In Defiance of Duty

But she couldn’t keep it up. Too soon she was worrying over a problem that had cropped up with the export of one of the Zinfandels they’d been experimenting with in recent years, and wondering if it required a quick, unscheduled call to her mother, the formidable CEO of Frederick Wines and sometime bane of Kiara’s existence. Given the complicated cocktail of guilt, love and obligation that characterized Kiara’s relationship with her mother as both her daughter and her second-in-command, Kiara usually preferred to handle things like this on her own. She argued the pros and cons in her head, going back and forth again and again.

Sydney preened before her in the abundant sunshine, skyscrapers sparkling in the light and the harbor dotted with sails and ferry boats far below, but Kiara hardly saw them. In her mind, she saw the greens and golds of her beloved Barossa Valley, the rich green vineyards spreading out in all directions, the complacent little towns bristling with Bavarian architecture, built by settlers like Kiara’s ancestors who’d fled from religious persecution in Prussia. She saw the family vineyards that had dominated her life since she was a girl—and the grand old chateau that had been in her family for generations.

The winery had taken over her mother’s life when she’d found herself there, a widow with an infant, and it was Kiara’s life, too, as it could hardly be anything else. At the very least, she had to prove to both her mother and herself that it had all been worth it, didn’t she? All the years of sacrifice and struggle on her mother’s part to build and maintain Kiara’s heritage—surely Kiara owed her, at the very least, her own commitment to that heritage.

She wasn’t sure what made her look up to find Azrin watching her then, his conference clearly over and an unusually serious look on his ruthless face.

“Good morning,” she said and smiled, pushing her concerns away as she drank him in, as if he could clear her head and vanquish her mother’s doubt just by being there in front of her. Instead of halfway across the world somewhere, available only by phone or video chat, which was the way she usually saw him.

She expected him to smile back. But he only looked at her for a long moment, and something twisted inside her—something she didn’t entirely understand. She remembered, then, his unusual urgency the night before. The edge to him that had made him even more fierce, even more demanding than usual. Something skittered down her spine, making her sit straighter on the stool. She smoothed the edges of her silk wrapper around her. She didn’t look away.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked softly. “What’s happened?”

“I am admiring my beautiful wife,” he said, though there was a certain rawness in his near-blue eyes. “My princess. My future queen.”

Kiara was uneasy, and she didn’t know why. He looked as if he’d been up for hours, which was not particularly remarkable, given his many business concerns and the world’s various time zones. His dark hair looked rumpled, as if he’d been running his hands through it repeatedly. He hadn’t bothered to shave, and the rough shadow along his tough jaw made him look more like the sheikh she sometimes forgot he was and less like the cosmopolitan, sophisticated husband with whom she explored the great modern cities of the world.

For some reason, her throat was dry.

“You could sound a bit less complimentary,” she pointed out, trying to sound as teasing and as light as she usually did. “If you tried. Though you’d have to work hard at it.”

He nearly smiled then, and she had the strange notion that it was against his will. Something sat heavy in the room, making her anxious, and she could see he felt it, too—that it was in him, something grim and hard behind his gaze, making those near-blue eyes grow dark. Making it difficult to breathe.

Kiara prided herself on her ability to close deals and navigate the sometimes treacherous labyrinth of international business concerns in general and the wine industry in particular. Hell, she was good at it. She’d had to be, having had to overcome the usual suspicions that she’d been promoted thanks to her relationship with the boss lady rather than her own hard work, and then, after her wedding, having to stare down everyone who’d sniggered and snidely called her your highness or princess in the middle of a tense meeting.

She enjoyed confounding expectations, thank you very much. She’d learned how to keep people at arm’s length as a defense mechanism against her mother’s complete lack of boundaries when she was still a girl. She’d spent her professional life cultivating a little bit of an untouchable ice-queen facade, and becoming a widely photographed and speculated-about princess had only helped make her deliberate shell that much more impenetrable. She liked it that way.

But this man was different. This man looked at her with some kind of pain in him and she would do anything—dance, tease, crawl, whatever worked—to make it go away. This was Azrin, and the love she felt for him—the love that had crashed into her and wholly altered the course of her life five years ago—was impossible to hide away behind some smooth mask. He was the one person on earth that she never, ever wanted at arm’s length, no matter how wild and unbalanced that sometimes made her feel inside, and no matter how far away from each other they often were.

She was up and on her feet before she knew she meant to move, crossing over to him.

“I have something to tell you,” he said, his gaze still so dark, so bleak.

“Then tell me,” she said. But she straddled him where he sat, letting her silk wrapper fall open to show that she was naked and still warm from her shower beneath it. “But you’ll forgive me if I make the conversation a little more exciting, won’t you?”

She wasn’t really thinking. She only knew she wanted to soothe him, and to do something to make whatever this was better. She felt him harden beneath her, felt his breath against her neck, as if he was as helpless to resist this pull between them as she had always been.

But she knew they both were. It had been this way, outsized and impossible and wholly irresistible, from the very beginning.

“Kiara …” he said, in that tone that was supposed to be reproving, chastising even, but his hands slid beneath the wrapper and onto her bare skin, smoothing over her hips. She arched against him, feeling the scrape of his jaw against the tender slope of her breast. He tilted his head back to look up at her, his hard mouth in an unsmiling line. “What are you doing?”

She thought that was obvious, but she only smiled, and rolled her hips, the heat and strength of him against the softest part of her. She ached as if she’d never had him. She burned as if he was already deep within her. And his eyes lit with that same fire, and she knew he felt it, too.

Holding his gaze, she reached down between them and released him from his trousers with impatient hands, stroking his silken length, driving herself a little bit wild. Still watching him, those unholy eyes and his fierce, uncompromising face, she shifted up and over him, then sank down, sheathing him hard and deep within her.

“I’m distracting you,” she told him, her voice uneven.

“Or possibly killing me,” he muttered, taking her mouth with his in a long, hard kiss. “As I suspect is your plan.”

She moved against him, rocking him deeper into her, unable to bite back her own small sigh of pleasure. He moved with her until she started to shake, and then he took control. His hands gripped her hips, preventing her from rocking against him when she wanted to tip herself over the edge.

“What are you doing?” she demanded, her voice a mere scrap of ragged sound, and his smile made her shiver.

“Distracting you,” he said, his cool eyes glittering with that sensual promise that made her feel nearly giddy. “You’ll come when I tell you to, Kiara, and not before.”

She wanted to argue, but he moved then, and she could do nothing at all but move with him, surrendering to his hands, his wicked mouth, and his dark, whispered commands. Letting him build the fire between them into an out of control blaze. Letting him take them both exactly where she wanted to go.

And when he finally ordered her to come, she did, screaming out his name.

Azrin could not understand why he didn’t simply tell her.

Why he hadn’t told her already. Why some part of him didn’t want to tell her at all.

They’d had the one last, long night. Drawing it out any further was nothing more than the very kind of selfishness he could no longer allow himself.

She was still in the shower. He could see the shape of her through the steamy glass, and he already regretted having left the warm embrace of the hot water. He could have stayed in there with her, and continued this exercise in pretense, in misdirection, as if they could lose themselves enough in each other that the whole world would go away.

Perhaps that was what he wanted. If he was honest, he knew that it was.

Hadn’t that been what Kiara had always been for him? A step away from the expected—an escape from the traditional?

Enjoy yourself while you can, his father had said when he’d married, his creased face canny, knowing. As unsympathetic as ever, the old man as harsh a ruler of his family as he was of his country. You will pay for it all soon enough, I promise you.

Because his father had known, too: Kiara was Azrin’s way of asserting himself in a life that would too soon be swallowed whole by duty and sacrifice. There would be no escape.

But Kiara had been his. All his. He’d been unable to resist her. She was his most selfish act of all, having nothing whatosever to do with the things that were expected of him, the things he expected of himself. He had been meant to marry a woman like his own mother—one of the exquisite Khatanian girls who had been trotted out before him at every social opportunity since he was a boy, each more perfect than the last, each competing to show herself to be the most obvious choice for Azrin’s future queen.

They were indistinguishably attractive, impeccably mannered and becomingly modest. They were all from powerful, noble families, all raised with the same set of ideals and expectations, all bred to be perfect wives and excellent mothers, all taught from birth to anticipate and tend to a man’s every passing whim—and if that man was to be their king? All the better.

Instead, he’d met Kiara in a crowded little laneway in Melbourne. He had been walking off his jet lag as he prepared for a week’s worth of meetings with some of the city’s financial leaders. He’d ducked into one of the narrow alleys that snaked behind a typical Melbourne street featuring a jumble of sleek modern skyscrapers and Victorian-era facades, and had found his way to a tiny cafе that had reminded him of one of his favorite spots in Paris. His bodyguard had cleared the way for him to claim a seat at one of the tiny tables overlooking the busy little lane—perhaps a touch overzealously.

“I think you’ll find it’s customary to pretend to apologize when stealing a table from someone else,” she had said, a teasing note in her voice that made her sound as if she was about to bubble over into laughter. As if there was something impossibly merry, very nearly golden, inside her just bursting to come out. That had been his first impression of Kiara—that voice.

Then he’d looked up. He’d never been able to account for the way that first look at her, when she’d been a stranger and speaking to him as if she found him both unimpressive in the extreme and somewhat ridiculous—not something that had ever happened to him before—had struck him like that. Like an unerring blow straight to the solar plexus.

First he’d seen that mouth. It had hit him. Hard. He’d seen her brown eyes, much too intelligent and direct, with the same arch look in them that he’d heard in her voice. He’d had the impression of her pretty face, her hair thrown back into a careless twist at the back of her head. It had been winter in Melbourne, and she’d dressed for it in boots and tights beneath some kind of flirty little skirt, and a sleek sort of coat with a bright red scarf wrapped about her neck. She had been all edges and color, attitude and mockery, and should not have attracted or interested him in any possible way.

“But as you and your entourage are fairly bristling with self-importance,” she’d continued in that same tone, waving a hand at his bodyguard and himself with an obvious lack of the respect he’d usually received, which Azrin had found entirely too intriguing in spite of himself, “I can only assume that you see cafе tables as one more thing you are compelled to conquer.” She’d smiled, which had not detracted from her sarcasm in any way. “In which case, have at. You clearly need it more than I do.”

She’d turned to go, and Azrin had found that unbearable. He hadn’t allowed himself to question why that should be, or, worse, why he should feel compelled to act on that unprecedented feeling.

“Please,” he’d said, shocking his usually unflappable bodyguard almost as much as he’d shocked himself—as Azrin was not known for his interest in sharp-mouthed, clever-eyed girls who took too much pleasure in public dressing-downs. “Join me. You can enumerate my many character flaws, and I will buy you a coffee for your troubles.”

She’d turned back to him, a considering sort of light in her captivating eyes, and a smile moving across that generous mouth of hers.

“I can do that alone,” she’d pointed out, her smile deepening. “I’m already doing it in my head, as a matter of fact.”

“Think of how much more satisfying it will be to abuse me to my face,” he’d said silkily. “How can you resist that kind of challenge?”