DO I LOOK PRETTY, Mama?
The reflexive question, one she had learned to suppress, still jammed in Galila’s throat along with her heart when she turned and caught sight of an apparition.
She held herself motionless on the tiled platform in the center of the reflecting pool, staring at the woman who appeared against the window to her mother’s lounge. With the subtle golden glow cast by the lights around the courtyard, it seemed as though her mother looked out at her, watchful and unsmiling.
As usual.
Galila wore a stunning tangerine gown, strapless and with a skirt of abundant shimmering silk. A long-sleeved tulle overlay was embroidered and bedecked with silver and glittering jewels—as suited a member of the royal family on the new king’s wedding day. Her hair cascaded from beneath a tiara that only ever came out on special occasions, and until now, only on her mother’s head.
The dress was too young for her mother, but those were definitely her mother’s eyes, scrupulously emphasized with greens and gold, liquid eyeliner ending in a cat’s tail. At one time, those doe-like eyes would have swept over Galila with indulgence. Affection.
So pretty, my pet. Her painted lips would have smiled with tender love as she stroked Galila’s hair.
Tonight, Galila’s mouth—as sensuously curved as her mother’s had been and wearing her mother’s signature glossy red—tightened. Her elegantly arched brows drew themselves together as she critically sought flaws, exactly as her mother would have done if she had still been alive.
Your skin looks sallow, Galila.
It was the yellow light and her imagination, but the reproach still had the power to sting. To make her yearn to correct the flaw and recapture the love that had dried up and blown away like sand across the desert.
She ought to be glad her mother wasn’t here; ought to be grieving properly for a life lost. Instead, it was her secret shame that she was mostly grieving her chance to win back her mother’s love. Or perhaps just to understand how she’d lost it.
What had she done that was so terrible—except to grow up looking exactly as beautiful as her mother had been? Was that her great crime?
Could she finally bloom freely now that she wouldn’t overshadow her mother?
She lifted the glass she held, leaving another kiss print on the rim.
Not champagne, either, Mother. She directed that baleful thought to her image and received a dispassionate glance in return.
The brandy she had learned to drink at boarding school seared with blessed heat through her arteries, promising the numbing effect Galila sought.
In a perfect world, she would drink herself unconscious and possibly drown here in an inch of water, escaping the chaos raging around her.
Don’t make a spectacle of yourself, Galila. That’s Malak’s purview.
“Your dress is getting wet.”
The male voice, so deep and velvety it matched the caress of the warm night air, had her turning to peer into the shadows, expecting—well, she didn’t know who she expected. A man, yes, but not such a man.
He leaned against the edge of an archway, features sharpened by the low light and framed by the drape of his ghutra. He was dangerous and handsome at once. Dangerously handsome with those dark, deeply set eyes and strong jaw beneath a short, black beard. Breath-stealing, in fact, in his gold-trimmed bisht that might have been the color of a good merlot. It hung open across wide shoulders to reveal his embroidered thobe, tailored to his muscled chest, collar closed at his throat and decorated by a yellow sapphire the size of her fist.
She told herself it was the alcohol that made her sway, but she suspected it was the impact of his virility.
He straightened and held out a hand. “Come. Before you ruin perfection.”
He sounded indifferent, perhaps a little impatient, but her confused, bruised-up heart reached like a flower toward the sunshine of his compliment. She used her free hand to lift her skirt and carefully placed her feet on each round tile. She was a little too drunk for stepping stones and appreciated when he took the drink from her hand and clasped her forearm, balancing her until she was completely away from the water.
His touch undermined her equilibrium as much as the brandy, though. More, perhaps. Brandy didn’t make her chest feel tight and her eyes dampen with longing. Her ears picked up the distant sound of the wedding music, but all her senses were trained on him. Something in her flowed toward him. Sought...something.
He was tall, radiating magnetism while a force field seemed to surround him, one that made him seem untouchable. It cracked fissures through her that she couldn’t begin to understand.
Maybe it was the brandy causing this overwhelming reaction.
He smelled the glass and his mouth curled with disdain. He set the glass aside.
“You don’t approve of alcohol?”
“I don’t approve of drunkenness.”
It should have sounded too uptight for words, but she was ever so sensitive to censure. His condemnation cut surprisingly deep. Why? He was nothing to her.
But he was also like nothing she’d ever experienced—and she’d seen a lot these last few years, living in Europe. He wasn’t like any of the urbane aristocrats or earnest artists she’d met. He didn’t even match what she expected here, in her home country of Khalia. He was almost too iconic in his arrogant sheikh demeanor. She had long decided that if she ever did marry, it would be to a progressive, cultured man from abroad. Not one of these throwback barbarians from five centuries ago.
Yet he was utterly fascinating. A tendril of desire to impress him wormed through her. She wanted to stand here and hold his attention and earn his regard.
Quit being so needy, she heard Malak say in her head. He had learned to live without love or anyone’s good opinion. Why did she think it was necessary?
She didn’t, she told herself and reached for the glass. “It’s my brother’s special day. I’m celebrating.”
* * *
“People do stupid things when they’re drunk.” Sheikh Karim of Zyria didn’t raise his hand or his voice. He didn’t even tell her not to drink.
Nevertheless, his deep tone carried the quiet command instilled by his station. It was evidently enough to make her falter and reassess him, perhaps understanding she would ignore him at her own peril.
He returned her scrutiny, taking advantage of the chance to do so up close. That’s what he told himself he was doing, in any case.
He had watched the royal family all day and evening—the ones who were here, at least. Princess Galila, with her stark resemblance to her deceased mother, fascinated him the most. She flitted like a bird from perch to perch, joining this group and that, welcomed by all and animated as she spoke, flirtatious and not above rolling her eyes at anyone, including her brother, the groom and newly crowned King of Khalia.
Had her mother possessed that same sparkling energy? Was that how she had so ensnared his father? He had seen photos of all of them over the years, but in person, Princess Galila was not merely beautiful. She was potent and enthralling, pulling at him in a way he resisted out of principle.
Out of self-preservation, a voice whispered deep in the back of his mind.
Not that he was in danger of infatuation, he assured himself. She struck him as far too superficial, thriving on being the center of attention. The way she smiled and bantered told him she was fully aware of the power in her beauty and sex appeal. She used it without shame to steal the spotlight from every other woman in the room.
That’s why it had surprised him when she’d slipped into the garden and walked away from the party into the family’s private courtyard. He had followed because he wanted to understand how this woman’s mother had destroyed and reshaped his entire life, not because he had been compelled to keep her in his sights.
Had her mother, Queen Namani, been this vain? He’d watched Galila preen in front of her own reflection like a lovebird, so deeply enamored with herself that she hadn’t been aware of his presence.
He wasn’t a stalker, lurking in shadows, spying on pretty maidens. He was a king, one with questions he had never been able to answer. Besides, he wanted to see her up close. Discover the secret of her allure.
He’d called her out of the pool—which was when he’d realized she was drunk.
Disappointing. He abstained, never wanting to be so far into his cups that he thought a leap off a balcony would solve his problems.
When he’d told her drinking was unwise, he’d thought for a moment that despair clouded her eyes, but she’d quickly switched to using her stunning looks to distract and mesmerize.
“What’s stupid about enjoying myself?” she challenged lightly. She lifted her hair off her neck and let it flow carelessly off her forearm, watching to see if he followed the movement.
There was a man inside this royal casing. He felt desire the same as any other, but he knew when he was being invited to lose focus by ogling a breast. Much as he longed to eye the weight of her curves, he kept his gaze locked with hers.
“Exhibit A. You’re on a tear of self-destruction.” Locking horns with him was a grave mistake, he silently warned.
She was disconcerted by his unaffected response. She might even have been burned by it. Her brow flinched. She quickly lifted her chin in a rally of spirit, though.
“Perhaps I have reason. Did you think of that?” Her long lashes blinked in big, innocent sweeps.
“I’m sure your life is very fraught,” he said drily.
“I lost my mother three months ago,” she threw back at him with quiet anguish. “I’m entitled to grieve.”
“You are.” He dipped his head, but that was as much condolence as he was willing to offer. He hadn’t been allowed any self-pity after his father’s death. The circumstances had been far more disturbing and he’d been a child of six. “Drinking yourself blind will only make things worse.”
“How is that possible?” she cried softly. “My father is so grief-stricken, he’s like a shell. I can’t reach him. No one can.” She looked to the huge window where her own reflection had stood. “He misses my mother terribly.”
Karim understood that affliction, too. No matter what he did, he had never been able to ease his mother’s heartbreak over her loss, either. Protecting her from the fact that his father’s death had been a suicide was the best he’d ever been able to do.
“She had an affair,” Galila whispered. “He loved her anyway, but now we all know about it, which seems to have tripled his agony.”
Karim’s heart stopped. Even the breath in his lungs stilled.
As if she noted his jolt of alarm, she nodded to confirm her shocking statement, eyes wide and tortured.
“Your father knew but kept it from you?” Karim’s mind raced. He had never confided in a single soul, no matter how long and heavily the truth had weighed on him—and it had. Endlessly. With the death of Queen Namani, he had thought that at least the secret of the affair would die when he did.
“He’s known for years!” Her tone rang with outraged astonishment. “He helped her cover it up when she became pregnant. They sent away our half brother the day he was born.”
Karim had to concentrate on keeping his face expressionless, his feet rooted to the marble tiles so he didn’t fall over. His ears rang as though the soft words had been a cannon next to his head.
Galila gave a choking half laugh of near hysteria. “Explain to me how one processes that sort of news except to get roaring drunk?”
“You have a third brother? A half brother?” He had a half brother? His carefully balanced world wasn’t just tilting on its axis. It was reaching such a sharp angle everything was sliding into a jumbled mess at his feet.
“Yes!” She didn’t seem to notice his deep shock, too caught up in layers of emotional turmoil within herself. “My brothers and I should have been supporting each other, comforting our father, but he showed up at the funeral. Told us how our mother had been writing to him for years. How she regretted sending him away because she loved him best.” Her eyes gleamed with a thick sheen of tears. “Because he was her only link to the man she truly loved.”
Her fist went to the spot over her breast where she seemed to stem the cracks in a bleeding heart.
“Our father had a complete breakdown. Who wouldn’t? We nearly all did! Zufar had to step in and take over... And now that’s where Zufar’s intended bride is, with our half brother.” She spoke with livid bewilderment, arm flinging out to some unknown location. “Zufar wasn’t supposed to marry Niesha. Amira’s been promised to him since she was born, but Adir came back this morning and talked Amira into running away with him. I watched her go through the window. Adir said it was his revenge for being denied his birthright.”
“Adir,” Karim repeated faintly. That was the name of his brother? He barely heard the rest of what poured out of her.
“Zufar is so single-minded, he married our maid rather than admit there was anything wrong. Malak has quit the palace entirely, gone gambling or to work his way through a harem, I imagine. Where does that leave me? With no one. So excuse me if I take some comfort in a bottle of brandy.”
When she started to drink, he stole it and tipped the alcohol onto the tiles. He had to. This news was utterly explosive.
“Who else have you told?” he demanded.
“No one,” she muttered, giving a tsk of annoyance at the brandy puddle. “Now I have to walk all the way back for a fresh one.”
“Who is Adir’s father?” He kept his voice level but held the empty glass in such a tight grip he expected it to shatter in his hand, leaving him dripping blood onto the evaporating alcohol.
“No one knows.” She gave her hair a flip. “Mother took one secret to her grave, it seems. Although, I have half a mind to ask around that crowd.” She jerked her chin toward the balcony across the darkened expanse of the garden, where light poured out the open doors to the palace ballroom. “He must be there.”
The elite from all the neighboring kingdoms mingled in a kaleidoscope of colored gowns and robes. Voices competed with the music in a din that suddenly grated on him more than he could bear.
“Why do you think that?” he asked, forcing a tone of mild curiosity while his blood prickled in his veins.
“My mother wouldn’t take up with a servant. It had to have been someone of her stature, very likely one of those men congratulating my brother on his mismatched marriage.”
She was right, of course. His father had been exactly at her mother’s level, not that Karim would confirm it. Maybe the affair had started at an event like this, he imagined. His father and her mother would have been about his and Galila’s age when they met, in their prime and bursting with biological readiness. Perhaps they had slipped away into the shadows to indulge their passion, as other couples were doing even now.
He was far too practical to wish, but he had an uncharacteristic longing to be one of those carefree couples with Galila. If only he could enjoy a simple dalliance, like other people, rather than listening to her sing his personal scandal to the night sky while racking his brain on how to most quickly prevent it going further than his own ears.
She was inordinately desirable, he noted with determined detachment. He almost understood his father’s desolation at being rejected by such a woman. Of course, his father had been married and never should have started the affair in the first place, but Karim had no such restrictions.
In fact, remaining close to this pretty bird was exactly what he ought to do. He had devoted his life to ensuring his mother never learned the truth about his father’s death. He wasn’t about to watch it all come apart through one woman’s brandy-lubricated tongue. In fact, he had to ensure the entire family’s silence on the matter.
Hmm.
* * *
“We should get back to the party,” the mysterious stranger said.
Through her haze of growing infatuation, Galila distantly realized she shouldn’t be loitering alone with a man, let alone spilling family secrets in his ear, but there was something exhilarating about holding his attention. For weeks, in many ways years, she’d been an afterthought. Female, and therefore less than her male brothers. Princess, not queen.
“Mmm, yes, I’d love to fetch a fresh brandy,” she said with a cheeky slant of her lashes at him.
No smile of answering flirtation, only a circumspect look that made her heart sink under the feeling she had disappointed him.
“I don’t need your permission,” she pointed out, but her confidence was a stuttering thing in her chest.
“We’ll see,” he said cryptically and took her arm to steer her around the pool.
His touch sent a shock of electricity through her. She jolted and nearly turned her ankle. It was disconcerting, made even worse by his disapproving frown.
I’m not that drunk, she wanted to claim, but all coherent thoughts seemed to have left her brain.
Her entire being was realigning its magnetic poles with something in him. She wasn’t just aware of him. His presence beside her seemed to surround her in a glow that tingled her skin and warmed her blood. It compressed her breaths while making her feel each one come into her like scent, except it was his aura she was taking into herself.
In a daze, she let him guide her toward the path that would lead them into the garden and back to the wedding reception.
“You don’t drink at all?” she asked, trying desperately to ground herself in reality.
“Never.”
“Oh, please,” she teased, leaning into his firm grip on her elbow. “Let me be the one to initiate you.”
Some dim instinct for self-preservation warned her that provoking him was a terrible idea. Something deeper, even. A sense that her gentle mockery not only failed to impact him but was misplaced. He wasn’t weak at any level. Nor innocent. He was worldly to the point of cynical, and inimitably strong because he allowed no one to influence him.
Looking up at him as they entered the garden, she noted that his mouth was a work of art. Despite how very serious it was, his lips were full and sensual. How would they feel, crushed against hers?
The flush that went through her at that thought was pure lust, hitting in all her erogenous zones and making her feet tangle into themselves again.
He stopped and steadied her, frowning. “Do I have to carry you?”
She laughed at the thought of it. She was worldly enough to have fooled around with men, but she knew who she was. She had kept her reputation intact along with her virginity for the sake of her family. Maybe even to avoid one more harsh criticism from her mother. The deep-down truth, however, was that she’d never been overcome with enough desire to give her body to anyone.
The compulsion to throw herself into the arms of this man, tonight, was intense enough to unnerve her. A drunk and stupid idea, indeed, but exciting. She didn’t even know his name!
“What were you doing over here? Following me?”
“Same as you.” A muscle in his cheek ticked. “Reflecting.”
“On?”
“Responsibility.”
“How boring. I’m surprised I didn’t find you drunk and facedown in that pool.”
The severity in his expression didn’t ease. His hold on her arm sent glittering sensations through her bloodstream. She ought to shake him off. What would people think if they returned together? Nothing good, that was certain.
Such a remarkable man, though. One she really didn’t want to share with a party full of beautiful women. She wanted him to be hers. To look on her with adoration and desire.
His expression in the moonlight was cool and decidedly intent. Ruthless, even. But there was hunger buried deep beneath his layers of control. Avid male need that she had seen often enough to recognize it. His narrowed eyes focused on her mouth, telling her his speculation was along the same lines as her own.
“Don’t you want to throw caution to the wind sometimes? I do.” She flipped her hair behind her shoulder again. Look at me. Want me. “Malak gets away with it all the time. I’m tired of being the good girl.”
“Are you?” Something in his silky tone and the way he flicked his gaze down her front wound around her like ribbons, exciting and wicked. Tightening and binding, compressing her breaths, yet making her feel free.
“Am I tired? Or a good girl? I’m both.” She thought of her charity work, her carefully cultivated image of kindness and purity, her endless striving to earn her mother’s approval and her stalwart presence beside the men in her life as they took their own self-destructive paths.
All her life, she had tried to be like her mother. They had all thought Queen Namani so perfect, but she hadn’t been. Why should Galila live up to something that was an illusion? Live up to the expectations of a woman who not only hadn’t held herself to such high standards after all but was also dead.
“I’m ready to do what I want.” She pressed herself to his front and lifted her mouth.
“I don’t take advantage of inebriated women,” he said, but with a glance toward the light of the party. His cheeks hollowed, giving his profile a chillingly ruthless appearance. His hands on her arms tightened in some internal struggle.
“I’m not that drunk,” she dismissed in a sultry voice. She was low on inhibition, certainly, but more intoxicated by the excitement he made her feel.
They were in a faraway, unlit corner of the garden, where the scent of roses and herbs, orange blossom and frangipani coated the air, making it feel thick as a blanket around her.
“Kiss me,” she demanded when he hesitated.
His hands almost began to push her away, but he only held her like that, staring into her uplifted face. For three heartbeats that shook the entire world, they stood like that, as he debated and came to a decision.
With a muttered imprecation, he circled his arms around her. His fingers dove into her hair, tilting back her head as his mouth came down to cover hers.
For another pulse of time, that was all it was. One mouth against another while the universe seemed to open itself, leaving her utterly vulnerable yet transfixed by the vast beauty of it.
With a harsh noise in his throat, he dragged his lips across hers. Instantly they were engulfed in a kiss that was beyond anything she had ever experienced. Intimate and passionate. Hot and damp and demanding. A statement of possession but with a quality that swept her into abandoning herself willingly. Joyfully.
The texture of his tongue met her own, boldly erotic. She reacted with a moan and mashed herself into him so hard her breasts hurt, but it felt good, too. The contact assuaged the tips that stung like bites. When he started to ease back, she whimpered and pressed her hand to the cloth covering his head, urging him to continue kissing her with this mad passion. She wanted to feel his hair, taste his skin, strip naked and know the weight of him over her.
She wanted to know how that hard flesh that was pressing against her belly would feel stroking inside her.
With an abrupt move and a ragged hiss of indrawn air, he pulled back. “Not here.”
Had he read her mind? Her body?
“My room,” she whispered, already plotting their discreet path through the halls of the palace.
“Mine,” he stated. She couldn’t tell if it was a preference of location or if he was staking a claim on her. Either way, she let him take her hand and drag her from the garden toward the stairs that led up to the balcony outside the ballroom.
She balked in the shadows at the bottom of the steps. “My lipstick. People will know.”
“I thought you were ready to take control of your own life?”
In the slant of light, she saw a mercilessness curl at the corner of his mouth. He pivoted them a few steps into the shadows beside the wall of the steps.
She was more than ready to give herself to him, but this was her home. Her brother’s wedding. She was the Princess of Khalia. She was sober enough to know that she had to be discreet about having an affair, not parade it through the middle of a state ceremony.
But as her would-be lover pressed her to the stones that had barely cooled in the hours since sundown, she forgot her misgivings. Her hands found the heat of his neck and she parted her lips, moaning as he kissed her again.
He transported her to that place of magic they seemed to create between them.
As she lost herself to his kiss again, he stroked her hip and thigh, urging her to pick up her knee and make space for him between her legs. Cool air grazed her skin as he shifted her skirt up, up and out of the way, touching—
She gasped at the first contact of fingertips against the back of her thigh. Arrows of pleasure shot into her core, making her yearn so badly her eyes grew damp along with her underthings. She arched her neck as he trailed his mouth down her throat.
It was exquisite and joyful and...
Wait.
He was hard where he pressed between her legs, but something was off.
She touched the side of his face, urging him to lift his head. There was heat in his glittering eyes, but it was banked behind a cooler emotion. Something deliberate. His skin might have been flushed with arousal, but his expression was dispassionate.
He wasn’t as involved as she was.
Hurt and unease began to worm through her, but before she could fully react, she heard a gasp and a giggle above them. Someone said a pithy, “Get a room.”
“That’s the princess!” a female voice hissed.
“With who?” She knew that demanding masculine voice. She looked up to see several faces peering down at them over the wall of the balcony, one of them her brother’s. He did not look pleased.
Did her lover release her leg to find a modicum of decorum? Not right away. Not before she caught a dark look of satisfaction in his hard features.
Gaze solely on her, he very slowly eased his hold on her leg so his touch branded into her skin as she lowered her thigh. Humiliation pulsed in her throat, made all the more painful by the way he had gone from passionately excited to...this. Remote. Unaffected. Perhaps even satisfied by her public set down.
Angry and embarrassed as she was, her abdomen still tightened in sensual loss as he drew away from their full-frontal contact, which only added to her mortification.
“You were right,” he said. “We should have gone to your room.”
She had no choice but to take refuge there. Alone and fast.