The Reluctant Queen

“You are insane,” she told him, when she could speak. When the red haze of confusion and emotion receded slightly. When she could jerk her attention away from his warrior’s body. “You cannot really believe I’ll marry you!”

Adel smiled again, though this time, there was nothing particularly sympathetic about it. Where was that younger man she remembered, who had been so eager to see her smile?

“I understand that this is a shock,” he said. “But let me be clear. You have only two possible choices before you, and while I am aware neither one is necessarily easy, you must choose one of them.”

“Your attempt at compassion is insulting,” Lara managed to say, her hands clenched tight into the bag she held. Part of her wanted to fling the sack at him as he stood near the trunk of her sensible sedan. And then run. Only the fact that he probably expected that reaction kept her from it.

“Nonetheless, it is real,” he said. His storm-colored eyes moved to hers, and darkened. “It would never have been my choice to confront you in this way, with this news. I regret the necessity. But it does not change anything.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Lara said after a moment, her temper kicking in—replacing the wild swirl of far trickier feelings. Anger was better. Anger felt better—more productive. “And more important? I don’t care.”

“Yet you must listen,” he told her. So quiet. So sure. And she could only stare at him. And obey. “I am sorry for that, too, but so it is.”

There was something about the way he looked at her then that … bothered her, in a way she couldn’t quite categorize. As if he could see the buried truths she’d denied existed for years. The old dreams. The yearnings for a life, a family, the kind of things other girls took for granted while she trailed around after Marlena, cleaning up her messes. The way she’d felt about him all those years ago, the things she’d dreamed they’d do together—

Lara blinked, and steeled herself against him—and the surprising swell of something like grief that she would have sworn she’d never feel.

“What, then?” she asked, her voice too rough, as she fought back the unwieldy emotions that shifted and rolled within her. “What is it you think I need to hear?”

“You have a choice to make,” he said again, and the worst part, Lara realized in a sort of horror, was that his voice was kind, his eyes the same. As if he understood exactly what she was going through—as if he knew.

And yet he was continuing anyway, wasn’t he? He was an Alakkulian male. An Alakkulian king. Just like her father, he thought only of himself. That much was blatantly obvious, no matter how kind his eyes might seem. No matter her memories of his smile, of his tenderness.

“The only choice I will be making,” she told him, enunciating clearly, deliberately, with razor-sharp precision, as if sounding tough would make her feel that way, too, “is to get in my car and drive away from here. From you. From this ridiculous conversation. I suggest you get out of the way, unless you’d like me to run you over.”

“You did not merely promise to marry me, as any young girl might,” Adel said in the same calm, commanding tone, as if she had not just threatened him. “You entered into a binding legal contract.”

“I was a teenager,” Lara retorted. “No court in the world would ever hold me to it. It’s absurd you would think otherwise—this is not the Stone Age!”

“You overestimate the progressive nature of the world’s courts, I think,” he replied, something almost like humor flashing briefly across his face. But she did not want to think of him as human, as capable of humor as he’d been before, and ignored it. “But in any case, it does not matter. Your father signed for you when you were too young, as is the custom. When you came of age you did not withdraw your consent from the contract—which, according to the laws of Alakkul, means you thus agreed that you entered into the terms of the contract of your own free will.”

“I will not marry you,” she said. Her shoulders tightened, her chin rose like a fighter’s. “I would rather die.”

“There is no need for such theater,” Adel replied in a faintly reproving tone. Yet his mouth curved slightly—as if he found her amusing. It made her temper kick in again. That, she told herself, was the feeling that pounded through her, shaking her. “You may break the contract, if that is your wish. But there is a price.”

“Let me guess.” Lara scraped her heavy curls back from her face with an impatient jerk of her hand. “My honor will be smeared? My family name forever muddied? Isn’t that how you people think?”

“By ‘you people,’” he asked, his voice staying even though a cold fire blazed to life in his gaze, “am I to understand you mean your own people? Your countrymen?”

“I’ll live with the dishonor,” Lara told him, not wanting to admit the twist of shame she felt move through her. Much less the odd urge she had to reach over and touch him. “Quite happily.”

“As you wish,” Adel said with that great calm that, for some reason, infuriated her as surely as if he’d openly taunted her. It made her want to scratch at him, poke at him—made her want to see beneath the surface, rip off the mask she was sure he wore, see what lurked beneath. She just wanted to touch him.

She had no idea where that urge came from. Nor why it seemed to move through her like a scalding heat, rippling over her skin and pooling in places it shouldn’t.

The city seemed to mute itself around them, the parking lot fading, the bright sky above and the slight breeze from the Rocky Mountains in the distance disappearing. There was only this dangerous, compelling warrior of a man in place of the boy she had once known, and too many emotions to name. She felt … pulled to him. Drawn. As if he’d cast a spell with that fascinating mouth and that commanding, resolute gaze of his, and she was helpless to resist, no matter how many reasons she had to avoid him and how little she wanted to hear what he might have to say.

But if there was one thing she refused to be, it was helpless.

“Wonderful,” she said, pulling herself back from the brink of disaster. Her tone was acerbic, as much to defend herself against this man as to convince herself he was not getting to her in so many odd, uncomfortable ways. “I’m glad you traveled across the world to tell me all of this. You can consider our absurd betrothal ended.”

“As you wish,” he said again. But he did not move. His gaze seemed to sharpen, as if he was some great predator and she nothing but prey. She fought off an involuntary shiver. “You need only pay me the bride price.”

“The bride price?” she repeated, caught as much by the sudden ferocity in his dark gaze as by the words themselves.

“Your dowry was the throne of Alakkul, Princess,” Adel said quietly, deliberately. “I am afraid that the sum my family paid for you was significant, give or take such things as the exchange rate, the rate of inflation, and so on.”

He named a number that she could not possibly have heard right—a number so astronomically high that it, too, made her laugh. It was as patently absurd as him suddenly appearing in a parking lot and announcing he was going to marry her, just as she’d dreamed when she’d first left Alakkul—and as impossible.

“I have nothing even approaching that amount of money, and never will,” she said flatly. “I am an accountant. I live an entirely normal and ordinary life. That amount of money is a fantasy.”

“Not to the Queen of Alakkul,” he said, and something flared between them, hot and bright, making her breath tangle in her throat, making her ache low in her belly. “Or to me.”

“That is another fantasy, one I have no interest in.”

“I am a compassionate man,” Adel said after a moment, though the expression he wore made her doubt it. “I will release you from your obligations to me, if that is your desire. You need only repay what your mother stole from the palace when she disappeared twelve years ago. It is not so much. A mere nine hundred thousand dollars, and some precious jewels.”

“Nine hundred thousand dollars,” Lara repeated in disbelief. “You must be joking. I don’t have it—and if my mother took it, it is no more than she deserved, after what my father subjected her to!”

Adel merely inclined his head. “I will not argue with you about your mother,” he said. “Nor will I debate your choices with you. They are simple. Marry me, or pay the price.”

He held up an autocratic hand when she started to speak, and she knew deep in her bones that he was every inch a king as well as a warrior. She should hate that—him. And yet her treacherous body, instead of finding him repulsive, yearned.

“There is not much time, Princess,” he said. “I regret the necessity, but you must make your decision. Now.”

CHAPTER TWO

HE APPROVED of the woman she’d become, Adel thought, her fierceness and her attempts at fearlessness, and was not certain why that surprised him.

“Do you accept credit cards?” she asked icily after a moment, her silver-blue eyes glittering in the late-afternoon light, even as she held herself so rigidly, so determinedly still. “If so, I am certain we can work something out.”

Adel only smiled, enjoying her, even under these circumstances. The girl he had never forgotten for a moment had become a woman he wanted to know better. “You are stalling.”

“Of course I am.” She shifted her weight and let the paper sack she carried fall to the ground at her feet. He heard the faint crunch of glass against the pavement, but she only glared at him. “It will take me more than thirty seconds to choose between marriage to a man I hardly know or a lifetime in debt I’ll never pay off. The interest rates alone would kill me! You’ll just have to wait.”

He liked that, too. She was as much the child of the late King Azat, his revered mentor, as she was of the faithless woman who was her mother. Brave. Vibrant. And she would be his wife. His queen, as had been decided so many years ago. The warrior in him appreciated the way she stood so straight, emotion darkening her eyes but not overtaking her, her body lean and supple and strong. The king in him imagined the future her blood assured, the children they would bear together, the way they would rule his beloved Alakkul. And the man in him wanted to taste the fullness of her mouth, and sink his fingers into the dark glossy waves of her long hair.

Just as he’d always wanted her, even back when they were both young.

He had wanted her even after her lying mother had spirited her away, taking her far from her home—far from Adel. He had wanted her in all the years in between, when the old King insisted they leave her to her new life and Adel had wondered when he could ever lay claim to the woman who had always been his. He wanted her as she denied him, as she fought with him, as she looked at him as if he was her enemy.

He had wanted her so long, it had become as much a part of him as his own name. It did not matter what she’d done in all the intervening years. It did not even matter if she’d forgotten him. He was here now, and she was his.

She was far too Western. She was dressed for summer in America—all bare skin and tight clothes that outlined curves his hands itched to touch. Her hair was untamed, uncovered, a silken black mass of curls spilling around her creamy shoulders. Her high, full breasts filled out the tight, V-necked shirt she wore to perfection, while her slim hips and long legs were encased in scandalously tight denim. Her feet were bare to his sight, her polished pink toenails in thonged sandals.

These things should have displeased him. Perhaps even angered him. Yet they did not. She did not.

At all.