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And the contact, skin on skin, floored him.
It was so...tactile.
It made him remember the images that had been dancing in his head ever since he’d brought up sex in her presence. It made him imagine it all in intricate detail.
It made him hard and needy, but better yet, it made her tremble.
Very solemnly, he took the ring—the glorious ring that in many ways was Idylla’s standard to wave proudly before the world—and slid it onto one of her slender fingers.
And because he was a gentleman and a king, did not point out that she was shaking while he did it.
“And now,” he said, in a low voice that should have been smooth, or less harshly possessive, but wasn’t, “you are truly my betrothed. The woman who will be my bride. My queen. Your name will be bound to mine for eternity.”
“I understand what it means.”
But her voice, too, wasn’t as sharp as usual. He expected her to yank back her hand, but she didn’t. He had the odd notion that she couldn’t.
The funny thing was, though he had never imagined that he would be blackmailed into marriage, it was no hardship at all to admit that Lady Calista looked a great deal like the woman he’d always vaguely imagined would be his. She was prettier than the last time he’d seen her, he was sure. There was something ethereal about her tonight, with her hair arranged on top of her head in something that looked effortlessly chic and complicated. It called attention to the beauty of her bone structure, from her high cheekbones to her elegant nose.
She looked like the queen she would become, and soon.
Orion dropped her hand, and was pleased to see that for a moment, she held hers where it was. Right there in midair, staring at the astounding ring on her hand as if she couldn’t quite believe it was real.
When she finally dropped it to her side, she looked almost lost. He told himself that was why he offered her his arm.
And when he led her from the salon, then down through the grand halls of the palace to the car that waited to take them from the palace, she seemed...almost subdued. Uncharacteristically, he would have said.
Though in truth he knew very little about her character—other than the fact she was happy to participate in his blackmail, that was.
“Where are my parents?” she asked when they were both inside the car, and his driver had pulled away from the palace.
“I sent them in a separate vehicle,” Orion said coolly. “Is that a problem? You will understand, I think, if I would prefer to do without your father’s company at present.”
“My father can be difficult,” she agreed, with a small laugh. And something in her gaze that he might have mistaken for dislike, had she been anyone else. Someone who didn’t work so closely with Aristotle, for a start.
Orion settled himself in his seat, wishing for perhaps the first time in his life that it was a tighter, smaller car. So that he would have the opportunity to touch her more. To enjoy the fact she was sitting there beside him, smiling faintly of something he could only describe as sparkling vanilla.
“Why do you do his bidding if you find him as difficult as the rest of us do?” he asked, because the seat was vast and it was the only way of touching her available to him.
And he didn’t want to investigate why it was he wanted that so much.
It seemed to take her a long moment to lift her gaze from where it rested on her hand in her lap. On the ring she wore. His ring, claiming her.
Something roared in him at that, too.
When her eyes met his, she looked far less dazed than before. And Orion found, to his surprise, that he liked the sharpness. The challenge.
That intensity that was only Calista.
She shook her head. “Of all people to ask me that question.”
“I don’t follow.”
Calista didn’t quite laugh. “Don’t you? My mistake. Or are you not the man who followed the dictates of a mad king for the better part of his life?”
That was a direct hit, but a part of him enjoyed that she swung at him like that. A part of him wanted more—because whatever else it was, unlike so much else in his life, it was real.
“The difference being that my father was indeed the king. Yours is...what? A businessman with a family title?”
