A Throne for the Taking (8 page)

‘Do I have to go on?’ Alexei enquired.

‘Don’t trouble yourself.’ She dripped the sarcasm so strongly that she fully expected it to form a pool at her feet. ‘I think I can guess the rest.’

She couldn’t see any way out of it. He had tied her up with her own arguments, left her without a leg to stand on. Looking at him now—at the ice that glazed his eyes, the cold, hard set of his face—the momentary hesitation, if that was what she had seen earlier, now seemed positively laughable. She had to have been imagining things.

‘Good, so now we understand each other. I said
sit down,
Ria.’ One lean hand pointed to the seat she had vacated.

Fury spiked, making her see sparks before her eyes.

‘Don’t order me around, Alexei! You don’t have the right.’

‘Oh, but I do,’ he inserted smoothly. ‘That is, I do if I am to do as you want. As king I can command and you...’

‘You’re not king yet.’

‘Perhaps not, but we are approaching Mecjoria.’ A nod towards the window indicated the way that the deep blue of the sea over which they had been flying had now given way to a wild coastline, a range of mountains. ‘Any moment now we will be coming in to land. You should sit down and fasten your seatbelt.’

Was that the quirk of a smile at the corners of his mouth? Knowing she was beaten, Ria forced herself forward, dumping down into the seat with her teeth digging hard into her tongue to hold back the wave of anger that almost escaped her. Focussing her attention on snapping on her seatbelt, she addressed the man opposite with her head still bent.

‘I had it wrong earlier, Alexei. You don’t need any practice, you have the autocratic tyrant down pat—absolutely perfect. No need for anyone at your side to support you or to instruct you in any of the etiquette needed.’

‘Perhaps so.’

His tone was infuriatingly relaxed, disturbingly assured.

‘But you know as well as I do that the one way to settle this accession situation once and for all and to bring peace to the country for the future is to have someone with an unassailable right on the throne. Mecjoria rejected me once—what’s to stop them doing it again? But you as queen will bring that unassailable right along with you. You can choose to give it to me—or to Ivan.’

Choose. There was the word that hit home, sticking in her throat like a piece of broken glass.

She didn’t
have
a choice. She had set out on this mission to make sure that Ivan didn’t become king—and that she didn’t have to marry him. She’d achieved one aim but only by painting herself into a corner to do it. Alexei would be king, if she married him. She could escape the loveless arranged marriage to Ivan only if she agreed to a different one with Alexei.

Out of the frying pan and into the fire.

The way that the plane swayed and jumped, turning into a new course, and the change in the sound of its engines brought home to her the fact that they were circling, ready to approach the airport and the runway on which the jet would land very soon.

This plane will land there, if only to let you off...
Alexei’s words came back to haunt her.
But that does not mean that I will disembark as well.

Marriage to Ivan or marriage to Alexei? She knew which one was better for the country—but right now she was thinking on a very personal level and that made everything so very different. The thought of both marriages made her shudder inside, but with very different responses.

One was a sense of cold horror of being tied to a bully like Ivan. For the other, the instinctive fear she was a prey to blended with a shiver of dangerous, treacherous excitement. The memory of last night and the rush of raw, carnal response that had flooded through her when Alexei had taken her in his arms, when he had kissed her, made it impossible to think beyond how it might feel to know that again.

The marriage would be a pretence but that would be real. She wouldn’t be able to hide the hunger she felt or even attempt to disguise it.

‘You call that a choice? You know I can’t let Ivan take the crown. The results for the country would be so appalling.’

‘And how do you know that I will not be as bad?’

She could only stare at him, asking herself the same question and finding no answer for it. She knew about Ivan’s alliances with dangerous governments, his profligate habits, his cold nature, but the reality was that she knew nothing about Alexei other than the reports in the papers she had read. But she did know that like her he wanted to make sure Ivan didn’t inherit.

‘For me or for the country?’

‘I thought we had agreed that we were largely irrelevant in this. It is the future of Mecjoria and her people that matters. It isn’t personal.’

But he had made it personal with this cold-blooded proposition.

‘It certainly isn’t personal. It’s dynastic necessity, pure and simple.

‘You don’t need to look as if you’re facing imminent execution, Ria,’ Alexei continued dryly. ‘I’m not a monster. I don’t expect you to take your marriage vows as soon as we land. For now all that I ask of you is that you take your place as my promised bride. My devoted fiancée,’ he added pointedly. ‘No one must doubt that this is a real relationship. A whirlwind romance perhaps, but very definitely real.’

Could the atmosphere in the luxurious cabin get any colder? Ria asked herself as she swallowed down his statement. Could there be any less emotion in his tone?

A sudden violent jolt, the screech of brakes, the rumble of tyres on the runway brought her to the realisation that they were down, had landed and the plane was now taxiing towards the airport building. They had arrived; they were on Mecjorian soil.

Peering out of the window, she saw the sun-baked countryside that was familiar, the range of mountains over in the distance, their tops covered in a coating of snow. It should have felt like coming home. It was home. She had only been away for less than a week, one hundred and twenty hours at the most, but it seemed that everything had changed totally. Her life was no longer her own; her future had taken a totally different path from the one she had believed it would follow. She had thought that she would persuade Alexei to take the throne and then she could quietly retreat into the background, live her life in private. Now it seemed that instead she was going to have to be up front and centre.

With Alexei.

Awkwardly she fumbled with her seatbelt, feeling imprisoned, tied down and needing desperately to be free. But the way her future was going it seemed she would never be free. She had gone to Alexei in the hope of being freed from the future that her father had planned for her but instead she had come up against a man who was even more ruthless and controlling than Gregor had ever been.

As a result she had jumped out of the frying pan and right into the fire. And she faced the prospect of being burned alive as a result.

CHAPTER EIGHT

‘L
ET
ME
...
’

Alexei had already dispensed with his seatbelt with clinical efficiency and he was standing beside her, his hand reaching out for the awkward buckle on hers. When he bent his head to deal with it the softness of his dark hair brushed against her cheek, caressing her skin and sending shivers of response down her spine. She could smell the citrus shampoo on his hair, the clean scent of his skin, and up this close she could see how already, even at this stage of the day, the dark shadow of the growth of beard marked his cheeks.

Her heart thudded in her throat and she had to sit back and clench her hands into tight fists down at her sides to stop herself from giving in to the urge to reach out and stroke his cheek, feel the contrast between warm satin skin and the rough scrape of hair against her fingertips. Heat flooded every part of her, pooling at the spot just between her legs, so close to where those strong, square-tipped fingers had just completed their task.

Would this instant, shockingly primitive reaction to his nearness make the future he had dictated to her so much easier or so very much harder? She didn’t know and with sparks of response flaring in her brain, spots rising in front of her eyes, she couldn’t even begin to think of finding a way to answer her own question. She didn’t even know if she could get to her feet, the muscles in her legs, even her bones, seeming to have melted in the burn of response that possessed her.

‘I can’t...’ she began but then, afraid of what she might be revealing, swallowed down the admission and changed it to, ‘I don’t think I can do this. How does a devoted fiancée—your devoted fiancée—behave?’

‘You need to ask that? Here...’

Those strong hands came down again, clamping over hers as he straightened up. He hauled her upwards, lifting her to her feet, so fast so roughly that she fell against him, her breasts thrust into the hard, muscled planes of his chest, her face pressed to the lean column of his throat, her senses swimming from immediate sensual overload.

‘Of course I need to ask!’ Her physical response thickened her tone, making it husky and raw, alien in her own ears. ‘I’m not your fiancée—nor am I devoted to you. We have nothing between us.’

‘Nothing?’ His laughter made it only too plain what he thought of that. ‘Lady, if this is nothing...’

His dark head came down fast and hard, those beautiful lips finding hers and clamping tight against her mouth, crushing hers back against her teeth so that she could only gasp in shocked response.

As a kiss it was cold and cruel, more like a punishment than a caress, but appallingly it didn’t matter. She didn’t care, couldn’t think, could only feel. And the feeling that was uppermost in her thoughts, pounding through her body, was a raw hunger, a desperate need for this—and so much more. She would have flung her hands up around his neck, bringing his head down even closer, to deepen and prolong that burning pressure, but the way he still held her prevented that. She couldn’t hold back and she crushed her mouth against his, strained her body closer, feeling the heat and hardness of his erection that pushed against the cradle of her pelvis, telling her of his desire and feeding her own until she was swimming on a heated tide of longing, losing herself in him.

The moment when he broke off the kiss, snatched his mouth from hers, dropped her back down on to her feet—feet that she hadn’t even been aware had left the floor—was like a brutal slap to her face. His name almost escaped her in a cry of shocked distress but she dragged her hands from his and flung them up and over her mouth to hold back the revealing sound.

‘I think that showed you—showed both of us—how this will work. You say you don’t know how to do this but it’s so easy. I want you...’

Reaching out, he stroked a finger down the side of her cheek, watching intently as in spite of herself she shivered, her eyes closing in instinctive response.

‘And I can have you if I want.’

That brought her eyes flying open again to stare, shocked, into his.

‘No!’

He ignored her furious protest. ‘Because you want me just as much. You responded. More than responded. You know as I do that if we’d been somewhere more private then things would have gone so much further.’

Breathing unevenly, he smoothed a hand over his face, brushed the other down his body to straighten the shirt her actions had creased, pulling it from his trousers at his waist.

‘Perhaps it’s best that things can’t go any further now—before I do something that we’ll both regret.’

‘You’ve already done something I regret—something I wish had never happened!’

Was it the fact that it was a lie that made her voice so shrill? Or the way that her body was still struggling with the aftershocks of the reaction his kiss had sparked off in her, sparks fizzing along every nerve, burning up in her blood?

‘Really? Then if that’s the case, you’ll not want this, either.’

She knew what was coming, and the tiny part of her mind that was still rational told her to step back, move away. Fast. But that tiny part was totally submerged in the burning flood of sensual need that swamped common sense, drowning it in the heat of the hunger that still throbbed deep inside. She saw the change in his eyes, the switch from ice to smoky shadows that matched her own mood, and her breath caught in her throat, her lips parting, ready for the very different kiss she knew he planned.

And the kiss she really wanted.

This time it was warm and gentle. It gave instead of taking. His mouth caressed hers, teased, tantalised, tempting it further open to allow the intimate invasion of his tongue. The cool, fresh taste of him was like a powerful aphrodisiac exploding against her lips, totally intoxicating, instantly addictive.

She melted into that kiss, almost swooning against him as the throb of desire took all the strength from her legs, made them feel like damp cotton wool beneath her. And when Alexei’s arms came round her it only added to the sensual overload that had her at its mercy. The heat and scent of his body was like the burn of incense in her nostrils making her head swim.

This was the kiss she had always dreamed of, the kiss she had been waiting for all her life. The kiss she had once lain awake imagining long into the night as she felt the awakening of her female sexuality It was a kiss that made her know what it felt like to be a woman.

A woman who had found the man she wanted most in all of the world.

A woman who had discovered the man she...

Oh no!
No, no, no!

Panic-stricken she froze, jerked back, tore herself away from him. What was she thinking? Where had that come from? How had she let that thought—that terrible, foolish, dangerous thought—creep into her mind?

Was she really so weak that she was allowing her adolescent self to resurface with all her foolish, gullible dreams, the fantasies she had indulged in when she couldn’t face reality? The fictions she had created for herself when she had let herself pretend that perhaps one day, Alexei, the boy she had had such a heavyweight crush on, would turn to her and want her as a man would want a woman.

Well, yes, he wanted her now, there was no denying that. And she wanted him. He was right, he could have her if he wanted her. There was no way she was going to be able to resist him if he turned on the true high-octane power of his sensuality, the enticement of the seduction she knew he could channel without trying. But was she going to mistake the white-hot burn of adult sexuality for anything more?

This was the first real experience of true lust she had ever known and it seemed it had the power to burn away some much-needed brain cells, foolishly allowing her to confuse it with real feelings—emotions that her younger, naïve sense had once dreamed of knowing.

‘No.’

Alexei had felt her withdrawal and his voice seemed to echo her thoughts, but so much more assuredly, calm and controlled—disturbingly so, considering the fires that had just blazed between them, the sparks that still seemed to sizzle in the air.

‘No—we can’t take this any further now.’

Shockingly he dropped another kiss on her upturned face. A brief, casual, almost affectionate kiss on her cheek. And the easiness of his response, the light-heartedness of his touch, rocked her even more than her own shattered thoughts of a moment before. They were kisses of certainty, relaxed, almost careless. The kisses of a man who knew that he could get exactly what he wanted—whenever he wanted—so that he didn’t have to take too much trouble now.

‘Too much to do. A reception committee outside.’

‘Really?’

Knocked even more off-balance, Ria twisted on her heel, still within the confines of his arms, and bent slightly to look out the window.

Someone must have radioed ahead, informing the airport authorities—and more—of their planned arrival. And that someone must have announced not just that Alexei’s private jet requested permission to land—but that Alexei Joachim Sarova, Crown Prince and future King of Mecjoria, was arriving back in his country, ready to take possession of the throne. There was a fleet of sleek black cars drawn up at the far side of the tarmac, smoked glass, bullet-proof windows, black bodyworks gleaming in the sun. A small Mecjorian flag fluttered on the bonnet of the lead vehicle and someone had rolled out a red carpet across the runway, leading to the bottom of the flight of steps that had now been brought to the door of the plane. A door that a member of the flight crew was hurrying to unlock, to let them out.

‘We’re here,’ Alexei said. ‘I’m here. This is what you wanted.’

What she wanted. He was going to make his claim for the throne; and that could only mean that he believed she had agreed to his conditions.

But why shouldn’t he think that? Hadn’t she given him every indication that she had accepted his terms—welcomed them if her response to his kiss was anything to go by?

After all, what other choice did she have? If she wanted Alexei to take the throne instead of Ivan then she had to go along with what he demanded of her. She had to marry him, become his queen. It was either that or marry Ivan, and the way that her blood ran cold at just the thought was enough to tell her that somewhere along the line she had decided to go along with Alexei’s proposal even though she had no recollection of ever rationally doing so. She had no other possible alternative.

Turning back from the window, Alexei looked down into her face, dark eyes probing hers.

‘We can make this work, Ria,’ he said sombrely. ‘Together we can do what’s best for Mecjoria.’

Did he read anything else in her face? She would never know, but something made him pause, then go on to add, ‘You’re right that the royal family doesn’t expect to marry for love—and I’m not offering that. I can’t love you. I loved once—adored her... Lost her.’

Something darkened his face, his eyes. Something reaching out from the past and coiling round his memory, Ria realised as he went on.

Mariette. He meant Mariette, the dark-haired beauty who had been the mother of his child, who had had a total breakdown when the baby died and had ended up in a psychiatric hospital. Refusing ever to see him again.

‘I’ll never feel like that again. But as my queen you would be my equal. My consort. And I know you’ll be a fine queen. How can you not when your father has trained you for this almost from the moment you were born?’

He must have known how the mention of her father would make her react because he waited as she tried to look away, to look anywhere but into his stunning face. Once again he touched her cheek very softly.

‘We’ll finish this later.’

It was his total assurance that terrified her. Particularly when she knew she had only herself to blame. Hadn’t she practically flung herself into his arms like a sex-starved adolescent who had only been kissed for the very first time?

Well, yes, she wasn’t going to deny the desire—the hunger—she felt when he kissed her. But knowing she wanted him was one thing, tying herself to him in the sort of cold-blooded dynastic marriage she had hoped to escape from totally another.

‘Later...’

It was all that she could manage as someone knocked on the cabin door and she found herself released so swiftly that she stumbled backwards and away from him. The speed with which he discarded her and turned his attention to other matters, reaching for his jacket, shrugging it on, smoothing a hand over his hair, made her feel like some dirty little secret to be kept hidden away until he had time for her again. He had her cooperation in the bag, he believed, and now he wanted to focus on the reason why he was—why they were both—here.

Reaction setting in made her vision blur, her hands shake, as she collected her own coat and her bag. She couldn’t look at Alexei, couldn’t bear to see the dark certainty, the satisfaction that she knew must show on his face. She wanted to get out of here, get her feet back down on the ground in more ways than one.

As she reached the door of the plane she was ahead of him. Just a couple of steps but enough. In the doorway at the top of the steps she suddenly realised, all her training kicking in, so that she hesitated, stopped. Reality hit home with the truth of who he now was. Carefully she took that couple of steps back and out of the way.

‘Sir,’ she said, resisting the urge to drop a curtsey even if only to defy him, to prove that he might have her in a cleft stick, but she wasn’t going down without a fight. She was still her own woman and she would hang on to that for as long as she could.

She saw that elegant mouth twitch slightly, curling at the corners in a way that told her he knew only too well what was in her mind and a brief inclination of his head acknowledged everything unspoken that had passed between them. A moment later he was past her, standing in the doorway, looking down at the reception committee waiting for him, before stepping out into the warmth of the evening air.

As he went down the steps to the tarmac with cameras flashing like wild lightning in the distance, warning them of what was to come, what was inevitable now that the prodigal prince had come home, she spotted one moment when he paused, just for the space of a heartbeat, and squared his shoulders like a man accepting his destiny and going to meet his future. He hadn’t wanted this, she recalled. He had practically thrown her out of his house when she had first put the proposition to him. Whatever else she might think of him, she could see that unlike Ivan, who wanted the crown for the prestige, the power, and of course the huge wealth that came with it, Alexei appeared to have totally different reasons for going ahead with this.