Billionaires: The Royal
Her throat tightened, her palms sweating. She hadn’t thought about that day in years. She had turned it into a lesson, an object, a cautionary tale. But the images of the day, the way that it had smelled, the weather. The sounds her stepfather had made as he bled out on the floor, the screams of her mother when she realized what had been done... Those things she had blocked out. The entire incident had been carefully formed into a morality tale. Something that served to teach, but something she couldn’t feel.
Not anymore.
Use what you need, discard the rest.
“I never wanted passion. Or love. Because...I shouldn’t. I’m afraid of what I might be. What I might become. I think I’ve proven I have the capacity to act recklessly when I’m overtaken by strong emotion,” she said, realizing that to him, the admission must seem ridiculous. For years all he had ever seen was the carefully cultivated cool reserve she had spent the better part of her teenage years crafting from blood and other people’s consequences.
“Tell me,” he said.
She was going to. Her heart was thundering in her ears, a sickening beat that echoed through her body, made her feel weak.
But maybe if she said it, he would understand. Maybe if she said it he would get why what he’d offered had seemed amazing. Why it had felt insufficient. Why she’d chosen to end it instead of asking for more.
“I was walking home from school. I was seventeen at the time. It was a beautiful day. And when I approached the trailer I could already hear them fighting. Not unusual. They fought all the time. My mother was screaming, which she always did. My stepfather was ignoring her. He was drunk, which he very often was.”
She didn’t let herself go back to that house. Not even in her mind. It was gritty and dirty and full of mold. But more than that. The air was heavy. The ghost of faded love lingering and oppressive, a malevolent spirit that choked the life out of everything it touched.
“I didn’t know,” Kairos said.
“I know,” she said. “I didn’t want you to.” It stung her pride, to admit how low she’d started. To admit that she had no idea who her biological father was to a man for whom genetics was everything.
She was a bastard, having a royal baby. It seemed wrong somehow.
You always knew it would be this way. Why are you panicking now that it’s too late?
Because the idea of it was one thing, the reality of it—all of it—her marriage, her past, her life, was different.
She’d spent the past year growing increasingly unhappy. And then Andres had married Zara. Watching the two of them physically hurt. It twisted her stomach to see the way they smiled at each other. Put a bitter, horrible taste in her mouth.
Made her feel a kind of heaviness she hadn’t felt since she’d stood in that grimy little trailer.
“Tell me,” he said, an order, because Kairos didn’t know how to ask for things any other way.
“She kept screaming at him to listen. But he never did. She was so angry. She left the room. I thought she was going to pack, she did that a lot, even though she never left. Or that maybe she’d given up. Gone to take a nap. She did that sometimes too depending on how much she’d had to drink. But she came back. And she had a gun.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
A COCKTAIL OF cold dread slithered down into Kairos’s stomach. He could hardly credit the words that were coming out of his wife’s mouth. Could hardly picture the gentle, sophisticated creature in front of him witnessing anything like this, much less being so tightly connected to it. Tabitha was strong. She possessed a backbone of steel, one he had witnessed on more than one occasion. When it came to handling foreign dignitaries, or members of the government and Petras, she was cool, calm and poised. When it came to organizing his schedule, and defending her position on hot-button issues, she never backed down.
But for all that she possessed that strength, there was something so smooth and fragile about her too. As though she were a porcelain doll, one that he was afraid to play with too roughly. For fear he might break her.
If she were that breakable, you would have shattered her on your desk.
Yes, that was true. He had not thought about her fertility then. Had not taken care with her, as he had always done in the past.
But still, he hadn’t thought in that moment. He simply acted. This revelation challenged perceptions that he had never examined. Not deeply.
“What happened?” he asked, trying to keep his voice level.
“She shot him,” Tabitha said, the words distant and matter-of-fact. Her expression stayed placid, as though she were discussing the contents of the menu for a dinner at the palace. “She was very sorry that she did it. Because he didn’t get back up. He died. And she was sent to jail. I don’t visit her.”
She spoke the last item on the list as though it were the gravest sin of all. As though the worst thing of all was that she had distanced herself from her mother, not that her mother was a murderer.
“You saw all this,” he said, that same shell he had accused her of having wrapping itself around his own veins now, hardening them completely.
“Yes. It was a long time ago,” she said, her voice sounding as if it was coming straight out of that distant past. “Eleven...twelve years ago now? I’m not sure.”
“It doesn’t matter how long ago it was, you still saw it.”
“I don’t like to think about it,” she said, her blue eyes locking with his, looking at him for the first time since she had started telling her gruesome story. “I don’t think you can blame me for that.”
“No, not at all,” he said.
“It wasn’t relevant to our union. Not relevant to whether or not I would be good for the position.”
“Except it clearly was, as I think it is probably related to the action you have taken now.”
She looked down. “I can’t argue with that. I was growing frustrated in our relationship, and I don’t like to give those feelings any foothold on my life. I don’t like to allow them free rein.”
“Surely you don’t think you’re going to find a gun and shoot me?”
“I’m sure my mother didn’t think she would do that either,” Tabitha said, starting to pace, her hands clasped in front of her. She was picking at the polish on her fingernails, something he had never seen her do before. It was then he noticed that she wasn’t wearing her ring. How had he missed it before?
Perhaps you were too wrapped up in imagining those fingers wrapped around your member to notice.
He gritted his teeth. Yes, that was the problem. Whatever had exploded between them was stealing his ability to think clearly.
“Where is your ring?”
She stopped thinking and looked at her fingernails. “I took it off.”
“It was very expensive,” he said, though that was not his concern at all, and he wasn’t sure why he was pretending that it was.
“I know. But it is also mine. That was part of our prenuptial agreement if you recall.”
“I don’t need the money, I was just concerned something might have happened to it.”
“It’s in a safe. In a bank. It’s fine. But there is no point in me wearing it when I’m not your wife. I would hate to start gossip in the press.”
“We already have.”
“Imagine the gossip if they knew my past as well.”
“Enough. No one is going to find out. Because I will not tell. Anyway, it is not a reflection on you.”
“Isn’t it? My genetics. Our child’s genetics.”
“If blood determined everything I would be a tyrant or absent.” He didn’t like to speak of his parents. Talking about his father, and his rages, was much simpler than talking about his mother, who was not there at all. But either way, it was a topic he preferred not to broach.
“Well, you’re neither of those things,” she said, “but Andres isn’t exactly well-adjusted.”
Kairos laughed, thinking of his brother and the large swath of destruction Andres had spent the first thirty years of his life cutting through the kingdom, through Kairos’s own life. “He has settled, don’t you think?”
Tabitha laughed. “I suppose he has. I’m not quite sure how they managed. A real marriage. Especially out of their circumstances. If any marriage came about in a stranger way than ours, it’s theirs.”
“Zara is not exactly conventional. Or suitable,” Kairos said.
Tabitha looked up at him, deep, fathomless emotion radiating from her blue eyes. “Perhaps I should have been more unsuitable?”
Her words made his heart twist, made his stomach tighten. “Tabitha, I cannot imagine the things you have seen,” he said. He wasn’t sure why he said it. But then, he didn’t know what else to say.
“I’m the same person.”
The same person from before she had told him about her experience, he knew that was what she meant. But for him it only highlighted the fact that he didn’t truly know her at all. She was right. The Tabitha who had witnessed the murder of her stepfather was the same woman he had been married to for the past five years. The same woman he had known for nearly a decade.
But he didn’t know her. Not really. How could he? She was all things soft, beautiful and contained, and he had imagined she had grown that way, like a plant that had only ever experienced life in a hothouse.
It turned out she had been forged in the elements. An orchid put to the test in a blizzard. And she had come out of it alive. Beautiful. Seemingly untouched.
It humbled him in a strange way.
“We do not know each other,” he said.
“I’ve been saying that,” she said.
“Yes, you have been. But I didn’t realize how true it was until now. You know my life, so I did not imagine there were such secrets between us.”
“We don’t talk about your life,” she said, “not beyond what you had for dinner last night.”
He couldn’t argue with the truth of that statement. “There is nothing to tell. The evidence of my life is before you. You have seen who I am by my actions. I don’t see the point in rehashing how I felt when my mother left.”
“You felt something,” she said, her voice muted.
“Of course I did,” he said. The very thought opened up a pit of despair inside of him. Helplessness. And a dark, black rage he would rather not acknowledge lived within him. “We are strangers.”
“Strangers who have sex,” Tabitha added.
“Yes,” he said, “certainly. And yet, I’m not even entirely certain I know your body.”
Her cheeks turned pink. “You did all right with it last month.”
“And the times before that?” This line of questioning was not pleasant for him. What man liked calling his own prowess into question? But it wasn’t so simple as prowess. He had the ability, but he’d always held back with her. Always.
That was the very beginning of where he had gone wrong. He had imagined that he needed to go slowly, that he needed to mitigate the passion between them.
The truth of it was he had been attracted to her from the moment she walked into his office. Even during his engagement to Francesca. And while he had never acted on it, it had been there, shimmering beneath the surface like waves of heat over the sand. He wanted her. He had always wanted her.
He had kept a part of himself closed off because it was so strong. Because, like her, he rejected strong emotion, strong desire.
But perhaps it would be possible to open up the physical, to have that, while keeping the rest of it safe. Perhaps it might give her what she craved. Or at the very least thaw some of the chill that was between them.
“Yes, I did then. Or, maybe my clumsiness was simply covered by the explosion between us,” he said.
“There was nothing clumsy about it,” she said, the color in her cheeks intensifying.
“I have held back every time we’ve been together,” he said. “Except then.”
“Why have you held back?”
“Why have you?”
“I think I explained that.” She swallowed visibly. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. We don’t work. We’ve established that.”
“Have we?” Desperation clawed at him like a wild beast. “I’m not sure that’s true. We’ve both admitted to holding back. And I think it’s safe to say that we’re both liars.”
“I never lied to you.”
“There is one very specific word I can think of in response to that. It has to do with the excrement of a bull.”
“Crassness does not suit you, Kairos.”
“Or, perhaps it does,” he said. “How would you know?”
“I wouldn’t. And it isn’t my job to know. The function of ex-wives is just to walk off into the distance and spend all of your money. It isn’t to know you.”
“All right,” he said, an idea pushing its way into the forefront of his mind even as the words exited his mouth. “You will be free to do so. But I have conditions.”
She frowned. “What are you talking about? We both know I don’t actually get any of your money.”
“It doesn’t have to be that way. The prenuptial agreement is very rigid. And I am a man of means. It is unreasonable of me to withhold a portion of that from you after all you have...suffered at my hands. Moreover, you are the mother of my child and therefore a consistent lifestyle will need to be kept whichever household he is staying in at a given time, don’t you agree?”
“I don’t...I don’t understand.”
“As I said, there will be conditions to this agreement.”
“What do you want?”
What he wanted was for everything to go back as it had been. What he wanted was the wife she had been all those years ago. The wife he had imagined she would be forever. The perfect complement to the man he presented to her, the man he presented to the world. Yes, they were liars, but they had told such compatible lies. Such quiet lies.
This explosion of truth wasn’t compatible, and it wasn’t quiet. It had left rubble and shrapnel everywhere, the shattered pieces of the life they once had littering the ground in front of them. There was no ignoring it. There would be no putting it back together as it was. But he wouldn’t leave it. Wouldn’t give up.
They were having a child together. He would not be an absentee father. He would not allow her to be a distant mother. There would be no echoes of his childhood. Not if he had anything to do about it.
And he did. He was king, after all.
“Two weeks. I want fourteen days of honesty. I want your body, I want your secrets. I want everything. And if, at the end of that time, you feel like you still don’t know me, if then, you feel like you cannot make a life with me, then I will give you your divorce. And with it, much more favorable terms than we originally agreed upon. Money. Housing. Shared custody.”
“Why?” She looked stricken, as though he had told her she had to spend two weeks in the dungeon, rather than two weeks with her husband.
“It doesn’t matter why. I am your king, and I have commanded it. Now,” he took a deep breath, trying to cool the flame that was roaring through his veins. One of triumph. One of arousal. “Either take off your dress, or tell me another secret.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
TABITHA’S HEART WAS pounding so hard, she thought she might pass out. She wasn’t entirely certain whether she was living in a nightmare, or a fantasy. Kairos did not ask her to take her clothes off. He just didn’t. He didn’t make demands of her like this at all. And yet, there was no denying that now, her normally cool and controlled husband was looking at her with molten fire in his dark eyes, his gaze intense, uncompromising.
“I’m certain that you did not command me to take my dress off here on the balcony.” Retreating into her icy facade was the most comfortable response she could find. After all, the cold didn’t bother her. It was this heat, this searing, uncompromising heat that arched between them.
“I am certain that I did.” The sun had lowered in the sky some since they had first come outside, and now the rays cut through the palm trees, illuminating his face, throwing his high cheekbones and strong jaw into sharp relief. He looked like a stranger. Not at all like the man she had married. A man who would never have made such a command of her. She was shaking. Shaking from the inside out. Because she had no choice. Had no choice but to accept his devil’s bargain. She would be a fool not to. He was offering her a chance to raise her child without struggle, without fighting for custody, without fighting for the bare necessities.
But deeper than that, more shamefully than that, she simply wanted to obey. Even though she could hardly imagine it. Slipping her dress off her body, out here, in the open air, the breeze blowing over her skin. To just let go of everything. Of her control. Of her fear.
“We’re the only ones here.” His words jolted her out of her fantasy.
He was right, of course, there was no one else here. There was no one to see. But that wasn’t what concerned her. The fact that there was no one around only frightened her more. There would be no consequences here. No one to stop them. No perfectly planned and well-ordered events on their calendar to interrupt. No rules, no society, no sense of propriety. There was nothing to stop her from stripping off her clothes, from closing the space between them and wrapping herself around his body, giving herself over to this desperate, gnawing ache that had taken her over completely.
She turned away from him, heading toward the entrance to the villa. She felt the firm hand on her shoulder, and found herself being turned around, pressed against the wall. Her eyes clashed with his, electricity skittering along her veins, collecting in her stomach. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“Away from you. Away from here. Because you’re crazy.”
“Your king gave you an order,” he said, his tone shot through with steel. It should make her angry. It should not make her feel restless. Shouldn’t make her breasts ache. Shouldn’t make her feel slick and ready between her thighs. But he did. He did.
His anger, his arrogance—never directed at her before, not like this—was a fresh and heady drug she’d never tried before.
“I see.” She swallowed hard. “And will he punish me if I don’t comply?”
“I would have to set an example,” he said, his tone soft, steady and no less strong.
“For who? As you have already stated, there is no one here.”
“For you. For the future. I cannot have you thinking you can simply defy me. Not if this is to work.”
“I haven’t agreed to—”
He reached up, gripped her chin and held her tight. “You may not have agreed to stay with me forever, agape. But you have no choice other than to agree to this two weeks. I do not wish to spend any of that time arguing with you. Not when I could find other uses for your mouth.”
She gasped, pressing herself more firmly against the wall, away from him. Erotic images assaulted her mind’s eye. Of herself, kneeling before him. Tasting him, taking him into her mouth. She had never done that before. Not with him, not with anyone.
Strange, now she thought about it. Other people traded that particular sex act so casually, and she had never even shared it with her husband.
It didn’t disgust her. To the contrary, it intrigued her. Aroused her. And yet, she was shrinking away from him as though she were afraid. She would not be so easily cowed. Would not allow him to claim total control in this way. She was strong. She had not got to where she was in life by folding in on herself. He might be the king, but she was a queen, for God’s sake.
“Could you? That would be a first, then.” She lifted her hand, curved it around his neck, losing her fingers through his hair. “Shall I get on my knees and bow down before Your Majesty?”
It was his turn to draw back, dark colors slashing his high, well-defined cheekbones. “I did not mean...”
Of course he didn’t. He never meant such salacious things. Ever. He had likely only been thinking of a kiss. He probably hadn’t even intended for her to take her dress off.
On the heels of that thought, her hand moved to her shoulder and flicked the strap of her dress down. “Words are powerful,” she said, pushing at the other strap so they both hung down. “Once they’re spoken you can’t erase them. Even if you didn’t intend for them to be taken in a certain way. Once you speak them, they belong to whoever hears them.” She reached behind her back, grabbing a hold of the zipper tab and drawing it down to the middle of her back. The top of her dress fell, exposing her bare breasts to him.
“Tabitha,” he growled, his tone a warning.
“What is it? Is my obedience not to your liking? Is this yet another one of our miscommunications?” She pushed the dress down her hips, taking her panties with it, standing before him, naked, and, somehow, not embarrassed.
“You seemed so confident this was what you wanted only a moment ago.”
He said nothing as she lowered herself to the patio in front of him. She was shaking. And she wasn’t entirely certain if it was the desire or rage. Or if it was some twisted, unholy offspring of the two, taking her over completely. She wasn’t entirely certain it mattered. Just as she was sure inexperience wouldn’t matter here either. She didn’t know what sorts of things Kairos had done with women before her. They barely talked about their own sex life, so they’d had no reason at all to discuss experiences either of them had had prior to their marriage. Of course, for her, there hadn’t been so much as a kiss. As far as he went? He was a mystery to her.
But one thing she knew for certain, if he was as faithful to her as he claimed to be, no one had done this for him in at least five years. Time healed all wounds, and likely erased memories of oral pleasure. At least, she could hope.
She reached up and grabbed hold of his belt buckle, working the leather through the metal clasp. Her hands were shaking, as much from nerves and determination as from desire. It was impossible for her to tell if this was really her defining move in a power play, or if she was simply acting out of need. Out of lust. She supposed that didn’t matter either.
He reached down, grabbing a fistful of her hair, stopping her short. “Tabitha. I would not ask this of you.”
She looked up at him, at the desperation in his dark eyes, and something twisted, low and painful inside of her. “Why do you think it’s a sacrifice?”
“It offers nothing to you.”
“Isn’t that what this two weeks is about? My service to you?” She immediately regretted the words the moment they left her mouth. That it was too late to call them back. As she had only just said to him, once words were spoken they could not be erased.
“No,” he said, his voice rough, “I do not require you to lower yourself in this way.”
Her eyes stung, a deep, painful ache that started behind them and worked its way forward. She said nothing. Instead, she tugged his pants and underwear down slightly, exposing his rampant masculinity to her. She didn’t often examine his body. More often than not, they made love in the dark. If she ever saw him naked, it was most likely an accident.
Her breath hissed through her teeth as she ran her palm over his hardened length. He was beautiful. Five years, and she had never had the chance to truly appreciate that. Five years and she had never knelt before him in this way, had never even contemplated doing what she was about to do. She had been so determined to keep control, so absolutely hell-bent on maintaining the facade of the perfect ice queen that she’d even allowed her fantasies to become frozen.
She regretted it now, bitterly. Wasted time freezing in the cold when she could have been warm. Like sleeping out in a snowbank only to discover that the front door had been unlocked the whole time, the lit hearth in a warm bed available to her if she had only tried.
Why had she never tried?
She curled her fingers around him, leaning forward and flicking the tip of her tongue out across his heated flesh. His hips flexed forward, a harsh groan escaping his lips. His fist tightened on her hair, so tight it hurt. Yet, she didn’t want him to release her. Didn’t want him to pull away.