A Royal Engagement: The Storm WithinThe Reluctant Queen

by Trish Morey

  And he wanted her. God, how he wanted her. Not as the king she had just made him, but as the man who had wanted her since he’d been barely more than a boy. As the man who had tasted her, and touched her, when he had known he should do neither, both twelve years ago and now.

  But now…now he did not have to hold back. Now, finally, he could sink into her as he’d longed to do for what felt like much too long. Now he could love her, openly and fully, as he’d always imagined he should.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked, but he could tell she knew.

  “Why do you think?” he asked, and smiled. He held her hand in his, and led her toward the waiting motorcade. There was the small matter of the reception to get through, and his coronation. But he was already thinking ahead. He was already imagining how she would taste, how soft her skin would feel beneath his hands. How he would make her cry out his name. How he would make her fall to pieces in his arms.

  They stood for a moment, her eyes locked to his, and he felt her tremble slightly in the afternoon sun. As if she could feel it, too. As if she’d finally stopped fighting. As if she was ready, at long last, to be his.

  He would make sure of it.

  The High Palace clung to the side of one of the tallest mountains to the west of the capital city. In ancient times, she remembered learning as a child, it had taken many weeks of travel via sure-footed mountain goats and under the protection of guides and priests for the royal family to make it to these heights. It had been a much quicker ride by helicopter.

  Standing out on the wide terrace that had been added off the King’s suite sometime since her last visit here, Lara looked out across the sweep and grandeur of Alakkul and wondered how she had ever managed to forget it. So many twinkling lights in the dark, mirroring the stars above. The brighter lights of the city, the far-off glimmers of the mountain villages. The crisp, clean air, cool and sweet.

  From so high, it looked magical.

  Or perhaps she only felt that way, after such a long day immersed in this fairy-tale that was, somehow, her life. It had to be a fairy-tale, because it couldn’t possibly be real. None of it felt real. She hardly felt real.

  Adel moved behind her. She sensed him first—that prickle along her neck, that banked fire blazing to life within her. She let out a breath she had not known she was holding as she felt him step behind her, his warm hands smoothing along the curve of her neck, tracing down over her shoulders.

  “Nothing seems real,” she heard herself say, so softly she thought for a moment the night breeze stole her words away.

  “I assure you, it is.” His voice was a low rumble. So amused, and still, her breasts swelled against the bodice of her dress, and that insistent, intoxicating heat pooled lower—became a low ache. He turned her around to face him. “You are my wife.”

  “And you are now the King of Alakkul,” she said, tilting her head back to study that hard, uncompromising face. Did she imagine what looked like tenderness in his eyes, so silver in the light from the candles scattered across the terrace? Or was it that she wanted to see such a thing—needed to believe she could see it?

  He reached over and smoothed his hand along her cheek, curving his palm around to cradle her face. There was some part of her that wanted to object. That should want to object! She did not have to give in to this heat, this need. He was no brute, no matter how calculating, how ruthless, he might be. Not about something like this. She knew so with a deep, feminine intuition.

  If she wanted to stop this, she needed only to open up her mouth and tell him no.

  But she did not speak. She only gazed at him, all of Alakkul spread out behind her, glimmering in the soft summer night and reflecting in his dark eyes as if it was a part of him. He had smiled at her outside the cathedral, his hard gaze open, and shaken her to her core—because she had seen, in that moment, how happy he was. How happy to look at her, to claim her. It had made her breath catch, her heart swell. It had made her think that he was not, after all, the enemy she wanted to believe he was. That perhaps he never had been.

  She stood before him now in a dress that made her feel like the princess she supposed she always had been, technically, but had certainly never felt like before. And he was so devastatingly handsome, so strong and so dangerous, standing before her with that almost-smile on his hard mouth.

  As if he knew things that she did not want to know. As if he knew far too much.

  Lara gazed at him—and did not say a word.

  “Tonight I am only a man,” he whispered, his voice a low rasp.

  Just as tonight she was finally his woman, as if all the years between them had melted away in his smile. How had she denied him this long?

  He pulled her head closer, and bent down to capture her mouth. His kiss was sweet, hot, sending spirals of heat dancing through her body, making her come up on her toes to meet him. She let her hands trail up the tantalizingly hard ridge of his abdomen to his broad chest, reveling in the taut glory of his muscles.

  He angled his jaw, and took the kiss deeper. Hotter. Lara felt the world fall away, spinning into nothing, and only belatedly realized he’d swept her into his arms. He kept kissing her as he moved, and she looped her arms around his neck and kissed him back. Again and again, until she found herself on her back in the center of the wide, white bed, with Adel resting snugly between her thighs.

  Was she really going to do this? Pretend nothing else mattered but this fire, this need?

  “Adel…” she began, but he smiled at her, even as he moved his hips against hers. Lara gasped, and forgot.

  She forgot she’d ever wanted to deny him, and instead opened to his every touch. He stripped them both naked with surprising finesse and long, drugging kisses, feasting on every inch of flesh he uncovered. He trailed fire from one breast to the other, then tasted his way down the soft skin of her belly to claim the heat between her legs.

  And then he licked his way into the molten core of her, and she forgot her own name.

  She shattered around him, caught in a wave of pleasure so intense, so perfect, she was not sure what would be left of her. She was not sure she could survive it.

  When she came back to herself, he was poised above her, his hard face sharpened, somehow, with passion.

  And she realized it was just beginning.

  “You are mine,” he said hoarsely, and then he thrust within her.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE summer wore on as the country settled into its new era, with its new rulers fully ensconced upon the throne, and Adel could not understand why—having finally achieved all he’d ever wanted—the only thing he seemed to think about was his wife.

  Not the warring factions that forever threatened to sink the government. Not the leftover yet ever-thorny issues from the various world powers that had tried to take the strategically located Alakkulian Valley in their time. Not the need to protect and support the economy, nor the tendency of some citizens to live as if it were still the tenth century. It was not that he did not care about all of these things. It was just that his focus was Lara. Always Lara.

  The way her skin felt against his, naked and soft, hot and delicious. The way her head tipped back in ecstasy, showing the long, elegant line of her neck as she cried out his name. The way her toned, athletic legs wrapped so tightly around his hips. The way she would smile at him, so dreamily, in those stolen moments after they had both reached heaven, her eyes that silver-blue that made his chest expand and ache.

  He was enchanted by her, this woman he had loved for so much of his life, and the reality of her far exceeded his fantasies.

  It wasn’t just the perfection of her body. He even enjoyed her when she argued with him—which was, he reflected as he took in the cross expression she wore as he entered their private breakfast room in the palace—most of the time.

  “I don’t see the point of being called a queen when all I do is sit around the palace, staring out of windows and boring myself to death,” she thre
w at him with no preamble, her fingers picking at the pastry before her.

  “Good morning to you, too,” he murmured, settling himself in his usual place opposite her while the servants bustled around him, pouring out his morning coffee and presenting him with a stack of papers for his review.

  She ignored him. “I am used to working,” she said. “Doing something, not sitting around like an ornament attached to your lapel!”

  “Then do something,” he suggested, picking up his coffee and eyeing her. She made his heart swell with what he could only describe as gladness. Most women cowered before him, or fell all over themselves in an attempt to please him. Never this one. She was bold. Brash. Unafraid. “You are the Queen. You can do as you like.”

  “Perhaps I wish to rule, as you do,” she said, with a sideways glance at him, and he had a sudden image of what it might be like with this woman at his side forever, on the throne and in his bed—this warrior queen he had never expected would grow to be so strong. And yet he loved it. Her.

  He shrugged. “You have an affinity for tedious meetings, day after day, with puffed-up, pompous men?” he asked mildly. Not his Lara, he thought. She would shred them with her sharp tongue, and he would laugh in admiration, and whole decades of careful diplomacy would go up in smoke. “Men who will insult you and berate you, who you cannot treat as you would like to do? This calls to you?”

  She let out a sigh. “No,” she said after a long moment. “Not really.”

  “Because, Princess, though your charms are many indeed, I do not count among them a particular gift for the diplomatic arts.” He smiled when her gaze sharpened on his. “This is not a flaw. You are too honest for politics. One of us should be.”

  He could feel the tension rise between them then, that tautening of the air, that narrowing of focus until he knew nothing but her face. The swell of her lips. The shine of temper in her gaze. The sweep and fall of her black curls.

  He knew her so well now. He could see the way the color washed across her face, and knew it would be the same all over her body. She would pinken as her body readied itself for him. Were he to reach for her under the table, he would find her hot and wet beneath his hands. He felt himself harden. He could not seem to get enough of her, no matter how often they sated each other. No matter how easily she came apart in his hands.

  “I am no longer a princess,” she said, her voice husky, a gleam of awareness in her magnificent eyes. “And you never use my name.”

  “I use your name,” he contradicted her, smiling slightly, “in certain circumstances.” He did not have to spell those circumstances out. Her flush deepened, as they both remembered the last time he’d called out her name, sometime before the dawn, when he’d been so deep inside of her he would have been happy to die there. She made him feel like a man, he realized. Not the soldier he had been, not the King he was now, but a man.

  “There is more to life than sex,” she said, and he saw a darkness pass through her eyes—some kind of shadow. But she blinked, and it was gone.

  “Apparently not for you,” he said lazily. “Apparently, you are bored with everything that happens outside our bed. One solution would be to make sure you never leave it.”

  “Promises, promises,” she chided him, a gleam in her eyes. “Who would run the country if we spent all our time in bed?”

  The man was insatiable, Lara thought.

  And what was so astonishing was that she, who had always enjoyed the company of men but had certainly never felt compelled by them, was too.

  He had her in the suites of hotels where they stayed while on royal engagements, her back up against the wall, his hand and mouth busy beneath her skirts. He seduced her on a speedboat as they made their way to one of the more remote clans, only accessible across a system of mountain lakes. There was no place he did not look at her with that dark passion, that promise, alive in his gray eyes. And no place where she did not immediately respond, no matter how inappropriate it might be.

  It was lust, she told herself. And unexpected chemistry.

  And she was no better.

  She climbed astride him in the backseat of the plush limousine as the motorcade wove through the twisting streets of the capital city, rocking them both into bliss before a command appearance at the city opera. She had taken it upon herself to explore him in every room she could discover in the old castle—behind doors, on ancient chairs, under the fierce and disapproving glares of her ancestors high above in their glowering state portraits.

  It was only lust, she thought. And lust was fine. Lust was allowed. Lust would fade. Though she could not help but note, every now and again as the summer wore on, that the more she touched him, the more she tasted him, the less she worried about the ways in which she might have lost herself in this strange little fairy-tale.

  She was not an idiot. She did not, in truth, wish to govern, and doubted she would be any good at it, anyway. She would have no idea how one even went about it. Lara had no particular interest in politics, but she could, she realized, use the position she found herself in for good. There was no excuse for lying about a castle, of all places, feeling bored and put upon. How she would have slapped herself for even thinking such a thing, once upon a time, when her paycheck had had to last far too long and cover books and tuition as well as pay her rent! Appalled at herself, Lara began to involve herself in charity work—to get a sense of what her people, her subjects, her countrymen really needed.

  And what she needed, too, if she was to stay here. If she was really to do this long-term. She pretended it was a lifestyle decision she was mulling over, like when she’d decided to stay in Colorado after college and make her life in Denver. She pretended it was a decision about a location, and about a job.

  After all, fairy-tales weren’t real. Not even this one.

  “You are just like your father, may he rest in peace,” an old woman told her as Lara toured one of the local hospitals, visiting the helpless and the needy, talking to the overworked staff. I can help these people, she had been thinking just moments before, as she’d tried to smile at a little girl gone bald from the cancer treatments, clearly the old woman’s grandchild. Maybe that’s why I’m here.

  “I beg your pardon?” she asked, fighting to keep her smile in place as the old woman held on to her hands. It was not the physical contact she minded, she realized, but that wild intensity in the woman’s eyes.

  “He was a good man,” the woman said, in the dialect of the upper mountains. “And a great king. I give thanks every day that you have returned to us, to bless us and help us prosper as your family has done for generations, no thanks to that evil woman who stole you away in the first place!”

  And what could Lara say? It was hardly the place to argue—particularly with the grandmother of a sick child. And why did it seem as if the part of her that had defended Marlena for so long was simply…tired?

  “Thank you,” she said, fighting to keep her expression serene. “I hope I can live up to his memory.”

  Later that night, Lara met Adel at the start of a great ball to honor a dignitary whose name she had yet to commit to memory as she knew she should. The palace was alive with lights and Alakkul’s most glamorous people were decked out in their finest clothes, all of it shining and sparkling. The palace gardens had been converted to a kind of wonderland for the evening, complete with a dance floor and little tables clustered in and around the flowering trees and geometrically shaped shrubberies. It was the end of August already. The twilight brought with it hints of the coming fall, the air was cool, and Lara felt a restlessness shiver through her, making her feel as if her skin was two sizes too small.

  “You are fidgeting,” Adel told her without altering his calm expression as they stood side by side to receive their guests. She did not have to look at him to know that he looked as he always did—so strong, so capable, his mouthwateringly male form displayed to perfection in the dark suit that clung to his every muscle and made his chest look like some kind
of hard, male sculpture. He was mesmerizing. Still.

  “It is just as well that you were raised since you were young to rule this place,” she said, not thinking, letting the wildness that rolled inside of her have its way. “I would have made a terrible ruler. Perhaps you knew that. Perhaps my father did, too. Perhaps it is not sexism but practicality that governs you.”

  He did not reply. He shot her one of those dark, far-too-calm glances that made her breath catch, and something thick and heavy turn over into a knot in her gut. Then he returned to his duties, the endless greeting and acknowledging of guests, as if she had not spoken at all.

  Later, he pulled her out on to the dance floor, and smiled slightly as he gazed down at her. His mouth was softer than usual, that hard line almost welcoming. The band swelled into a waltz as he held her in his arms, his hand in the small of her back seeming to beam heat and comfort directly into her skin through the silk of her gown, the hand holding hers so warm, so strong.

  She did not know why she wanted, suddenly, to weep.

  “What is the matter?” he asked in that quiet way of his, and she knew he was continuing the discussion from earlier, that nothing ever truly distracted a man of his focus.

  “I do not know,” she said, surprised to hear that she was whispering. She blinked, and tilted her head back to study his face. He only watched her, that boundless patience in his gray eyes—that calm readiness for whatever she might say, whenever she might say it to him.

  “There is nothing you can tell me that will tarnish you in my eyes,” he said in a low voice, sweeping her around the dance floor, his eyes on her as if nothing else existed. As if there was only the music, the palace, the low murmurs of the well-heeled guests, like a bubble around them. As if there was only this perfect, tiny jewel of a country, hidden away in remote mountains, beautiful in ways that hurt her soul. In the same way that he did.