A Royal Wedding(64)

“Lara—”

“I cannot do this again!” she cried, and there was nothing held back anymore, nothing hidden. She looked at him and she saw all the betrayals and disappointments of her youth. All the times she’d known, somehow, that Marlena was not telling her the truth. All the lonely days and nights spent waiting for Azat to come and claim her, to let her know she was worth something to him. Worth fighting for.

“There is no again,” Adel said fiercely. “There is only you. Me. This child. I cannot change the circumstances that have brought us here, Lara, but how can you doubt—”

“I won’t do it,” she threw at him. “I won’t subject my own child to this endless tug of war, this game with no end. I will not have this baby grow up wondering what she’s worth, and why, and have her squabbled over like a piece of meat in the market. Not this child!”

“This child will be loved,” he said, in that wild voice, low and throbbing. Uncontrolled. “Celebrated and adored.”

“Yes, far away from thrones and politics. And you.”

The silence seemed to hum between them. Lara was aware, suddenly, of the rain beating against the windows, and her own tears wet on her cheeks. She dashed at them with her fists, her breathing too fast, too hard. And all the while, Adel gazed at her, his beautiful, hard face open in a way it had never been before—shattered, a small voice inside of her whispered.

As if she’d destroyed him. As if she—or anyone—could have that power.

She wanted to turn away, but she could not make herself do it. She wanted to go to him, to press her lips against the uncompromising lines of his jaw, his brow. She did not do that, either. Could not let herself.

“I told you I loved you,” he said, as if from a great distance. “I have never loved anyone else in my life. Only you. Always you.”

“Prove it,” she heard herself say—harsh and fast. Before she could think better of it, or change her mind. “Let me go.”

She thought the bleakness in his eyes might have killed her right there, on the spot. She felt it pierce her heart, and shoot like fire through her veins, making her stomach lurch. She gasped for breath.

But Adel merely bowed his head slightly, as if the anguish she could see in his face was nothing at all.

“If that is what you want,” he said, his voice the barest thread of sound, and yet it still seemed like a lash against her flesh. “Then it is yours.”

And then Lara watched him turn and walk out of the hotel door, leaving her, just as she’d claimed she’d wanted.

So why, when the door closed behind him and the room was empty of everything save the rain against the windows, did she feel as if part of her had just died?





CHAPTER NINE



SHE walked back into the palace like a warrior, proud and strong, and Adel felt his heart stop in his chest.

Then begin to beat, hard. Something inside of him, granite and cold, began to ease as she stalked across the great marble floor of what had once been the throne room and was now the antechamber to his office.

“I did not expect to see you again,” he said, standing in the doorway between the two rooms, his arms folded across his chest. It had been two days. He knew, intellectually, that those forty-eight hours had been no longer than any other set of forty-eight hours, but it had not felt that way.

He had believed she was lost to him. Forever.

“I did not expect you to give up and slink away like a whipped puppy,” she threw at him as she closed the distance between them, going immediately for the jugular. He should not admire that as he did. She should not arouse him, with her temper and her daring. He should be furious that she had turned on him, run from him—and on some level he was.

But more than that, he wanted her. He wanted her, and she was here, and she was glorious.

And his.

“You told me to set you free, Princess,” he drawled. Surely she had come back in all ways, or why would she have come back at all? “I was only following your orders.”

She came to a stop before him, her remarkable eyes a mix of bravado and something else, something that made him long to touch her. It took all he had to keep from doing so.

Not yet, he thought. Not just yet.

“Since when do you listen to what I want?” she asked, a slight frown between her eyes. “I cannot recall a single instance of you ever doing so, in all the time I’ve known you.”