“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.”
“I cannot follow this conversation,” he replied, his tone silky, his attention on her lush mouth. “I am a bully if I do not listen to you, and a whipped puppy if I do?”
She did not answer him. She only gazed at him for a long moment, her full mouth soft, her eyes big. Adel could feel the tension between them, the kick and the spark. He could see the truth of it reflected in the way she caught her breath, the way her body swayed toward his as if of its own volition.
Mine, he thought, deep inside. Like a perfect note played on a traditional balalaika, low and true.
“You said you loved me.” She said it so matter-of-factly, yet he could still hear the question. The uncertainty.
“I do.” And then he could not help but touch her, reaching across the space he did not want between them to hold her soft cheek in his hand. She shivered slightly, and then leaned into it, like a cat. “And I suspect you must feel the same, or you would not be here. You would have gone on to America. You would not have returned.”
“It seems I cannot stay away,” she said softly.
“Nor should you,” he said. “You are the Queen, Lara. You are my wife. This is your home.”
Lara blew out a breath, as a shadow moved over her face. “I do not want what my parents had,” she said, her silver-blue eyes so serious it made Adel ache. “I refuse to do to this child what was done to me. Or to you. I refuse.”
“Stay with me, Princess,” he said softly, raising his other hand to hold her face between them, looking deep into her eyes, into their future. “We will make the world whatever we wish it to be, together.”
Once again, Lara stood out on the terrace high in the mountains and looked out over the Alakkulian Valley. It sparkled in the bright morning light, the chill of the coming autumn already moving in from the higher elevations, bringing a sharper kind of light and a certain crispness to the air. She pulled her thick robe tighter over her torso and snuggled into it, flexing her toes against the cold stones beneath her.
She felt … alive. More alive than she had ever felt before.
Because she had chosen, finally. For the first time since Adel had appeared before her in that far-off parking lot, as if conjured out of the June afternoon, she had decided.
She had sat in that anonymous hotel room for what seemed like weeks, unable to process both what had happened and her own reaction to it. She’d wanted to die. She’d felt as if part of her had, as every moment stretched out and seemed to last forever, all of them resoundingly, painfully empty of Adel. She had not understood how she could yearn for him so much, hunger for him. How his absence could feel like a missing limb. How she could want him near her as much for the calm, quiet steadiness of his presence as for the desire he could stir in her with a single glance.
But then she’d realized that this time, it was up to her. He had let her go. His doing so had shocked her, but it had also freed her,