by Alyssa Cole
Tears pooled in her eyes and he frowned and cupped her face in his big hands.
“Wait. Why are you crying? I was trying to compliment you.”
“I’m crying because your words feel as good as any praise I’ve ever gotten in my lifetime,” she said peevishly. “I’ve worked my ass off and you can just show up, tell me you’re proud, and make me feel as good as all that hard work and toil. What a scam!”
She let out a shaky laugh and Sanyu joined her.
“Earlier I told you I knew of only one True Queen, but all of the former queens were. They were all important in some way, and Musoke and my father’s deciding their value was as unfair as Musoke deciding mine. But . . .” He moved forward so the bulk of him was between her thighs and his face was close to hers. “You are both a True Queen and my queen. That is why I told the advisors to stop looking for the next bride. That is why I didn’t want to marry anyone else.”
“Sanyu?” Shanti placed her hands carefully on either side of his neck, and felt his pulse thrumming beneath her palms.
He was gazing at her with so much admiration in his eyes that she almost couldn’t hold his gaze. “I appreciate our teamwork, but I clearly need to get better at that and don’t want there to be any confusion while I do. I love you, and I want you to stay with me. As Shanti, as Queen Shanti, as everything you are whether it’s useful to me and this kingdom or not.”
The clouds above them parted and the brightness of the moon and the stars bathed him in silver-blue light. Shanti knew a sign from her goddesses, Thesoloian and Njazan both, when she saw it.
She smiled and slid her hands up to his ears, cradling his head. “Are you sure? You know I’m not going to be easy to get rid of if you change your mind. Once I’ve had a taste of power, and of you, it’ll be hard to give up.”
“I’m sure,” he said, laughing. “But you should take some time to decide. I know you had to make a spur-of-the-moment decision when you got the notification from RoyalMatch.com and I don’t want you to have any regrets this time.” His hands went up to rest on her thighs, draped over the hem of her nightgown. “And? I want to woo you, Wife. I want to make you love me.”
“But I already lo—”
Her words were cut off by a kiss from Sanyu, hungry and tender and exactly what she needed. His tongue caressed her lips then parted them, and his hands undid the sash of her bathrobe at her waist.
“Don’t say it yet,” he said when the kiss finally broke. “I want to work for it.”
“Why?” she asked. “You don’t have to—what I feel isn’t conditional, Sanyu. I know you grew up differently, but you don’t have to work for my love. I told you I don’t barter for affection.”
“I want to because . . . well, maybe I do need therapy,” he laughed, his eyes bright with mirth again. “But mostly because you deserve someone willing to work to have you. Our being already married doesn’t change that.”
“It does,” she said. “We can’t go back and have a normal courtship, and that’s okay. What is normal anyway?”
Sanyu was rubbing his hands back and forth over her legs and looking into her eyes so intently—looking at her like he had for months. It had never been hate—it’d always been desire.
“I don’t care about normal,” he said gruffly. “I was lucky enough to land the most amazing woman in the world by total chance and I didn’t tell her that for months. If you stay, it’ll be not because I want you to, but because you’re choosing to. I’m going to work as hard at making sure you keep choosing to stay as I do at improving my subjects’ lives.”
“Oh goddess,” she said, her face warm and her body warmer. “You’re off to a fantastic start. And you know I wouldn’t just say that to make you feel better.”
His hands moved up her thighs, pushing up her nightgown. “By the way, what you said about having a taste meaning it won’t be easy to get rid of you. May I test that theory?”
“May you . . . ?”
He pushed her thighs apart slowly and sank even further into a crouch, rubbing his beard against the sensitive skin of her inner thigh. “Have a taste?”
When she nodded, he began to kiss his way up her thighs, his warm breath and the cool air stirring the curls between her legs. He didn’t inch the gown up, but ducked his head beneath it, and this action seemed somehow more illicit than the fact her husband was about to have her as a late-night snack in the backyard of a goddess’s temple.
Shanti’s whole body went tight with need as Sanyu dragged his lips back and forth over her skin, teasing her. He lifted her right leg over his shoulder, and then her left, and gripped an ass cheek in each hand, squeezing hard.
“Sanyu, please,” she whispered, grabbing onto his shoulders.
His voice was muffled by both fabric and her folds when he responded, the vibration of his words thrumming through her clit. “Hold on tightly, my queen.”
She gripped the bench with one hand and his shoulder with the other, and only just managed not to shout when he licked into her hard. He’d told her he wanted to work for it, and he did—teasing her with tongue and mouth and fingers until her toes curled and she couldn’t muffle her moans.
Sanyu licked and sucked until a body-jangling burst of pleasure crashed through Shanti and she almost tumbled back off of the bench. Sanyu tugged her toward him to right her, and Shanti made use of the momentum to slid off of the bench and into her husband’s lap. She tugged the fabric of his robe away to find the hard length of him, his groan of pleasure telling her all she needed to know. She stroked him once, neither of them in the mood for foreplay, and then lowered herself onto him.
Shanti clamped her lips onto the flexing muscles of his shoulder as he filled her, another orgasm already tearing through her.
“Gods, Shanti,” he growled into her ear, and then there was no more talking, just the sound of their skin meeting and their mouths clashing and their mingled cries as he thrust into her hard and they shuddered through their release together.
Later, after they’d given each other pleasure under a blanket of stars more times than she could count, Shanti lay panting with a huge smile stretching her face and an adoring husband draped over her. She reached up to stroke Sanyu’s neck.
“Okay, orgasms achieved. Are we going to talk politics now or what?”
Sanyu let out a booming laugh that pressed her deeper into the ground, and she joined him. “By Amageez,” he growled, rolling her on top of him to look up into her face.
“What’s our next step?” she asked as she settled comfortably onto him.
He told her, and after he did, she leaned up on her elbow and grinned down at him with pride.
“I approve, my king.”
Chapter 22
Sanyu had discovered something in the weeks with Shanti before he’d nearly ruined everything—coming up with a plan for how to handle things helped keep the not-fear at bay, and it turned out that he was actually good at planning. He hoped to become better at following through with said plans, so he took the new one he gave Shanti very seriously.
The first step of his plan was “Honeymoon, Part 1.” His kingdom was in crisis, so he didn’t have all the time in the world, but the day after their outdoor escapade, he borrowed Gertinj’s minivan and took Shanti on a tour around the north of the kingdom. There wasn’t very much to see apart from bogs and cliffs and dreary landscape, but it was their first real date alone outside of the palace and gave them time to talk more. To just . . . be.
When they had to pull over during a downpour, they also got to learn how flexible they were, as the seats in the back of the minivan did not fold down. Gertinj eyed them suspiciously when they returned the car cleaner than it’d been when she gave it to them, but didn’t say anything.
It was one date, and not a full honeymoon, but there would be others—that was part of the work he planned to put in for years to come, in making sure Shanti chose him and was making the right choice in doing so.
She would tell him he
didn’t have to, but she had asked him for respect on that first day. While he knew that marriage would have its ups and downs, he could think of nothing more disrespectful than making her regret any of her valuable time that she chose to spend with him.
The next step of his plan had been a planning session with the former queens, where he explained the changes he wanted to institute.
“Are you saying you want us to do all the work?” Marie had asked testily.
Sanyu had understood her frustration. “I will do the work, too. Asking anything of you at this point is unfair, but I also don’t want to make decisions on your behalf. I was born the lion, but the counsel of the aardvark is just as valuable.”
“What are you talking about, boy?” Josiane asked.
“I believe our queen has also been sharing her favorite quotes with him,” Marie said, then looked at him. “We’ll think about it.”
The next step was harder—letting Shanti return to Thesolo to prepare for the conference and see her family and new friends.
“Don’t look like that,” she’d said when he dropped her off at the small airport for a specially chartered flight. “I’ll be back after the conference. Or you can come to Thesolo! I’m friends with the princess now, I bet I can snag you a royal audience.”
He laughed and hugged her close. “You know, that’s not a bad idea. Prince Thabiso would probably be open to discussing the Rail Pan Afrique stuff, and I’d like to see where you grew up and meet your family.”
“You want to meet my family?” she asked.
“Well, not really, because the thought makes my stomach hurt, but since they’re important to you, yes. I’ll bring my antacid.”
“You’re so romantic, my king,” she’d said, and Sanyu didn’t even think she was making fun of him.
Then it was time for the hardest part of all.
When Sanyu returned to the palace, he couldn’t find Musoke anywhere. His panic, which he’d been able to ignore while he was away, ballooned in him as the places the advisor could possibly be began to dwindle.
Musoke is old. I hurt him. Maybe he’s left me, too, like Father did.
When he finally found the old man sitting on a pew inside of Omakuumi’s temple, with his eyes closed and so still that he barely seemed to be breathing, Sanyu jogged over to him.
“Musoke!”
The advisor opened his eyes slowly, but didn’t look at Sanyu. “Oh, you’ve decided to return to your responsibilities? I’ve spent my life imagining the ways you’d disappoint us, but flouting tradition and then running off after a foreign woman wasn’t one of them.”
Sanyu wasn’t sure if he himself had changed or Musoke’s heart just wasn’t in it, but the scorpion stinger wavered lethargically and its venom was diluted.
“I met Anise,” Sanyu said. “She sends her greetings.”
Musoke’s gaze flew to him, and Sanyu went utterly still as tears welled in Musoke’s eyes and spilled down the man’s cheeks at the mention of the first queen’s name.
“Anise? Our Anise? She’s alive?” Musoke’s thin chest heaved, and Sanyu felt something in him crumble—the pedestal he’d placed Musoke on, or perhaps the idea that the man was all-knowing and invulnerable. He’d never seen Musoke cry before; it was Musoke who had told him tears were weakness—emotion was weakness—but now he openly sobbed from the shock of Sanyu’s words.
Sanyu had expected a nasty, painful fight. He’d been ready to tell Musoke all of the terrible things he’d done and how he’d hurt Sanyu, even if Musoke ridiculed him for it. But what he was witnessing was a different kind of pain, and even though some might have reveled in the man who hated weakness drowning in his own emotions, it gave him no pleasure to see Musoke like this. His own throat was rough with unshed tears as he moved onto the pew beside the old advisor, whose frail body was shaking, and offered himself as a life preserver.
Musoke coughed and let out a sound that seemed almost like a wail of pain as he clutched Sanyu’s arm.
“I wish I didn’t know,” he said a moment later, his voice strained with what seemed like panic. “She left us, and it was so painful—we convinced ourselves she must have died since she didn’t come back. We tried to erase everything that reminded us of her because the pain . . . it was unbearable. Sometimes we felt her with us just as I felt my lost limb, and then we’d have to realize over and over again that she was gone. Now I’ve lost your father and have no one and I—I have to face the truth. I did everything wrong and I’ve lost them both.”
Musoke began to sob again. Sanyu placed an arm around the hunched-over man as he wept pitifully, and when his own tears began to fall, he didn’t wipe them away.
He didn’t tell Musoke everything would be all right, but he did what he wished the man had done for him at so many points in his life. He held Musoke tightly and let him feel what he needed to feel.
“You’re not alone,” Sanyu said, then inhaled shakily. “I won’t—I won’t allow you to treat me badly anymore, even if you disagree with my decisions. And I won’t allow you to disrespect Shanti or try to prevent change in the kingdom. If you can deal with that, then you still have me. I know you’ve never claimed me, but I’m as much your son as I am my father’s. If we could treat each other like family . . . bah! Maybe you hate me too much to do that.”
The pain in Sanyu’s stomach flared up at saying his deepest fear out loud, but then Musoke turned his head to stare up at him with wide, red-rimmed eyes.
“You think I hate you, boy?” he shouted, hitting the floor with his cane. His expression crumpled but he gathered himself. “Do you think I would spend my life trying to protect someone I hate? I lost so much creating this kingdom and holding it together. The only way I could keep you safe was to make sure you could keep the kingdom safe. What will happen when I’m gone, eh? I had to make sure you were strong enough to never get hurt!”
They stared at each other, tears on both of their cheeks as they sat in the temple of the god of strength. Sanyu felt many things in that moment, and weak wasn’t one of them.
He saw now, what kind of life had shaped Musoke—growing up poor under the suffocation of a colonial government, winning freedom for his people but suffering so much loss to preserve it. Losing his love due to his own egotism. Holding his kingdom and its subjects in fear’s chokehold. Musoke had been borne from trauma after trauma, and in trying to protect Sanyu from the same, he’d created more pain.
“You know, I’m thinking about getting therapy,” Sanyu said. “It doesn’t work for everyone, but maybe we should try it together. Family therapy. I won’t tell anyone. If anyone finds out, you can say you’re doing it for your weak . . . your weak son.”
“Humph,” Musoke replied, beginning to wipe at his tears with the fabric of his robe.
“I know you didn’t do it on purpose, but you hurt me, Musoke,” Sanyu said. “I’ve spent my life feeling I could never live up to the idea of the man you wanted me to be. I know you won’t apologize but I had to at least tell you that. I don’t know if I can forgive you. But we can’t live like that anymore. I refuse to. And I hope you’re willing to work so that we don’t have to live like that. Because I—” He swallowed against the emotion trying to clog his throat. “Because I am worth more than having been born heir to the throne of Njaza. And the love I feel for you is worth you fighting for it.”
Musoke didn’t respond, didn’t look at him, and Sanyu exhaled, allowing himself to be hurt by the response but not crushed by the hurt. He extricated himself, stood, and turned to go, and then felt a thin, bony hand clench around his forearm.
“I am a stubborn man. I can be cruel, and feel that I am always right,” Musoke said, his voice gaining a bit of its usual strength. “But I am learning still in my old age, and my most recent lesson is that being touched by Amageez and being a disciple of Amageez are two different things. You are my king. And my child. If you say I need to learn how to show my love for you without hurting you, I will do that. It’s only logical,
as Amageez does not present me with unnecessary paths toward learning. And you, my boy, are worth this knowledge.”
“Thank you,” Sanyu said gruffly, his heart almost unable to deal with the hope bursting in him, and Musoke released him.
“Let’s see if you feel the same way when you hear what I have planned for the kingdom in the next few days,” Sanyu said, then walked away, worried but optimistic.
It might be the closest he ever got to it from the man, but Musoke had almost said he loved him. If he could get that from the obstinate advisor to the crown, then changing Njaza for the better would be easy.
SANYU HAD THOUGHT he’d miss Shanti too much while she was in Thesolo, but the few days leading up to the celebration of Njaza’s independence had been packed with meetings and coordination for the upcoming changes. His video chats with his wife had added an interesting new dimension to their nightly meetings—he’d learned that she wasn’t at all camera shy and had access to some exquisite lingerie in Thesolo that he’d demanded she bring back with her. More than that, the act of both seeing her and missing her helped him realize just how happy he’d be when she returned, and not just because he’d be able to view her silky red negligee in person.
On the day of the celebration, though, he did miss her. His not-fear—his anxiety—had kicked in with a vengeance, and though Musoke hadn’t impeded things yet and was clearly trying to rein in his catastrophizing, he certainly wasn’t happy with the situation. And he was going to be even less happy with the speech Sanyu gave—the first he’d written for himself.
Lumu sat beside him in the chauffeured car as they approached the stadium where the small parade route had ended. Right now, a reenactment of the great battle of Omakuumi was taking place, and at the end of it, Sanyu would take the stage.
“You’re wearing your contacts for this speech,” Lumu noted.
“I think my people deserve to be seen clearly today,” Sanyu said gruffly.