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?”

She thought that was obvious, but she only smiled, and rolled her hips, the heat and strength of him against the softest part of her. She ached as if she’d never had him. She burned as if he was already deep within her. And his eyes lit with that same fire, and she knew he felt it, too.

Holding his gaze, she reached down between them and released him from his trousers with impatient hands, stroking his silken length, driving herself a little bit wild. Still watching him, those unholy eyes and his fierce, uncompromising face, she shifted up and over him, then sank down, sheathing him hard and deep within her.

“I’m distracting you,” she told him, her voice uneven.

“Or possibly killing me,” he muttered, taking her mouth with his in a long, hard kiss. “As I suspect is your plan.”

She moved against him, rocking him deeper into her, unable to bite back her own small sigh of pleasure. He moved with her until she started to shake, and then he took control. His hands gripped her hips, preventing her from rocking against him when she wanted to tip herself over the edge.

“What are you doing?” she demanded, her voice a mere scrap of ragged sound, and his smile made her shiver.

“Distracting you,” he said, his cool eyes glittering with that sensual promise that made her feel nearly giddy. “You’ll come when I tell you to, Kiara, and not before.”

She wanted to argue, but he moved then, and she could do nothing at all but move with him, surrendering to his hands, his wicked mouth, and his dark, whispered commands. Letting him build the fire between them into an out of control blaze. Letting him take them both exactly where she wanted to go.

And when he finally ordered her to come, she did, screaming out his name.

Azrin could not understand why he didn’t simply tell her.

Why he hadn’t told her already. Why some part of him didn’t want to tell her at all.

They’d had the one last, long night. Drawing it out any further was nothing more than the very kind of selfishness he could no longer allow himself.

She was still in the shower. He could see the shape of her through the steamy glass, and he already regretted having left the warm embrace of the hot water. He could have stayed in there with her, and continued this exercise in pretense, in misdirection, as if they could lose themselves enough in each other that the whole world would go away.

Perhaps that was what he wanted. If he was honest, he knew that it was.

Hadn’t that been what Kiara had always been for him? A step away from the expected—an escape from the traditional?

Enjoy yourself while you can, his father had said when he’d married, his creased face canny, knowing. As unsympathetic as ever, the old man as harsh a ruler of his family as he was of his country. You will pay for it all soon enough, I promise you.

Because his father had known, too: Kiara was Azrin’s way of asserting himself in a life that would too soon be swallowed whole by duty and sacrifice. There would be no escape.

But Kiara had been his. All his. He’d been unable to resist her. She was his most selfish act of all, having nothing whatosever to do with the things that were expected of him, the things he expected of himself. He had been meant to marry a woman like his own mother—one of the exquisite Khatanian girls who had been trotted out before him at every social opportunity since he was a boy, each more perfect than the last, each competing to show herself to be the most obvious choice for Azrin’s future queen.

They were indistinguishably attractive, impeccably mannered and becomingly modest. They were all from powerful, noble families, all raised with the same set of ideals and expectations, all bred to be perfect wives and excellent mothers, all taught from birth to anticipate and tend to a man’s every passing whim—and if that man was to be their king? All the better.

Instead, he’d met Kiara in a crowded little laneway in Melbourne. He had been walking off his jet lag as he prepared for a week’s worth of meetings with some of the city’s financial leaders. He’d ducked into one of the narrow alleys that snaked behind a typical Melbourne street featuring a jumble of sleek modern skyscrapers and Victorian-era facades, and had found his way to a tiny café that had reminded him of one of his favorite spots in Paris. His bodyguard had cleared the way for him to claim a seat at one of the tiny tables overlooking the busy little lane—perhaps a touch overzealously.

“I think you’ll find it’s customary to pretend to apologize when stealing a table from someone else,” she had said, a teasing note in her voice that made her sound as if she was about to bubble over into laughter. As if there was something impossibly merry, very nearly golden, inside her just bursting to come out. That had been his first impression of Kiara—that voice.