by Dani Collins
“Adir,” Karim repeated faintly. That was the name of his brother? He barely heard the rest of what poured out of her.
“Zufar is so single-minded, he married our maid rather than admit there was anything wrong. Malak has quit the palace entirely, gone gambling or to work his way through a harem, I imagine. Where does that leave me? With no one. So excuse me if I take some comfort in a bottle of brandy.”
When she started to drink, he stole it and tipped the alcohol onto the tiles. He had to. This news was utterly explosive.
“Who else have you told?” he demanded.
“No one,” she muttered, giving a tsk of annoyance at the brandy puddle. “Now I have to walk all the way back for a fresh one.”
“Who is Adir’s father?” He kept his voice level but held the empty glass in such a tight grip he expected it to shatter in his hand, leaving him dripping blood onto the evaporating alcohol.
“No one knows.” She gave her hair a flip. “Mother took one secret to her grave, it seems. Although, I have half a mind to ask around that crowd.” She jerked her chin toward the balcony across the darkened expanse of the garden, where light poured out the open doors to the palace ballroom. “He must be there.”
The elite from all the neighboring kingdoms mingled in a kaleidoscope of colored gowns and robes. Voices competed with the music in a din that suddenly grated on him more than he could bear.
“Why do you think that?” he asked, forcing a tone of mild curiosity while his blood prickled in his veins.
“My mother wouldn’t take up with a servant. It had to have been someone of her stature, very likely one of those men congratulating my brother on his mismatched marriage.”
She was right, of course. His father had been exactly at her mother’s level, not that Karim would confirm it. Maybe the affair had started at an event like this, he imagined. His father and her mother would have been about his and Galila’s age when they met, in their prime and bursting with biological readiness. Perhaps they had slipped away into the shadows to indulge their passion, as other couples were doing even now.
He was far too practical to wish, but he had an uncharacteristic longing to be one of those carefree couples with Galila. If only he could enjoy a simple dalliance, like other people, rather than listening to her sing his personal scandal to the night sky while racking his brain on how to most quickly prevent it going further than his own ears.
She was inordinately desirable, he noted with determined detachment. He almost understood his father’s desolation at being rejected by such a woman. Of course, his father had been married and never should have started the affair in the first place, but Karim had no such restrictions.
In fact, remaining close to this pretty bird was exactly what he ought to do. He had devoted his life to ensuring his mother never learned the truth about his father’s death. He wasn’t about to watch it all come apart through one woman’s brandy-lubricated tongue. In fact, he had to ensure the entire family’s silence on the matter.
Hmm.
* * *
“We should get back to the party,” the mysterious stranger said.
Through her haze of growing infatuation, Galila distantly realized she shouldn’t be loitering alone with a man, let alone spilling family secrets in his ear, but there was something exhilarating about holding his attention. For weeks, in many ways years, she’d been an afterthought. Female, and therefore less than her male brothers. Princess, not queen.
“Mmm, yes, I’d love to fetch a fresh brandy,” she said with a cheeky slant of her lashes at him.
No smile of answering flirtation, only a circumspect look that made her heart sink under the feeling she had disappointed him.
“I don’t need your permission,” she pointed out, but her confidence was a stuttering thing in her chest.
“We’ll see,” he said cryptically and took her arm to steer her around the pool.
His touch sent a shock of electricity through her. She jolted and nearly turned her ankle. It was disconcerting, made even worse by his disapproving frown.
I’m not that drunk, she wanted to claim, but all coherent thoughts seemed to have left her brain.
Her entire being was realigning its magnetic poles with something in him. She wasn’t just aware of him. His presence beside her seemed to surround her in a glow that tingled her skin and warmed her blood. It compressed her breaths while making her feel each one come into her like scent, except it was his aura she was taking into herself.
In a daze, she let him guide her toward the path that would lead them into the garden and back to the wedding reception.
“You don’t drink at all?” she asked, trying desperately to ground herself in reality.
“Never.”
“Oh, please,” she teased, leaning into his firm grip on her elbow. “Let me be the one to initiate you.”
Some dim instinct for self-preservation warned her that provoking him was a terrible idea. Something deeper, even. A sense that her gentle mockery not only failed to impact him but was misplaced. He wasn’t weak at any level. Nor innocent. He was worldly to the point of cynical, and inimitably strong because he allowed no one to influence him.
Looking up at him as they entered the garden, she noted that his mouth was a work of art. Despite how very serious it was, his lips were full and sensual. How would they feel, crushed against hers?
The flush that went through her at that thought was pure lust, hitting in all her erogenous zones and making her feet tangle into themselves again.
He stopped and steadied her, frowning. “Do I have to carry you?”
She laughed at the thought of it. She was worldly enough to have fooled around with men, but she knew who she was. She had kept her reputation intact along with her virginity for the sake of her family. Maybe even to avoid one more harsh criticism from her mother. The deep-down truth, however, was that she’d never been overcome with enough desire to give her body to anyone.
The compulsion to throw herself into the arms of this man, tonight, was intense enough to unnerve her. A drunk and stupid idea, indeed, but exciting. She didn’t even know his name!
“What were you doing over here? Following me?”
“Same as you.” A muscle in his cheek ticked. “Reflecting.”
“On?”
“Responsibility.”
“How boring. I’m surprised I didn’t find you drunk and facedown in that pool.”
The severity in his expression didn’t ease. His hold on her arm sent glittering sensations through her bloodstream. She ought to shake him off. What would people think if they returned together? Nothing good, that was certain.
Such a remarkable man, though. One she really didn’t want to share with a party full of beautiful women. She wanted him to be hers. To look on her with adoration and desire.
His expression in the moonlight was cool and decidedly intent. Ruthless, even. But there was hunger buried deep beneath his layers of control. Avid male need that she had seen often enough to recognize it. His narrowed eyes focused on her mouth, telling her his speculation was along the same lines as her own.
“Don’t you want to throw caution to the wind sometimes? I do.” She flipped her hair behind her shoulder again. Look at me. Want me. “Malak gets away with it all the time. I’m tired of being the good girl.”
“Are you?” Something in his silky tone and the way he flicked his gaze down her front wound around her like ribbons, exciting and wicked. Tightening and binding, compressing her breaths, yet making her feel free.
“Am I tired? Or a good girl? I’m both.” She thought of her charity work, her carefully cultivated image of kindness and purity, her endless striving to earn her mother’s approval and her stalwart presence beside the men in her life as they took their own self-destructive paths.
All her life, she had tried to be like her mothe
r. They had all thought Queen Namani so perfect, but she hadn’t been. Why should Galila live up to something that was an illusion? Live up to the expectations of a woman who not only hadn’t held herself to such high standards after all but was also dead.
“I’m ready to do what I want.” She pressed herself to his front and lifted her mouth.
“I don’t take advantage of inebriated women,” he said, but with a glance toward the light of the party. His cheeks hollowed, giving his profile a chillingly ruthless appearance. His hands on her arms tightened in some internal struggle.
“I’m not that drunk,” she dismissed in a sultry voice. She was low on inhibition, certainly, but more intoxicated by the excitement he made her feel.
They were in a faraway, unlit corner of the garden, where the scent of roses and herbs, orange blossom and frangipani coated the air, making it feel thick as a blanket around her.
“Kiss me,” she demanded when he hesitated.
His hands almost began to push her away, but he only held her like that, staring into her uplifted face. For three heartbeats that shook the entire world, they stood like that, as he debated and came to a decision.
With a muttered imprecation, he circled his arms around her. His fingers dove into her hair, tilting back her head as his mouth came down to cover hers.
For another pulse of time, that was all it was. One mouth against another while the universe seemed to open itself, leaving her utterly vulnerable yet transfixed by the vast beauty of it.
With a harsh noise in his throat, he dragged his lips across hers. Instantly they were engulfed in a kiss that was beyond anything she had ever experienced. Intimate and passionate. Hot and damp and demanding. A statement of possession but with a quality that swept her into abandoning herself willingly. Joyfully.
The texture of his tongue met her own, boldly erotic. She reacted with a moan and mashed herself into him so hard her breasts hurt, but it felt good, too. The contact assuaged the tips that stung like bites. When he started to ease back, she whimpered and pressed her hand to the cloth covering his head, urging him to continue kissing her with this mad passion. She wanted to feel his hair, taste his skin, strip naked and know the weight of him over her.
She wanted to know how that hard flesh that was pressing against her belly would feel stroking inside her.
With an abrupt move and a ragged hiss of indrawn air, he pulled back. “Not here.”
Had he read her mind? Her body?
“My room,” she whispered, already plotting their discreet path through the halls of the palace.
“Mine,” he stated. She couldn’t tell if it was a preference of location or if he was staking a claim on her. Either way, she let him take her hand and drag her from the garden toward the stairs that led up to the balcony outside the ballroom.
She balked in the shadows at the bottom of the steps. “My lipstick. People will know.”
“I thought you were ready to take control of your own life?”
In the slant of light, she saw a mercilessness curl at the corner of his mouth. He pivoted them a few steps into the shadows beside the wall of the steps.
She was more than ready to give herself to him, but this was her home. Her brother’s wedding. She was the Princess of Khalia. She was sober enough to know that she had to be discreet about having an affair, not parade it through the middle of a state ceremony.
But as her would-be lover pressed her to the stones that had barely cooled in the hours since sundown, she forgot her misgivings. Her hands found the heat of his neck and she parted her lips, moaning as he kissed her again.
He transported her to that place of magic they seemed to create between them.
As she lost herself to his kiss again, he stroked her hip and thigh, urging her to pick up her knee and make space for him between her legs. Cool air grazed her skin as he shifted her skirt up, up and out of the way, touching—
She gasped at the first contact of fingertips against the back of her thigh. Arrows of pleasure shot into her core, making her yearn so badly her eyes grew damp along with her underthings. She arched her neck as he trailed his mouth down her throat.
It was exquisite and joyful and...
Wait.
He was hard where he pressed between her legs, but something was off.
She touched the side of his face, urging him to lift his head. There was heat in his glittering eyes, but it was banked behind a cooler emotion. Something deliberate. His skin might have been flushed with arousal, but his expression was dispassionate.
He wasn’t as involved as she was.
Hurt and unease began to worm through her, but before she could fully react, she heard a gasp and a giggle above them. Someone said a pithy, “Get a room.”
“That’s the princess!” a female voice hissed.
“With who?” She knew that demanding masculine voice. She looked up to see several faces peering down at them over the wall of the balcony, one of them her brother’s. He did not look pleased.
Did her lover release her leg to find a modicum of decorum? Not right away. Not before she caught a dark look of satisfaction in his hard features.
Gaze solely on her, he very slowly eased his hold on her leg so his touch branded into her skin as she lowered her thigh. Humiliation pulsed in her throat, made all the more painful by the way he had gone from passionately excited to...this. Remote. Unaffected. Perhaps even satisfied by her public set down.
Angry and embarrassed as she was, her abdomen still tightened in sensual loss as he drew away from their full-frontal contact, which only added to her mortification.
“You were right,” he said. “We should have gone to your room.”
She had no choice but to take refuge there. Alone and fast.
CHAPTER TWO
GALILA WOKE TO a dull headache, some low-level nausea that was more chagrin than hangover and a demand that she present herself to her brother immediately.
Despite what she would have hoped was a fulfilling wedding night, Zufar was in a foul mood and fifteen minutes in, didn’t seem to be tiring of tearing strips off her.
“You can’t bring that sort of shame down on the palace and think it doesn’t matter.”
“What shame?” she cried, finally allowed a word in edgewise. “A few people saw us kissing. Malak behaves far worse all the time.”
“And you hate it when he gets the attention! You couldn’t put your own silly need to be in the spotlight on hold for one night? The night of my wedding? Is anyone talking about our ceremony or my bride? No. The buzz is all about the fact you were seen behaving like a tart.”
“You’re welcome,” she said with a glance at her manicure. “Because the things they were saying about your marriage to the maid weren’t all that flattering.”
“Mind how you talk to your king, little sister,” he said in a tone that should have terrified, but she refused to take him seriously. It was just the two of them in here and he was behaving like a Neanderthal.
“I don’t know what you want me to do,” she said, throwing up her arms. “I can’t undo it.”
“You could start by promising you’ll show more decorum in future. This shouldn’t even be happening. Why Mother let you go this long without marrying you off to someone who can control you, I will never understand.”
“Can’t you?” she bit out sharply.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“She saw me as competition, Zufar.” It was plain as day.
“Get over yourself, Galila. You are the one who sees everyone as competition. Take heed now. I won’t have you upstaging my queen. You will learn to take a back seat.”
“I wouldn’t—”
They were interrupted by a servant. He entered after a brief but urgent knock and hurried to lean into Zufar’s ear. All Galila caught was “...very insistent...”
Zufar’s expression hardened. “Show him in.” As she turned, Zufar added, “Where do you think you’re going?” He glared at Galila’s attempt to exit.
“I assumed we were done.”
“You wish. No, I have no idea why he insists on speaking to me, but I imagine it concerns you, so you’ll stand here while he does.”
“Who?” She looked to the door the servant had left through.
“Sheikh Karim of Zyria.”
“Is that his name?” She had imagined he was one of their more illustrious guests but hadn’t realized—
Zufar slammed his hand onto his desktop, making her jump. “Do not tell me you didn’t even know the name of the man who had his hand up your skirt.”
She looked to the corner of the ceiling, biting the insides of her cheeks.
“Do you honestly think my life has room for your childish antics?” Zufar demanded.
She started to scowl at him, but he came in. Sheikh Karim of Zyria. He had exchanged his ceremonial garb of last night for a Western-style bespoke suit in slate gray sans headdress.
If possible, he was even more knee-weakeningly handsome. The crisp white of his shirt and blood-red tie suggested a man who commanded any world he occupied. He stole the breath from her body in a psychic punch, utterly overwhelming her.
His gaze spiked into hers as though he’d been waiting to see her again, but before her heart fully absorbed that sensation, he offered a terse nod and turned his attention to her brother, leaving her feeling promptly dismissed and inexplicably bereft.
* * *
After ensuring Princess Galila had indeed retired for the night, Karim had gone to his own guest apartment, somewhat disgusted with himself. He had been telling the truth when he’d claimed not to take advantage of women in a weakened state. He considered himself an honorable man.
But he hadn’t been able to take the chances that she would leak his secret to someone else after her next sip of brandy.