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“You don’t have to dress it up, Your Majesty,” she drawled, and smirked at him. Edgy and tight. “You could have just said you want to have sex with me. You don’t have to pretend it’s for the greater good.”
CHAPTER THREE
TWODAYSLATER, like it or not, Orion found himself getting ready for the first of the traditional Idylla Christmas balls he would share with his betrothed—soon to be his fiancée.
And if he wasn’t mistaken, he was actually...filled with a kind of anticipation.
Though he told himself it was not as simple as that.
He’d assumed that their initial meeting would sort things out between them and make their respective roles clear. He’d expected Lady Calista would be like any of the typical Idyllian nobility he’d contended with in his time. She’d been meant to fawn all over him and tremble and agree with his every utterance, pretending she was a vestal virgin instead of the usual party girl. His staff had assured him that while, yes, she had a place in her father’s company, it was only for show.
But she hadn’t done any of the things he’d expected she would.
To say that their first meeting had not gone according to plan was vastly understating things.
She’d underscored that by continuing to do nothing but laugh, at him, clearly and boldly—and then leaving. Without waiting to be dismissed from his presence.
And more to the point, without agreeing to a single one of his terms. Or even pretending to consider them.
He had no idea what to expect from her now.
Orion had spent entirely too much time since then trying to reconcile who he’d imagined she was based on the depth of her curtsy and the demure outfit she’d worn with who she’d proved herself to be thereafter.
He was appalled at himself, actually.
If he thought about it, he should have assumed that a man like Aristotle Skyros could, naturally, bring into the world only creatures of selfish greed and astonishingly bad behavior just like himself. There was nothing surprising about it.
What Orion couldn’t countenance was his reaction to her.
Everything she’d said and done had horrified him on every level, obviously. But his body had taken a different tack despite that. His body—which he had long treated with a monastic fervor Griffin liked to tell him took zealotry to a new level—did not seem to care that Lady Calista was nothing at all like the queen he’d imagined would rule at his side. His body had not been overly concerned with her disrespect, her flippant responses, her outright rudeness to both her king and her future husband.
His body had gone rogue.
Orion had woken in the night, hard and aching. And no amount of exercise, cold showers, or sheer fury at his own flesh had helped. The only thing that had was a detailed fantasy about what it would be like to feel that sharp tongue of hers on that place where he was hardest of all.
Damn her.
Orion prided himself on being in control. Of himself, his body and his mind, in every regard. It was another decision he had made a long, long time ago, faced with the knowledge that one of the great many ways his father was weak was King Max’s inability to deny his appetites. Particularly those of the flesh.
Orion had decided that he would be master of his own body in the same way that he had learned to master his emotions. He stayed in control, always, no matter the provocation.
Calista Skyros tested him. She tested his control.
And he hated it.
But he hadn’t lost a test yet.
Grimly, Orion allowed his fussy, demanding valet to finish dressing him in the exquisite black-tie ensemble appropriate for the occasion of the first ball of the Idyllian holiday season. The ball that happened to also be the place where the newly crowned king would announce his engagement, God help him. Once he was suitably regal, he walked through the palace to meet the woman he would never have chosen to be his bride, especially now that he’d met her. There in the same private salon where he’d faced the unpleasant fact that he was not as immune to a blackmailer’s daughter as he should have been.
Perhaps the truth was that he was still trying to face that fact.
This time, when he opened the door and stepped inside, the room was not empty.
It was, in fact, rather more full than he had been anticipating. He was displeased to note that Calista had come with her father and mother in tow. Something he was sure he ought to have been horrified by.
But for the moment, a very long moment that seemed to drag out for an eternity, all he could see was her.
Just her, as if there was a separate sun that was all hers and it shined on only her, even at night.
