In Defiance of Duty by Caitlin Crews Page A

get away with it, to be honest.” He launched into a tale of some childhood adventure Kiara had half forgotten.
    She was laughing when the door to the outside opened again, as Harry reenacted his own teenage response to the trouble they’d got in. Assuming it was one of the many staff members, Kiara didn’t even turn to look.
    “That sounds like a delightful story,” Azrin said in his coldest voice, the chill of it slicing through Kiara’s laughter, straight into her heart, making her freeze solid and then whip around to take in the impossibility of him standing there, so fierce and hard and with that frigid gleam in his not quite blue eyes. Even so cold, so forbidding, he burned into her, making her momentarily blind. “I’m sorry to interrupt.” He was dressed entirely in black, which only served to make him that much more intimidating, something she would have thought impossible. A black T-shirt hugged his powerful torso and the black trousers he wore beneath did the same, and yet, despite the casual clothes, he was obviously and overpoweringly a king.
    He looked as regal as he did lethal, like some kind of dangerous angel, conjured up from who knew what kind of erotic dream to loom here, all smooth muscles, hard aristocratic stance, and implied danger. There was no mistaking that masculine threat, that ingrained assumption of dominance. It was written on every hard-packed inch of him.
    He never took his gaze from Kiara. And yet that banked sensual menace, that unmistakable air of command, seemed to come off him in waves to blanket the whole of the room.
    She could feel him in her bones, as if he had worked his way into the very marrow of her. And she could not seem to tell if what she felt so deep inside, that sweeping, twisting wave of sensation, was jubilation or despair.
    Or both.
    “Hello, Kiara,” Azrin said in that dark, seductive way of his that set off fires inside of her, whole bright blazes she hadn’t felt since she’d walked away from him in Washington and couldn’t seem to breathe through now. There was only the lick of flames and that mad urge to throw herself directly into them. Into him. His mouth pulled into a crook that was not quite mocking, and yet was entirely too knowing. “My queen.”
    “Poor Harry,” she said, her voice chiding.
    It was the first thing she said to him, directly to him, and she didn’t stop walking as she said it, she only ushered him into the sitting room on the family side of the chateau as if he was nothing but a guest. One she hardly knew, come to that. Azrin wasn’t particularly impressed by that kind of reception from the woman whose absence had tortured him, flayed him alive, and in point of fact still did—but he shoved his own reaction aside.
    This was all a means to an end, he told himself as he followed her. His desired end, whatever he had to do to achieve it. Whatever it took.
    She turned back toward him once she’d walked all the way into the room, and it hit him then, the weight of the strain between them. It seemed to echo in the air between them, making its own noise. He couldn’t help but drink her in, as if he’d been thirsty for her all this time.
    He knew it was no more that the truth—he had been. He was.
    She was dressed very casually in sand-colored trousers and a top that clung to her mouthwatering curves and was the precise shade of ripe cherries. Her light brown hair was pinned back from her face, but still fell to her shoulders in waves, and it caused him physical pain not to reach over and touch it. Her. He could not have said why he wanted her so terribly, so completely—but it had always been this way. She had always defied reason.
    He had to order himself to keep from touching her, little as his own body wanted to obey him. He wanted to drag her mouth to his and end this absurd distance between them. He wanted to take her down to the floor and remind her exactly how good it was between them—but too well did he remember what