In Defiance of Duty
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“You have vast experience with princes, do you?” His tone had been sardonic, but she’d ignored him anyway.
“—while I really do require my Masters in Wine Technology and Viticulture to get on with my real life.” She’d smiled at him, even as he’d registered the way she’d emphasized the word real. “I’ll understand if you want to throw a little bit of a strop and sulk all the way back to your throne. No one will think any the less of you.”
“Kiara,” he’d said then, unable to keep his hands off her, and wanting more than just the simple pleasure of his palm over the curve of her upper arm, which was what he’d had to settle for. She was not for him—he’d known that—but he’d been completely incapable of accepting it as he should. “Prepare yourself for the fairy-tale interlude. I may have to go to Khatan tomorrow morning, but I’ll be back.”
“Of course you will,” she’d said, smiling as if she’d known better.
But he’d come back, as promised. Again and again. Until she’d finally started to believe him.
He watched her now, his unexpected princess, as she climbed from the shower and wrapped herself in one of the soft towels. She smiled at him, and he felt something clench inside of him. She had never wanted to be a queen. She hadn’t even wanted to be a princess. She’d wanted him, that was all, just as he’d wanted her. Perhaps it had been foolish to imagine that that kind of connection, that impossible need, could be enough.
But foolish or not, this was the bed they’d made.
And now it was time to lie in it, whether he liked it or not. Whether she liked it or not.
Whether he wanted to be the King of Khatan or not— which had never mattered before, he reminded himself sharply, and certainly didn’t matter now. It simply was.
“My father’s cancer is back,” he said abruptly.
“Azrin, no,” Kiara breathed, as she tried to process his words.
He did not move from his position in the doorway. He leaned against the doorjamb with seeming nonchalance, beautiful and yet somehow remote, in nothing but dark trousers he hadn’t bothered to fully button. But she could see the grim lines around his mouth, and the tension gripping his long frame. And the dark gray of his eyes, focused on her in a way that she could not quite understand.
“He plans to fight it, of course,” he said in that same, oddly detached way, as if he was forcing himself to get through this by rote. As if this was the preview to something much bigger. Something worse. What that might be, Kiara did not want to imagine. “He is nothing if not ornery.”
“I’m so sorry,” Kiara said, her head spinning. It was difficult to imagine the old king, Azrin’s belligerent and autocratic father, anything but his demanding and robust self. It was impossible to imagine that even cancer would dare try to beat King Zayed, when nothing and no one else had ever come close to loosening the iron grip he held on his country, his throne. His only son.
“He does not seem particularly concerned that it will kill him this time,” Azrin continued. He shifted then, thrusting his hands into the pockets of his trousers. His mouth twisted. “But then, he has always had an exalted sense of himself. It is what led to the worst excesses of his reign. He leaves the wailing and gnashing of teeth to my mother.”
Queen Madihah was the first of the old king’s three wives. That and her production of the Crown Prince rendered her a national treasure. She was the very model of serene, gracious, modestly restrained Khatanian femininity, and as such, had always made Kiara feel distinctly brash and unpolished by comparison. It was impossible to imagine her changing expression, much less wailing.
“He’s in excellent health otherwise,” she said, thinking of the last time she’d seen her father-in-law, sometime the previous spring. He had insisted she join him for a long walk in the palace gardens, and despite the fact that Kiara regularly put in time on treadmills in gyms all over the world, the pace the older man had set had left her close to winded. That and the way he’d interrogated her, as if he was still suspicious of her relationship with his son and heir, as if he expected her to reveal her true motives at any moment, whatever those might be. “You would never know he was in his seventies …”
Something moved across Azrin’s face then, and she let the words trail away.
“He has announced that he is an old man, and has only the weapons to fight one battle left in him,” he said. Kiara felt frozen in place, and she didn’t understand it. It was something to do with the way he was looking at her, the set to his jaw, that made her … nervous. Much too nervous. “He doesn’t think he can care for the kingdom and for himself, not now. Not the way he did the last time.”
“Whatever he needs to do to beat it,” Kiara said immediately. Staunchly. “And whatever we need to do to help him.”
The silence seemed to stretch taut between them.
“He is stepping aside, Kiara,” Azrin said. Almost gently, yet with that steel beneath that made a kind of panic curl into something thick and hot in her belly. “Retiring.”
For a moment, she didn’t know what he meant.
“Of course,” she said, when his meaning penetrated. “It will be good practice for you to take the throne while he recovers, won’t it?”
“No.” Again, that voice. His eyes so hard on hers. As if she was letting him down—had already done so—and she didn’t know how that could have happened without her knowing it. Without her meaning to do it. She locked her knees beneath her, afraid, suddenly, that they might tremble and betray the full scope of her agitation.
“No?” she echoed. “It won’t be good practice?”
“It won’t be temporary. He is stepping aside for good.”
She blinked. He waited. Something inside her seemed to go terribly still. As if she could not comprehend what he was telling her. But she did.
“That means—” She stopped herself. She had the urge to laugh then, but knew, somehow, that she did not dare. That he would not forgive her if she did, not now. She shook her head.
“It means I will be the new king of Khatan in six short weeks,” Azrin said in that strong, sure voice, as if that hardness was a part of him now, as if it was part of who he was becoming. As if it was a necessary precursor to the throne.
“Six weeks?” Kiara did laugh then, slightly. Her voice seemed too high, too uncertain. “I’d hardly got used to you being a prince over five years of marriage. I can’t get my head around you being king in a little more than a month!”
She thought he might smile at that, but his mouth remained that flat, stern line. His eyes were the coldest she’d ever seen them. She felt, again, as if she’d been thrown neck deep into something that she ought to understand, but didn’t.