In Defiance of Duty Read Online Free PDF

length, driving herself a little bit wild. Still watching him, those unholy eyes and his fierce, uncompromising face, she shifted up and over him, then sank down, sheathing him hard and deep within her.
    “I’m distracting you,” she told him, her voice uneven.
    “Or possibly killing me,” he muttered, taking her mouth with his in a long, hard kiss. “As I suspect is your plan.” She moved against him, rocking him deeper into her, unable to bite back her own small sigh of pleasure. He moved with her until she started to shake, and then he took control. His hands gripped her hips, preventing her from rocking against him when she wanted to tip herself over the edge.
    “What are you doing?” she demanded, her voice a mere scrap of ragged sound, and his smile made her shiver.
    “Distracting you,” he said, his cool eyes glittering with that sensual promise that made her feel nearly giddy. “You’ll come when I tell you to, Kiara, and not before.”
    She wanted to argue, but he moved then, and she could do nothing at all but move with him, surrendering to his hands, his wicked mouth, and his dark, whispered commands. Letting him build the fire between them into an out of control blaze. Letting him take them both exactly where she wanted to go.
    And when he finally ordered her to come, she did, screaming out his name.
    Azrin could not understand why he didn’t simply tell her.
    Why he hadn’t told her already. Why some part of him didn’t want to tell her at all.
    They’d had the one last, long night. Drawing it out any further was nothing more than the very kind of selfishness he could no longer allow himself.
    She was still in the shower. He could see the shape of her through the steamy glass, and he already regretted having left the warm embrace of the hot water. He could have stayed in there with her, and continued this exercise in pretense, in misdirection, as if they could lose themselves enough in each other that the whole world would go away.
    Perhaps that was what he wanted. If he was honest, he knew that it was.
    Hadn’t that been what Kiara had always been for him? A step away from the expected—an escape from the traditional?
    Enjoy yourself while you can, his father had said when he’d married, his creased face canny, knowing. As unsympathetic as ever, the old man as harsh a ruler of his family as he was of his country. You will pay for it all soon enough, I promise you.
    Because his father had known, too: Kiara was Azrin’s way of asserting himself in a life that would too soon be swallowed whole by duty and sacrifice. There would be no escape.
    But Kiara had been his. All his. He’d been unable to resist her. She was his most selfish act of all, having nothing whatosever to do with the things that were expected of him, the things he expected of himself. He had been meant to marry a woman like his own mother—one of the exquisite Khatanian girls who had been trotted out before him at every social opportunity since he was a boy, each more perfect than the last, each competing to show herself to be the most obvious choice for Azrin’s future queen.
    They were indistinguishably attractive, impeccably mannered and becomingly modest. They were all from powerful, noble families, all raised with the same set of ideals and expectations, all bred to be perfect wives and excellent mothers, all taught from birth to anticipate and tend to a man’s every passing whim—and if that man was to be their king? All the better.
    Instead, he’d met Kiara in a crowded little laneway in Melbourne. He had been walking off his jet lag as he prepared for a week’s worth of meetings with some of the city’s financial leaders. He’d ducked into one of the narrow alleys that snaked behind a typical Melbourne street featuring a jumble of sleek modern skyscrapers and Victorian-era facades, and had found his way to a tiny café that had reminded him of one of his favorite spots in Paris. His bodyguard had cleared the way