the gorgeous Royal Botanic Gardens, the soaring shapes of the Sydney Opera House, and the picturesque Sydney Harbor, all of it bathed in the sweet, golden Australian sunshine.