He would not miss this part of their life at all. He told himself that having this part end would be worth the rest of it. At least they would be together. Surely that was the important thing.
“You should not have stayed so long in Arjat an-Nahr,” she was saying, that teasing note in her voice, the one that normally made him smile automatically. “I’m tempted to think that you care more for your country and its demands on your time than your poor, neglected wife.”
He knew she was kidding. Of course she was. But still—tonight, it pricked at him. It seemed to suggest things about their future that he knew he didn’t want to hear. That he could not accept, not even as an offhanded joke. It cut too deep tonight.
“I will be king one day,” he reminded her, keeping his voice light, because he knew—he did—that she was only teasing, the way she often did. The way she always had. Wasn’t her very irreverence why he had been so drawn to her in the first place? “Everything will come second to my country then, Kiara. Even you.”
And him, of course. Especially him.
She looked up at him, those marvelous brown eyes of hers moving over his face in the dark. He knew that she could read him, and wondered what she saw. Not the truth, of course. He knew even she could not know that, not from a single searching look, no matter how well she could read what she saw. No one knew the truth yet save his father’s doctors, his mother and Azrin himself.
“I know who I married,” she told him softly, though Azrin did not think she could when he felt so unsure of it himself. “Do you doubt it?” She smiled; soothing, somehow, what felt so raw in him that easily. As if she could sense it without his having to tell her. And then her voice took on that teasing lilt again, encouraging him to follow her back into lighter, shallower waters. “You always take such pains to remind me, after all.”
It was only change, he told himself. Everything changed. Even them. Even this. It was neither good nor bad—it was simply the natural order of things.
And more than that, he had always known this day was coming. Why had he imagined otherwise, these past five years? Who had he been trying to fool?
“Do you mean when I request that you keep your voice down while you are pretending that I am merely some overconfident stranger picking you up in a bar, lest the papers feel the need to share this game of yours with the whole world?” He couldn’t quite make his voice sound reproving, especially not when her brown eyes were so warm, so challenging, and seemed to connect directly with his sex. And his heart. “Does that count as taking pains, Kiara? Or is it simply a more highly developed sense of self-preservation?”
“Yes, my liege,” she murmured in feigned obeisance, laughter thrumming in her voice, just below the surface. She even bowed her head in a mock sign of respect. “Whatever you say, my liege.”
His almost equally feigned look of exasperation made her laugh, and the bright, musical sound of it seemed to roll through him like light.
He couldn’t regret the past five years. He didn’t.
He had always taken his duties as Crown Prince as seriously as he’d taken his position as the managing director of the Khatan Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds in the world. Kiara had always been wholly dedicated to her own role as vice president of her family’s famous winery in South Australia’s renowned Barossa Valley, a career that took her all over the world and kept her as busy as he was. Theirs had always been a modern marriage, the only one like it in the whole of his family’s history.
But then, he had long been his country’s emblem of the future, whether he wanted to be or not—and no one had ever asked him his feelings on the subject. His feelings were irrelevant, Azrin knew. While his father was very much and very proudly wedded to the old ways, Azrin was supposed to represent the modern age come to life in the midst of old-world Khatan, his small, oil-rich island nation in the Persian Gulf.
He knew—had always known—that once he took the throne he was expected to usher in the new era of Khatan that his father either could not or did not want to. He was expected to lead his people into a freer, more independent future, without the bloodshed and turmoil some of their neighboring countries had experienced.
And Kiara had been his first step in that direction, little as he might have thought of her in those terms when he’d met her. She was a twenty-first century Western woman in every respect, independent and ambitious, a fourth generation Australian winemaker and wholly impressive in her own right. Marrying her had been a commitment to a very different kind of future than the one his old school father, with his traditional three wives, offered their people.
Together, Azrin and Kiara were considered the new face of a new Khatan. That wouldn’t change now—it would only become more analyzed and critiqued. More speculated about. More observed and remarked upon. Their marriage would cease to be theirs; it would become his people’s, just as the rest of his life would. It was inevitable.
Azrin had always known this day would come. He just hadn’t expected it would come now. So soon. And perhaps because he’d thought he would have so many more years left before it happened, he certainly hadn’t understood until now how very much he’d dreaded it.
He didn’t want to admit that, not even to himself.
“Where have you gone?” she asked now, stopping, and thereby making him stop, too. The busy Sydney Pier bristled with ferries and commuters headed home for the evening, tourist groups and restaurant patrons on their way to an evening out. Her clever eyes met his as her palm curved against his jaw. “You’re miles away.”
“I am still in Khatan,” he said, which was true enough. He took her hand in his, lacing their fingers together, and tugged her along with him as he started to walk again, guiding her around the usual cluster of stalls and street performers making the most of the evening rush and the ever-present tourists. “But I would much rather be in you. Naked, I think you said?”
“I did say that.” Her voice was so proper, so demure. Only because he knew her well could he hear the mischief beneath the surface, that touch of wickedness that made him harden in response. “I thought you might have forgotten. My liege.”
“I never forget anything that has to do with your naked body, Kiara,” he said in a low voice. “Believe me.”
He wasn’t ready, he thought—and yet he must be. What he wanted, what he felt—none of that mattered any longer. What mattered was who he was, and therefore who he was about to become. He simply had to learn to keep his own desires, his own feelings, in reserve, just as he’d done for years before he’d met Kiara. In truth, it had been nothing but selfishness that had allowed him to spend the past five years pretending it could ever be otherwise.
He handed Kiara into the long black car that idled at the curb once they reached the street and climbed in after her.
Despite the fact that they were a prince and a princess, a royal sheikh and his chosen bride, they had spent years behaving as if they were like any other high-powered couple anywhere else in the world. They’d believed it themselves, Azrin thought. He certainly had.
The 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