by Pippa Roscoe
He clenched his fists and ordered himself back under control as the lift arrived at its destination.
In the hallway another guard held the door to his suite open, and once again Odir marched straight into the darkened rooms and, control be damned, headed straight for the whisky.
He listened for the sounds of Eloise behind him and realised that she was the first person that he’d told about his father’s death.
Jarhan had been with him when the doctor had conveyed the news that had set his every action today in motion. Odir had been able to tell, when he’d seen his aide, that he had already been informed by the medical staff—in the event that the Princes would need further support. And now, between his aide and his bodyguards, who had been sworn to secrecy, it left the number of people who knew about his father’s death at a total of twelve—including the doctor and nurse.
It felt so strange. The man he’d spent years hating, the man who had almost obliterated any happy childhood memories—memories of when his father had not been the monster he had become the day his wife tragically died—was now gone from this world. He wondered, not for the first time, if it would have been easier had he not had those happy memories. If Abbas’s later actions had truly killed any knowledge of the man he had once been. The father he had once been.
‘It’s okay to mourn him, Odir.’
A bitter laugh erupted, unbidden, from his lips, searing his flesh with its intensity.
‘Thank you for your permission, but I mourned the loss of my father years ago—the moment he stopped being a father and a husband and became a widowed king.’
He crossed the room in two strides and went to the drinks cabinet, with a determination to wash the taste of grief and anger from his palate with whisky. Unthinking, he put ice into two crystal-cut glasses, poured a generous amount of amber liquid into both, and passed one to Eloise. The weight of the glass was oddly satisfying, and he was left oddly bereft when she took it from him.
He looked up and found Eloise watching him through narrowed eyes.
‘You think that a cruel thing to say? You think me cruel?’ he asked.
He was genuinely curious. For although once he might have claimed to know her thoughts, with the changes the last six months had brought to her he honestly couldn’t tell.
‘No. On the contrary,’ Eloise said, so quietly he had to strain to hear her. ‘I think it an eminently practical thing to mourn the loss of a person who has changed irrevocably.’
Odir was surprised. He’d thought that she would try to comfort him with gentle words and reassuring sympathy, which would have been utterly false to his own feelings, and he was thankful she hadn’t. Thankful that she hadn’t tried to contradict him. Thankful that she hadn’t tried to reassure him that ‘grief was a natural part of life’.
His mind replayed the words of his father’s nurse as she had tried to offer some comfort to her new Sheikh. Perhaps, he realised with a silent laugh, she had been vying for a position within the royal household and he had been too numb to realise it.
‘What was he like?’
Her words drew him back.
‘The father you mourned, not the King you lost.’
Part of him didn’t want to go there. Didn’t want to revisit memories he would find painful. But, even though his heart avoided it, he scanned his memory for a time when his father hadn’t been so stricken with grief that it had rotted every good thing about him. And there, just as it had always been, was a memory waiting to be found. It led him to the next memory, and the next, as if a string of lights were being turned on, one after the other.
‘He laughed,’ Odir said, sounding almost as surprised as he felt. ‘It was the sound of his laugh—I’ll never forget it. It was deep. Deep and joyful. Perhaps not two words that you would associate with the man you met. And he smiled. It was never going to be a perfect smile. As a child he’d been kicked by a horse—a vicious kick that broke his jaw. Not that that stopped him from riding—or smiling. Though according to my mother it stopped him talking for a good while.’
Odir realised that he too was smiling until fresher, newer, memories overlaid the past.
‘It’s that memory that is the hardest. Because had I not known a father who smiled, who laughed and played with his wife and children, then I wouldn’t have known anything different. Instead I watched a powerful, kind, generous man disintegrate into a bitter, paranoid, destructive man who ruined everything he touched because he had lost his love.’
And that was why Odir had been happy with a marriage based on nothing so dangerous as emotions. Because his father had proved over and over again just how damaging love could be to a man—to a king. And whether or not he felt desire for this woman—the woman who had betrayed him in the most awful way—he was certainly sure of one thing. He would make sure that she could not incite in him anything near love. Even if there had been feelings that might have grown into something more, then they had been killed dead the day he’d found her with his brother.
* * *
Despite his silence, Eloise could trace the feelings crossing her handsome husband’s features. And for a moment she was lost in his words, wondering if her own father had ever been like that. If perhaps that was why her mother had chosen to stay with him—desperate to see traces of another man, the one she had first fallen in love with.
For a strange moment, she felt impossibly close to her mother and couldn’t explain why. But then darker memories returned—of her father and his manipulations, her mother’s constant escape into prescription drugs to dull the edge of whatever emotion she wanted not to feel. Each time her hopes of being loved and wanted for who she was had been dashed, again and again.
She dragged her thoughts away from her own life and returned them to Odir’s.
‘I hadn’t realised that things were so bad,’ she said into the dark room.
Her words seemed to reach her husband a long moment later, and she realised that she had echoed the same sentiment she’d expressed upon their encounter with Prince Imin. Had she been so preoccupied with her own wants and needs that she had failed to grasp the true significance of her husband’s absence?
‘Jarhan and I have worked for years with the council to protect Farrehed from our father’s paranoia and bad decision-making. Or even lack of decision-making. For some time he simply retreated and made decisions about the governing of Farrehed from his ivory tower.’
‘Is that what you were doing in the first months of our marriage? Is that why you were so busy?’
‘Had I not been so distracted by our engagement, our wedding, my father might not have been able to muster enough support to make an incursion on to Terhren soil. He might not have been able to undo the hard work Jarhan and I had put in to redeem Farrehed in the eyes of her allies.’
Eloise’s mind flew to the spaces in between his words, the meaning she so desperately wanted to find. Did he blame her? Did he blame their relationship—whatever form it had taken—for what Sheikh Abbas had been able to do?
* * *
‘I was trying to hold the country together by a thread. A thread I had to weave without my father seeing me as a usurper.’
In his mind’s eye, Odir watched his father hurl a priceless antique vase gifted to him by the Egyptian Ambassador across the room and watched the pieces shatter and scatter across the floor. It had been illustrative of his father’s sheer fury at the thought of his eldest son trying to take his place.
In his madness he had called him all the names under the sun—things that he would never repeat to a living soul, not even his brother. And it had brought to life the awful, terrible truth. That, yes, Odir had wanted his father gone—he had wanted to usurp his father’s position so that he could stop him damaging their beloved country. But not because he had wanted that power for himself—as his father had thought.
‘I thought it was because you didn’t want me.’
Eloise’s voice broke through, the hurt her tone failed to conceal cra
shing against wounds already salted with grief.
‘Want you? I always wanted you, Eloise.’
* * *
His words shocked her. Cut through the months of silence and absence. Cut through the fears that somehow she had not been what he wanted. That in spite of the attraction she’d thought they’d shared it was a figment of her imagination.
‘I wanted you so much that I nearly turned my back on my country. Do you know how hard it was for me to walk away that night? I nearly didn’t!’
* * *
Shock marked her features, but he couldn’t stop, the words seemingly ripped from the past and falling unrestrained from his lips.
‘From the moment of my birth I was brought up to protect this country. My father educated me in leadership, and I was sent to university to gain an understanding of politics and economics for the betterment of my country. Everything was about protecting the people of Farrehed, even when I had to protect it against my own father. But I never thought that I might have to protect it against me. Against the desire I felt for you. In that moment just before I left the palace for Terhren I would have let it burn for just one more taste of you. Just like my father would have done.’
His breath was unaccountably tight within his chest.
‘Every single thing I have done or not done has been for Ferrehed. I can never become the selfish man my father was. I will never be that man. And I will never make the same mistakes he did.’
‘And if you weren’t?’
‘If I weren’t what?’
‘A ruler. If you weren’t bound by rules and duty and convention what would you be? What would you want?’
You. The word came unbidden to his mind. Even before their marriage—even before she had been presented to him as the perfect wife—he had been intrigued by the pale, silky-skinned woman before him.
He saw her as she had been then, standing in the summer sun in the dusty stable yard, taunting him with her words, teasing him with her smiles. She had brought brightness back to the palace that had been like a dark kingdom, holding its breath under the weight of a year’s long grief. If he were honest with himself he knew he had held her at a distance because she had truly been the only threat to the barriers around his heart.
It was as if his thoughts had reached out into the air around them and changed something. Something that had passed between them. He could see now that Eloise understood why he needed this marriage. All bribery and pretence was done. She had accepted that, he could tell.
But beyond that he could see his own desire reflected in her eyes, and the temptation to sink into it, to give in and stop fighting, was so great. How bad would it be if just for once he could simply take what he wanted and damn the consequences?
His mind flew back to earlier in the evening, when he had greeted her with a kiss that had been intended to humiliate, to punish, but had done nothing of the sort. The kick of adrenaline—purer than any daredevil ride, any hit of alcohol—had flooded his system, blocking all thoughts completely.
And for once Odir was desperate to feel something other than all the swirling emotions brought about by his father’s death, this conversation, all his doubts about his wife. He wanted to feel something else. Her skin beneath his hands...her lips beneath his...her body beneath his body. Perhaps if he gave in—if he allowed himself to have her, even just once—it would resolve his need. Perhaps he would finally be free of the chains his desire for her had wound around him.
And for the first time since he had placed that ring on his wife’s finger he couldn’t think of a reason not to.
He closed the distance between them in two powerful strides, and before his beautiful, treacherous wife could do anything to stop him he slid his hand into the hair at the base of her neck, glided his palm against her cheek, pulled her lips close to his and sank into a heaven he had no business entering.
CHAPTER SIX
August 2nd, 01.00-02.00, Heron Tower
FOR A MOMENT—just a moment—Eloise was completely taken aback. This was nothing like the kiss he had punished her with when he had first seen her downstairs at the party. Nor the kiss from their wedding night.
She wondered whether she had somehow conjured it from her deepest fantasies. For in a sense it was the way she had always wanted him to kiss her. There was a rawness, an urgency about it that called to something deep within her. She could feel the recklessness in his touch—could feel it in the depths of her mouth, plundered by his tongue with an onslaught so sensual, so incredible, that it simply could not be real.
His hands shifted, the palm at her neck slipping down to the centre of her back, bringing her body fully flush against his own. She felt the hard planes of his stomach against her soft skin, the press of his arousal, and it wasn’t enough.
She wanted more.
And for that she hated him.
She felt fury race through the blood in her veins. Anger that he had withheld this from her. That he had denied them this. Denied them something that could have cut through all the deceit, all the lies, all the unspoken truths that had come between them. He had denied them something that would have brought them together in the way that men and women had been brought together for all the centuries of the world’s existence.
Eloise was furious—furious at all the things that life had placed just out of her reach, the things that she’d never been able to have or to indulge in. His tongue wrapped around her own, filling her in a way that promised a different kind of fulfilment, and in that moment of fear—fear that he wouldn’t seek complete fulfilment—her hands came to life, clutching at the shirt he wore, pulling him to her just as powerfully as he was pulling her to him.
She felt Odir take in a ragged breath without breaking the seal of their kiss, knowing that the air they shared came together in a way more intimate than they had ever been with each other.
She opened her eyes and saw him lost to the kiss, just as she had been. His dark skin betrayed him with a faint flush, his closed eyes, framed by impossibly dark eyelashes, were hiding the secrets hidden there.
It was all too much. She wanted to see him—wanted to know that he was driven by this unconstrained passion as much as she was.
She pushed Odir back, breaking their contact and forcing him to look at her. Their breathing, ragged and uncontrolled, the only sound in the darkened room. And she got what she asked for. In his gaze she could see anger, accusation and fury, all rimmed with need and a fire that finally she knew would not be so easily put out.
Their masks were off. All the hurt, the pain, all the passion held at bay for so long—too long—was laid bare between them. Suddenly the anger swelled to life within her and she lifted her palms to his chest and pushed. Pushed and punched, again and again, and he just stood there, taking each blow, each strike.
‘Are you done?’ he demanded into the darkened room.
‘No. I’ve not even begun,’ she promised him.
‘Good.’
He gathered her wrists in his strong hands and drew her back to him. Crushed her mouth with his and began his reckless, sensual onslaught once again. His hands came around her slim waist and he pulled her from her feet up against his body, blocking all thought of what might have been had it not been for their fathers, had not been for all the lies.
It was just them in the suite—no audience, no press, no witnesses—and Eloise finally demanded the pleasure that she’d waited for, longed for all this time.
Even as his fingers roamed over the black silk fabric of her dress, separating his skin from hers by the smallest distance possible, her mind raced. This was her husband—a man who thought the very worst of her, of whom she had thought the very worst... Perhaps they could take this one moment, this chance to indulge in the deepest fantasies which had kept her awake night after night in the palace as she had lain alone.
Perhaps tonight she could forget that she was a virgin, that she was innocent—forget that the whole of her body was trembling in a heady mixture of
anticipation and fear. She knew he did not think her innocent. And for the most shocking moment she wanted to have had that experience—wanted to be a woman who knew what she was doing.
Eloise was so tired of being scared, of being helpless. Perhaps if she faked knowledge, faked the sophistication he believed her to have, then she could just let go...
* * *
Odir felt as if he were letting go of something that he couldn’t—wouldn’t—put a name to. He felt as if all his desire, all his need, was pouring out of him and being eaten, consumed whole, by the woman in his hands. And still it wasn’t enough—this kiss wasn’t enough.
He had been able to take the soft punches her hands had thrown at his chest. He had been able to take her anger because it matched his own. But he hadn’t been able to take that look in her eyes when she’d watched him. So he had stopped her with another kiss.
He stepped back, without breaking the hold his lips had on hers, and ran his hands down the front of her chest, over her beautiful breasts—just enough of a handful to rest in his palms, as if they were made for him and him alone. Her nipples pebbled beneath his touch and he cursed, because touching was no longer enough.
He followed the path his hands had taken with open-mouthed kisses, his tongue meeting silk and skin where the two pieces of material covered her breasts. He pushed one of the sections aside with his thumb and lapped at her soft skin—purer than silk, purer than any silk he had ever touched—and revelled in the power he had as he heard her soft gasp echo in the room.
He had never been so hard in his life. He should have known that this woman of all women could do that to him. But all thoughts flew from his head when she arched her back, whether consciously or not, pressing her breast closer and deeper against him.
He couldn’t hold back any more.
He yanked the material aside and took her hard nipple into his mouth, drawing on it as if he were a drowning man. Again she groaned, louder this time and more urgent, as if her body was calling to his...as if she did not know what she was calling for.