In Defiance of Duty

She still did not speak Arabic, though she’d picked up a few phrases over the years, none of them particularly repeatable outside of the bedroom. So she didn’t try to figure out what he was talking about in that commanding tone that reminded her that he was a royal prince who some called my liege without irony; she let his deep, sure voice wash over her like a caress. She sat and enjoyed a rare moment with nothing to do but look out the wall of floor-to-ceiling glass windows that faced north, the spectacular view stretching across the green lushness of Hyde Park toward the gorgeous Royal Botanic Gardens, the soaring shapes of the Sydney Opera House, and the picturesque Sydney Harbor, all of it bathed in the sweet, golden Australian sunshine.

But she couldn’t keep it up. Too soon she was worrying over a problem that had cropped up with the export of one of the Zinfandels they’d been experimenting with in recent years, and wondering if it required a quick, unscheduled call to her mother, the formidable CEO of Frederick Wines and sometime bane of Kiara’s existence. Given the complicated cocktail of guilt, love and obligation that characterized Kiara’s relationship with her mother as both her daughter and her second-in-command, Kiara usually preferred to handle things like this on her own. She argued the pros and cons in her head, going back and forth again and again.

Sydney preened before her in the abundant sunshine, skyscrapers sparkling in the light and the harbor dotted with sails and ferry boats far below, but Kiara hardly saw them. In her mind, she saw the greens and golds of her beloved Barossa Valley, the rich green vineyards spreading out in all directions, the complacent little towns bristling with Bavarian architecture, built by settlers like Kiara’s ancestors who’d fled from religious persecution in Prussia. She saw the family vineyards that had dominated her life since she was a girl—and the grand old chateau that had been in her family for generations.

The winery had taken over her mother’s life when she’d found herself there, a widow with an infant, and it was Kiara’s life, too, as it could hardly be anything else. At the very least, she had to prove to both her mother and herself that it had all been worth it, didn’t she? All the years of sacrifice and struggle on her mother’s part to build and maintain Kiara’s heritage—surely Kiara owed her, at the very least, her own commitment to that heritage.

She wasn’t sure what made her look up to find Azrin watching her then, his conference clearly over and an unusually serious look on his ruthless face.

“Good morning,” she said and smiled, pushing her concerns away as she drank him in, as if he could clear her head and vanquish her mother’s doubt just by being there in front of her. Instead of halfway across the world somewhere, available only by phone or video chat, which was the way she usually saw him.

She expected him to smile back. But he only looked at her for a long moment, and something twisted inside her—something she didn’t entirely understand. She remembered, then, his unusual urgency the night before. The edge to him that had made him even more fierce, even more demanding than usual. Something skittered down her spine, making her sit straighter on the stool. She smoothed the edges of her silk wrapper around her. She didn’t look away.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked softly. “What’s happened?”

“I am admiring my beautiful wife,” he said, though there was a certain rawness in his near-blue eyes. “My princess. My future queen.”

Kiara was uneasy, and she didn’t know why. He looked as if he’d been up for hours, which was not particularly remarkable, given his many business concerns and the world’s various time zones. His dark hair looked rumpled, as if he’d been running his hands through it repeatedly. He hadn’t bothered to shave, and the rough shadow along his tough jaw made him look more like the sheikh she sometimes forgot he was and less like the cosmopolitan, sophisticated husband with whom she explored the great modern cities of the world.

For some reason, her throat was dry.

“You could sound a bit less complimentary,” she pointed out, trying to sound as teasing and as light as she usually did. “If you tried. Though you’d have to work hard at it.”

He nearly smiled then, and she had the strange notion that it was against his will. Something sat heavy in the room, making her anxious, and she could see he felt it, too—that it was in him, something grim and hard behind his gaze, making those near-blue eyes grow dark. Making it difficult to breathe.

Kiara prided herself on her ability to close deals and navigate the sometimes treacherous labyrinth of international business concerns in general and the wine industry in particular. Hell, she was good at it. She’d had to be, having had to overcome the usual suspicions that she’d been promoted thanks to her relationship with the boss lady rather than her own hard work, and then, after her wedding, having to stare down everyone who’d sniggered and snidely called her your highness or princess in the middle of a tense meeting.

She enjoyed confounding expectations, thank you very much. She’d learned how to keep people at arm’s length as a defense mechanism against her mother’s complete lack of boundaries when she was still a girl. She’d spent her professional life cultivating a little bit of an untouchable ice-queen facade, and becoming a widely photographed and speculated-about princess had only helped make her deliberate shell that much more impenetrable. She liked it that way.

But this man was different. This man looked at her with some kind of pain in him and she would do anything—dance, tease, crawl, whatever worked—to make it go away. This was Azrin, and the love she felt for him—the love that had crashed into her and wholly altered the course of her life five years ago—was impossible to hide away behind some smooth mask. He was the one person on earth that she never, ever wanted at arm’s length, no matter how wild and unbalanced that sometimes made her feel inside, and no matter how far away from each other they often were.

She was up and on her feet before she knew she meant to move, crossing over to him.

“I have something to tell you,” he said, his gaze still so dark, so bleak.

“Then tell me,” she said. But she straddled him where he sat, letting her silk wrapper fall open to show that she was naked and still warm from her shower beneath it. “But you’ll forgive me if I make the conversation a little more exciting, won’t you?”

She wasn’t really thinking. She only knew she wanted to soothe him, and to do something to make whatever this was better. She felt him harden beneath her, felt his breath against her neck, as if he was as helpless to resist this pull between them as she had always been.

But she knew they both were. It had been this way, outsized and impossible and wholly irresistible, from the very beginning.

“Kiara …” he said, in that tone that was supposed to be reproving, chastising even, but his hands slid beneath the wrapper and onto her bare skin, smoothing over her hips. She arched against him, feeling the scrape of his jaw against the tender slope of her breast. He tilted his head back to look up at her, his hard mouth in an unsmiling line. “What are you doing?”