she could see it. She could sense it.
Possibly that was due more to the fact that he had pulled her out of the bathtub yesterday and thrown her onto his bed, than any kind of sixth sense on her part.
Still, she was confident in her answer to his question.
“No. You aren’t,” she said.
“But I appear to be. Or rather, I appear to be when it suits me.”
“Is that what you are suggesting I do? Behave the part of princess in public?”
“I should like for you to be a little bit more tame than you already are, as I have no interest in being bitten.” Something changed in his eyes as he said the words. Anger morphing into something else entirely. To a molten heat she could swear radiated from him. Something she couldn’t quite sort out. There was a lot of that between them.
“I have never bitten anyone in my life. Your concerns are unfounded.”
He arched an eyebrow. “Are they?” He took a step toward her, his dark eyes boring into hers. “If I were to grab you now and throw you down on that bed, you wouldn’t bite me?”
Her heart was fluttering so fast she could scarcely catch her breath. “Why would you do that?”
“Do not tell me you are so naive that you are unaware of what a man wants from a woman,” he said, something hard, dangerous in his tone.
“Of course not,” she said, her throat feeling tight, her face hot.
“You know what a husband wants from his wife, then,” he said.
It felt as if a fire had broken out over her body, burning her in the most intimate places. She should strangle him with his own tie for daring to speak to her in such a manner. She should certainly not be overheating. “But I am not your wife.”
He reached out, taking her chin between his thumb and forefinger, his hold firm, his eyes locked with hers. She should move away from him. She should kick him. She did neither.
“You will be my wife. In every sense of the word. I do like that dress,” he said, his gaze roaming over her body. “I do wonder, though, if I would like it better on the floor.” He leaned in closer, and her breath caught. “I wonder, if I stripped it from your body, if I were to try and claim you, would you try to bite me then?”
“Try it,” she said, her voice trembling, “try it and see, you bastard.”
“Dirty talk. I like it. If you think that’s going to push me away, I hate to disappoint you.” He moved closer then, his lips a whisper away from hers. And she found that rather than wanting to draw away, perversely she wanted to lean in closer to him. She could feel a connection forming between them, physical, real, tangible. She wanted to solidify it. She didn’t want to break it. How long had it been since she felt connected to anyone? How long had it been since anyone touched her? “Sadly, for you, disappointing people is what I do best.”
Then he moved away. She felt his withdrawal like a gale-force wind. Making her feel disheveled, cold.
“I resisted the urge to eviscerate you with my teeth,” she said, trying to keep her tone stiff. “Perhaps I am not as uncivilized as you seem to think I am.”
“Perhaps I’m not as civilized as you think I am.”
“If you’re trying to frighten me into submitting to your marriage plan, I’m afraid I must deliver the disappointing news that it will not work.” She swallowed hard, calling on all her strength to form the next sentence, to meet his gaze while she spoke the words.
He laughed, a dark, humorless sound. “Silly woman. I don’t need your submission. I need your cooperation.”
“Is there any way I can help you without marrying you?”
“No. There isn’t.”
She gritted her teeth. “That’s very inflexible of you.”
“I am inflexible. In this instance largely because my brother is. I owe him. I disappointed him once, and I cannot do it again. This is my atonement. You are my penance.”
“I suppose in that case lowering yourself onto my body will be much like crawling over broken glass.”
He chuckled, which angered her because those words had cost her. Because she was dealing in subject matter she was not well versed in, trying to play that she was sophisticated. As if the things he said were unremarkable. And when she reached for a comment she thought might shock him, he didn’t even have the decency to look fazed. “To the contrary, I imagine lowering myself onto your body—as you so eloquently put it—will be the most enjoyable portion of our enforced union.”
“Why marriage?” she asked, feeling desperate. “Why not... I suppose I don’t understand what else I could do, because I’m not entirely certain why it is you need me.”
“I must marry you because Kairos gave the order for me to do so. Kairos asked me to do so to improve relations between Petras and Tirimia. Presumably there are more detailed explanations available, but he didn’t give them, and I didn’t ask. The reasoning was irrelevant.”
“And yet you do not seem like a man who would normally feel that way. I can’t imagine that you’re docilely lying down and engaging in something against your will, simply because it’s the right thing to do. There is something else to this. There has to be.”
She had no idea how she was so certain of this, only that she was. Nothing about Andres was docile. She was right, he wasn’t tame. Not in the least. And yet he was allowing himself to be collared and muzzled by his older brother. It made no sense.
“I told you already I spent a great many years doing nothing less than exactly what I wanted. In fact, I was doing that only last week. I have made mistakes,” he said, his tone uncompromising. “Mistakes I had hoped were healed by time, and circumstance that had nothing to do with conciliatory actions on my part. It turns out I was wrong.”
“Be specific,” she said. “Where I come from we don’t deal in this kind of circular conversation. Either we tell someone what we are thinking, or we don’t. There is no alluding to events and talking around the most important element of the truth.”
It was true, though she was rarely included in important conversations back in her homeland. Still, the exclusion was not ambiguous.
“You want to know what I did? Is that it?”
“If it answers the question of why you’re doing this, then yes. I feel like I have a right to know.”
“So be it, then.”
* * *
Andres felt strangely reluctant to tell Zara the truth. It was an oddity that she didn’t know already. Everyone in his country did. Anyone abroad who read tabloids while standing in line at the grocery store knew the sordid details of his past, and what had become of Kairos’s first engagement.
And it was that fact that made him so reluctant to speak of it.
She didn’t look at him and see the playboy prince. Didn’t look at
