ROUGHLY, CHARLOTTE SMUDGED the pad of her thumb against the sketch, to blend the thicker lines of charcoal into lighter tones. She was attempting to draw his hands. The hands that had held her against that wall. The hands that he had used to turn her on and melt her bones so mercilessly. The hands that belonged to Akeem. The man who wouldn’t show himself to her. The man she wanted desperately to remember that he was more than a dutiful king.
The servants had brought an easel last night, and a trolley to keep her art supplies on, and it had been...wonderful. Making lines and smudges, expressing herself—
‘Lottie.’
Hurriedly, she flipped her drawing over and turned to face the doorway. Akeem stood there, wearing white loose-fitting trousers and a long tunic.
‘Still not ready?’ he asked, and a guilty flush heated her cheeks.
‘No, it’s not ready.’
‘You weren’t so shy before.’
‘It’s been a long time.’ She brushed off her hands. Trying to free her fingertips of soot. ‘I’m feeling my way back in.’
‘I have something that will help.’
‘What is it?’
He stepped closer to her. ‘Come with me and I’ll show you.’
‘Where?’ she asked, her body all too aware of his approach. His closeness.
‘It’s a surprise.’
She arched a brow. ‘More caves?’
He laughed and pointed. ‘You have charcoal on your nose.’
She didn’t laugh back. She placed her charcoal on to her new art trolley and stood. This was her chance.
‘I’ll come with you,’ she said, reaching for the watch at her wrist and unbuckling it with trembling fingers, ‘if you tell me about this?’
She held it out to him. He stopped moving and she felt it. The distance he immediately put between them.
‘What is there to tell?’ He frowned. ‘My mother tied that watch around my wrist on my first day at school and reclaimed it when she collected me. She gave it to me and retrieved it every day until she couldn’t. That is it. That’s the story.’
‘No.’ Her bare feet soundless, she moved closer. ‘They’re the facts.’
‘There is no story. You asked me to tell you and I have.’ He reached for her. ‘Now we leave.’
She evaded him. ‘What about the boy she left with it around his wrist every day? What about the boy who kept it? I want to know the why...’ she repeated his words back at him ‘...the how.’
His expression controlled and unreadable, he replied, ‘It is what it is.’
‘Instinct?’ she said, recalling her words to him last night. ‘He survived, didn’t he?’ Her heart squeezed for the little boy he had been. Alone in his grief. Her eyes filled with unexpected tears.
‘I guess he did,’ he replied, his eyes sharp, watching her face, her expression.
‘It must have been hard, surviving on your own for so long. With only this...’ She looked down at the watch and swallowed down the lump in her throat.
His expression turned from passive to enraged. ‘We both know you were as alone as I was.’ His bearded cheek pulsed. ‘We both survived.’ His black eyes flashed. ‘On our own.’
The past came hurtling back to her. ‘Are you still surviving?’ she asked.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Since I arrived you’ve used mechanisms...places where you hide.’
‘I am right in front of you.’
‘Yes, you are,’ she said, ‘but you pull away every time I get close. Last night you pulled away...’ she shifted uneasily ‘...in your head.’
She made herself stand still. She wanted him to know, so she told him.
‘You ran away.’
‘I ran straight to you.’
She shook her head. ‘You distracted me and I let you, because I understand running...’
She stalled, thinking about the right words—the right way to tell him that she got it. That she understood it—him—better now.
She swallowed. ‘I understand how hard it is to let anyone close, because it’s scary. Scary to think someone might see you. I let you see me last night, because I think we could be a family, Akeem.’
Eyes narrowed, he scoffed, ‘A family?’
‘If not a family...at least we could be friends.’
‘Friends do not feel what we feel. They do not feel this intensity—’
‘We’re going to get married. We can choose what we are, can’t we?’
His face gave nothing away, but his hands moved, his thumbs and forefingers grinding against one another at his hips.
‘I was alone growing up with Dad,’ she admitted. ‘Glossing over that—what growing up with him was truly like—is a habit that isn’t easily broken. But I want to stop glossing over it. Because telling you set a part of me free.’
She stopped talking for a moment, because she wasn’t sure she was making sense.
‘It will take time to get my dad’s voice out of my head...telling me to keep quiet,’ she continued. ‘But I don’t have to be quiet any more.’ She inhaled deeply. ‘And neither do you.’
‘Our marriage benefits the crown. The people.’
‘It will still be a marriage,’ she insisted. ‘Two people who should be honest with each other. When one wants to run—the other runs with them. Catches them up and tells them they’re worthy. When I ran in the cave, you caught me and told me I was enough...’
And, oh, how those words had moved her. It was the first time she’d ever heard them. But she shook it off. Right now, it wasn’t about her. It was about him. The man who kept coming back to her. In London, to her bedroom ... He had something to say, and she wanted to hear it.
‘We made a deal,’ she said. ‘And now we need to make the deal work. So next time you want to run, Akeem, I’m going to run with you—because whether or not you like it, you might have bargained on getting yourself a temporary queen, but you got me too. A temporary family. So run all you like, but I’ll catch you. Because that’s what friends do. What family does.’
‘Why is it so important to catch me, qalbi?’ he asked, taking back the control he needed, when his urge was to run.
She’d tied her long hair back, and he wanted to release it. Set her curls free until they feathered her waist and the dip in her spine. He longed to explore with more than his hands...
‘You have told me how—why—you have become this Charlotte,’ he continued, ‘but you did not tell me why you’re helping me?’
‘You didn’t give me a choice, remember?’
She smiled. That small, knowing smile. He wasn’t running. He was walking slowly towards her. Slackening the tension on that rope.
‘There are always choices,’ he said—because there were. He could have decided to be a no one. Instead, he’d become this. And he’d made the right choice.
Had she?
He raised his brow, his heart giving a painful double beat. ‘A diploma?’
‘I can do that on my own,’ she dismissed, too easily. ‘Why are you changing the subject? Stop deflecting.’
‘I’m not deflecting.’ He was. ‘Tell me why?’
Another step. And there it was again. The stray bullet. Her presence. Her scent. He couldn’t help it. He reached out, grasped her by the back of her neck, felt his knuckles cushioned by her curls, and reached up to remove the tie in her hair. It tumbled, heavy and long, around her face. He pulled her towards him.
‘Why are you helping me?’ he asked, and his eyes flicked to the pulse pumping hard at her throat. His lips thinned, and he answered for her. ‘Kindness?’ It was a sneer, because it disgusted him.
The King did not need kindness. The King did not need the emotions tied to family or friends. Because emotions had no place in royal life. His father had administered that lesson, but he had put the teachings into practice. He had decided long ago that to be a true ruler he would set aside the part of himself that needed answers to the question why, because his destiny was to repair a broken legacy—not to weep over his mother or the love his father had denied him.
He didn’t need to know why they’d abandoned him any more because he wasn’t that boy. He was a king. The King.
But here she was, offering help anyway.
‘No, not kindness,’ she rejected. ‘I knew a boy once who became a prince,’ she said. ‘I didn’t see him for a really long time. I owe that boy a great debt, because he showed me once that there was another way to live. He gave me sanctuary, and when I lost him I forgot there could be another way.’
‘And now?’
‘The debt stands. I understand that now. I understand it wasn’t his fault,’ she continued. ‘I stood still because of me. It was my fault. And now I hope I can move forward.’
‘With the boy?’ His voice was deep, the words low, conflicted.
‘With the boy and the Prince,’ she answered. ‘One and the same, he told me. But the Prince also told me he could never really be the boy again, because he’d had to become someone else. Something else. But I think he can be that boy again. I think he can be both. And I would like to meet them in the same skin, breathing the same air and in the same room.’
‘I’m not the person you seek. This is not a fairy tale. There are no transformations at midnight—no toads to be kissed, no princes to rescue.’
‘You can be the boy with me,’ she said, ignoring him.
He could never be that boy again.
‘The boy is weak.’
‘And the King is strong?’
‘The King has power, respect. The boy knew neither.’
‘You’re going to kiss me now, aren’t you?’
‘Yes.’
And he did.
He ran straight into the warmth of her body. Her kindness. And he closed off the voice in his ears telling him he wasn’t worthy of friends—family. That he was weak for wanting them. Because he was starting to wonder if it was wrong.
He was distracting her again. Asking her lips to accept the thrust of his tongue and moving his hands under her tunic to grasp her hips and pull her core into the hard heat of his.
But Charlotte put her hands on his chest and pushed. ‘No.’
‘No?’
‘No more running,’ she said. ‘You let me whisper all my secrets in your ear in the cave. It’s time to whisper in my ear, Akeem.’
His nostrils flared, but he nodded, knowing that next time she wouldn’t accept his attempts to divert her.
‘I do not whisper, qalbi,’ he said, and stalked back to the entrance of her room and opened the door wide. ‘I roar.’
Charlotte remained silent. Breathless as she followed him up a staircase and down a long corridor.
Akeem came to a halt. ‘Here it is.’
She frowned. ‘A door?’
‘A room.’
Her heart cinched. ‘Your room?’
He shook his head.
She inhaled deeply, feeling regret or relief washing over her. She didn’t know which. ‘But I already have a room. Several.’
He reached for the handle. ‘And now you have this.’
He pushed the door open and stepped aside.
Charlotte didn’t move to touch him. She didn’t dare. Because touching him would spiral her into a thousand splinters of emotions that would stream from her eyes in an unstoppable stream of— She inhaled deeply, trying to quiet her mind, to think. Of delight?
She whirled to face him. ‘Why would you do this?’
‘We will make this marriage work despite the circumstances that have brought us here, qalbi.’ His eyes darkened. ‘Your lessons begin tomorrow.’
Breathless excitement quickened her breathing. ‘Lessons?’
‘Your diploma,’ he answered.
‘But how...? Who...?’
‘An artist in her own right, with substantial success in the European art world, and a retired teacher, is currently settling into her rooms. This—’
He waved his hands and her eyes moved across walls lined with different casings. A wide cupboard with thin slots holding different paper. Another with paints in bottles and tubes. Another with pencils, charcoal, and an array of other mediums.
‘This will be your classroom.’
Her very own studio.
Hers.
‘Why?’
‘Proof,’ he said. ‘Your dreams will not be forgotten here.’
‘What about your dreams?’
His eyes trained on her; Akeem stepped inside the room and closed it behind him with a flick of his wrist ‘I dream to be the King my father wasn’t.’
‘Why? Why is it so important to be him? His heir, but not your mother’s son? Why are you not both?’
He swallowed, pushing down the angst that had travelled with him throughout his life.
‘The boy you speak of knew only one type of life. The care system embedded uncertainty into the little boy with scraped knees, too troubled to keep. Into the teenager too angry to place in a family home. He grew into a loner in the children’s home. He was too quiet—too withdrawn—to engage in meaningful conversation. Too angry to soothe. The boy was unwanted. The teenager hated. The man...’ He shrugged. ‘He became a king.’
‘I wanted the boy.’
‘You wanted escape, qalbi. Not me. You wanted a new life away from your father. We are both grown enough now to recognise the truth.’
‘You can’t presume to know that.’
‘I presume nothing. It is a truth I recognise. A truth that, if you wanted to, you would also recognise.’
‘Tell me more about the boy who became a king,’ she asked, moving on.
Or moving back.
He’d said enough in the cave. He did not want to go back.
‘Tell me,’ she urged, her voice soft. Tempting.
And there it was. The flare of kindness in her eyes, softening the green to a moss-like effect. Kindness. The reason he’d become besotted with her in their shared time in care.
His hands sought her out before he could tell them not to. They went to her hips, feeling the hard bones there as he tugged her into the length of him.
‘All my life I wanted this “more” you talk of. And now I have it. I have it here—power,’ he breathed between clenched teeth. ‘The past is irrelevant.’
‘You want power?’ she asked, and leaned into the pressure of his palms. ‘Control?’
‘I have it already,’ he said, and loosened his grip. Because that was not the power he wanted. He did not want power over her.
She already has it over you.
He dismissed the voice and hammered his kingliness home. ‘Power I imagined impossible is now mine. I have respect. Control.’ He moved back, away from her. ‘My mother’s name was as unwanted as mine before I was King. They called her a whore. And me a bastard. Only when I’d worked hard to be the perfect image of a crown prince did they call her by her name, and me by mine.’
‘Your new name?’
He didn’t answer.
‘Whatever title you have, you’ll always be him. You know that, don’t you? Not the illegitimate legacy of your dad, or the result of whatever relationship your mum had with your father—’
‘Don’t.’
‘I just don’t understand how you think hiding away from who you once were makes you a better king.’
‘Charlotte...’
‘No!’ She dismissed his warning. ‘Your past isn’t the enemy. Your dad lied to you. Like mine lied to me. Your feelings are valid. They make you strong.’
‘Enough.’
‘You said your dad was a terrible king. That he did not cater to the troubles of your people and followed his pleasure-seeking lifestyle and destroyed others in the process. You know the troubles of real people. Powerless people. First-hand. Why not tell them—show them—that because of your past you will be the King they need, if not the King they think they want.’
‘They do not know what they want.’
‘Then tell them—because they need you. Not this shell of a king, fighting against anything that might bring him joy—fighting against me.’
She lies. Feelings are not strength. Your past makes you vulnerable.
‘My mother’s name will always be in the gutter if I do not prove I am neither my father’s son nor hers, but something else. Something stronger. Better.’
‘You are strong,’ she corrected him. ‘You always were.’
He swallowed and closed his eyes.
‘You can roar now, Akeem.’
He opened his eyes, his breathing coming faster and faster. ‘Yes, I’ll roar.’ He jerked her forward with a snap of his wrists. Moved his hand up to caress the sensitive flesh at the base of her throat, swiping his thumbs against the erratic drum of her heart. ‘And so will you.’
He pulled her with him, through one of the doors in the studio and then another adjoining door. He kicked it shut behind him. Everything in the room was a shadowed blur. All he could see was the bed. A huge, imposing four-poster of extraordinary wooden proportions.
Silently they walked towards the bed and he wasn’t sure who was leading who. Only that they were here.
His bed.
A moan escaped her as he laid her down in the middle of the bed. Her hands moved on him, seeking an edge. She found it—the hem of his tunic—and lifted it up.
‘I want to see you,’ she said.
‘I’m right in front of you.’
‘I know...’
Her eyes held his, her hands against the flat of his stomach.
‘I want to feel you against me. The man beneath those barriers of an adopted legacy.’ She lifted the hem higher, exposing his hard, peaked nipples. She touched one. ‘I want to see you.’
Groaning, he tugged off his tunic, throwing it to the floor. ‘Touch me,’ he commanded, and she did.
She touched him, placing her hot palm against his chest and stroking her fingers over him.
‘You’re perfect,’ she said, running her fingers through the fine fuzz of hair to follow the ripples of his washboard chest.
She ventured lower. Tentatively moving her hands to his firm, full backside. Her hands stroked around the tense globes. She hooked her fingers into the band of his trousers and pulled, testing the elasticity.
His hands clasped hers and dragged them back up over his flat abdomen, raised them above her head.
‘I’ve dreamt of this moment,’ he confessed, leaving her hands to raise himself above her.
‘Akeem!’
Eyes wide, Charlotte squealed as he gripped the seams of her tunic and tore it in two, ripping the fabric apart to expose her black lace-covered breasts.
He tugged the ripped top from her body and bent to expose her golden flesh. He trailed his fingers down her upper arms. ‘I’ve dreamt of being a king between your thighs,’ he confessed. ‘Extreme pleasure, surrounded by opulence.’
‘And now?’ she whispered.
Akeem set to work on her exposed throat. He kissed the arched tension from her neck slowly, tasting the sweetness of woman and the earthy, fresh sweat of passion. The slight tingle of salt on his tongue tempted him to suck deeper and bring her skin between his lips in a kiss that would mark her.
His mark.
She’s already marked. And so are you.
Forcing himself to go slow, to stem the urgency demanding that he find her slick core and push inside her, he unhooked her bra.
‘So beautiful,’ he murmured, exposing her breasts and moving his mouth, licking and kissing the length of her collarbone, moving down to a dark nipple. He sealed his mouth over the puckered tip. Her moans grew faster, her nails digging in anywhere they could as he sucked her nipple deeply into her mouth while teasing the other beneath the pad of his thumb.
He flicked his tongue again and she quivered against him, panting hard. ‘You are so responsive, qalbi.’ He kissed and licked his way through the valley of her breasts.
‘I want you....’
He raised his head. ‘Say it again,’ he commanded throatily.
‘I want you, Akeem Ali, son of Yamina Ali.’ Her eyes, green fire, thrust into him, inside him. ‘And I want you too, Crown Prince, future King of Taliedaa.’
He lunged. She would have all of him. Take him deep. Until she didn’t care who was inside her. The boy or the King. Only knew it was him.
He buried his mouth against her skin and kissed her harder, silencing the voice inside him and moving his mouth down her stomach. He kissed the waistband spanning her hips and tucked his fingers inside, then pulled the trousers off in one swift movement and threw them to the floor.
He returned to her. Positioning himself between her thighs, as the length of him found her core, he pressed against the entrance.
‘Say yes,’ he demanded, tilting his hips to apply more pressure.
One more nudge and he’d be inside her, and he needed her to tell him to push, to cement this moment with his body inside hers.
‘Tell me this is what you want.’
‘I need you, Akeem.’ She wrapped her legs around his hips. ‘Both of you.’ The heels of her feet pressed into the dip of his lower back. ‘Inside me.’
He swelled—his chest, his shoulders, his every muscle expanding to accommodate the realisation that she was giving herself to him. Completely.
The room whirled around him, disappearing.
He thrust deep inside her.
‘Akeem... Oh, Akeem!’ Charlotte lifted herself and tilted her hips.
‘Charlotte!’ he cried as she brought him deeper inside her.
Her hands grabbed at him, pinching his flesh between her fingers as wave after wave of pressure ignited inside him, taking him to the edge.
She gripped his chin, making him look at her, and kissed him. It felt like a promise. A wordless pact. The way it had nine years ago. The night they’d shared then had been a promise.
He sank deeper inside her and he was lost. They both were. The boy and the would-be King were lost to Charlotte Hegarty.
And from the song of duty there was not a peep. Not a sound.
‘Akeem!’
Charlotte sobbed into his shoulder, holding on to him as he pumped into her body, keeping his promise to bring her extreme pleasure.
But she couldn’t see the opulence surrounding them.
She could only feel him.
The man she’d always wanted.
The man she’d never stopped wanting.
It was all-consuming and overwhelming. Because in nothing but their skin they were everything they had once been and everything they had become. They were nothing but a man and woman, seeking sanctuary in one another.
Escape.
He was her oasis and she was his.
That had always been the case.
But it’s only sex, the broken voice in her head admonished. Sex fixes nothing.
The voice was right. Sex fixed nothing. Not even amazing sex. And this was amazing.
But love...love could.
She loved him.
She gasped at the realisation. Her limbs tightened, her legs curled around his hips, and her core clenched around his mass. Clenching and unclenching, she screamed, noisily urging him to love her faster—harder, because she loved the love of his body. And she loved him.
She made sense with him.
She always had.
Under the oak tree. In front of the TV. In rundown pubs. In helicopters across the desert. In nothing but her underwear on a throne. In a red ball gown. Against the cave wall. In his bed...
She loved the boy he had once been and the uncertain Prince he’d become under the veil of perfection—the persona of the perfect King.
Sex fixed nothing.
But love could.
And this was love, wasn’t it?
And it wasn’t neat or tidy.
‘I’m—I’m—’ She stuttered, because he’d exposed every nerve and she was burning with him in this ascent to the unknown as they travelled deeper into the oasis of their bodies, into their sanctuary—into each other.
He kissed her breasts, her neck, her mouth. ‘Come for me, qalbi. Come now.’
And she did. A sheer blinding light burst behind her tightly closed lids and she let it claim her. The light. The brilliance. The release of love...of knowing she loved him. The shuddering climax was one only he could give her. Sanctuary in his body, and in his touch. The ultimate escape.
He roared, his neck straining backwards as he thrust one last time, filling her with himself. And she roared too. Loud and free.
He collapsed onto his elbows and she held him to her, his heart echoing the rapid pulse of hers.
For a long, breathless moment they stayed locked in each other’s embrace, until their raging hearts slowed. Then he eased out of her and pulled her hips into his from behind, held her to him. He pulled the sheet over them.
‘Sleep, qalbi.’
Safe in his arms—protected by the security of her love—she did.