In Defiance of Duty. Caitlin Crews

Prince and Princess of Khatan were relatable, accessible. Normal. They worked hard and didn’t get to see as much of each other as they’d like. Theirs was not a story of harems and exoticism, royal excesses and the bizarre lifestyles of the absurdly privileged. They were your everyday, run-of-the-mill power couple, just trying to excel at what they did. Just like you.

      And yet they were not those couples, and never would be.

      They were not normal. They had only been pretending. He told himself it was not a kind of grief that gripped him then—that it was simply reality.

      He would be king. She would be his queen. There were greater expectations of those roles than of the ones they’d been playing at all this time. There were different, more complicated considerations. He knew with the kick of something like foreboding, deep in his gut, that there were great sacrifices that both of them would have to make.

      It was only change, he told himself again. Everything and everyone changed.

      But not tonight.

      CHAPTER TWO

      IT TOOK Kiara long moments after she woke in the wide, plush bed in the center of a room bathed in light to recall that she was in Sydney. In the penthouse in Sydney, she reminded herself as she stretched—that glorious multilevel dwelling high on the top of an exclusive building that only Azrin, who had been raised between several palaces, could call an apartment. Her lips curved.

      She swung her legs over the side of the platform bed and rose slowly, smiling at the delicious feeling of bone-lessness all throughout her body. That was the Azrin effect. She supposed she should have been used to it by now. Images of the previous night swept through her head, each more erotic than the last. He was a sensualist, her husband; a demanding lover who held nothing back—and took everything in return.

      She found herself in the opulent shower with no real idea how she’d got there, humming to herself as she used the delicately scented soap over the skin he’d tasted and touched repeatedly. That was what he did—he made her a besotted, airheaded fool. When he was near, she found she could think of very little else.

      Just him. Only him.

      She stepped from the great glass shower that she knew from past experience could hold both of them as well as some of Azrin’s more inventive fantasies, and toweled herself off, letting her hair down from the clip she’d used to secure it away from the hot spray. Sometimes she felt guilty that she often considered her demanding career a necessary a bit of breathing room between rounds with her far more demanding, far more consuming husband. There was just something about Azrin, she thought, smiling to herself, that encouraged complete surrender.

      She found him out in the great room, lounging carelessly on the low sofa that sprawled out in the center of the sleek, modern space, speaking in assured and confident Arabic into the tablet he used for video conferencing. His fierce gaze met hers and though he did not smile, a flash of heat moved through her anyway.

      Even after the night they’d shared, she wanted more. Her core warmed anew, ready for him at a glance. Again. Always.

      He was lethal.

      She made sure to keep out of sight of the camera, slipping into the open-plan gourmet kitchen that neither she nor Azrin had ever cooked in to fix herself a morning coffee from the imposing, gleaming espresso machine. A few minutes later she settled with the fruits of her labor—a flat white in a warm ceramic mug, perfectly made if she said so herself—on one of the chrome bar stools that fetched up to the shiny granite expanse of kitchen counter.

      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