A Royal Wedding(56)

“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.