The Reluctant Queen

“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.