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Pull yourself together now, Calista ordered herself.It’s only a crowd. And he’s only a man. A very powerful, very pampered man.
Though this close to Orion, Calista couldn’t help but think he didn’t feel likeonlyanything.
Maybe it was nerves that kept her mouth going. “At the very least I would have thought you’d have sage advice to offer. That I should imagine them all naked, or something.”
“I can’t imagine I would find the prospect of a heaving mass of nudity particularly comforting,” King Orion said, his voice dark and sardonic. And possiblysatisfied, too. “But if that helps you, Calista, then by all means. Imagine whatever sea of flesh you think will make you calm.”
She stared out the window for another moment, still feeling stricken and breathless. And hopelessly out of her depth. Then she blinked. “You’re right. That’s not better at all.”
Orion fixed her with another long, dark stare. He didn’t say another word, but still, she could feel the weight of the way he regarded her. As if it had its own heft and heavy, booted feet.
He rapped on his window, and a moment later, the door was opened. The roar from outside shoved in, even louder and wilder. He flicked Calista a look, indicating that she should slide after him to exit behind him.
Then he stepped out—into the noise, the lights, and the howls as they greeted him—with an innate athleticism that made her blink.
This was a fine moment indeed to rethink her choices. A fine moment to ask herself why she hadn’t pushed back a bit harder against her father. It was hard to remember why she’d chosen to go along with all this nonsense as she sat here in the back of a royal vehicle, her last moments as a private citizen spiraling away from her. It was hard to remember anything, really—much less all the reasons she’d had for allowing her father to think he was still in control of her.
The one very good reason in particular.
She could hear a strange little sound, high-pitched and plainly terrified, and realized she was panting.
And as she didn’t wish her big moment in the spotlight to coincide with the first time she fainted, she made herself take a deep breath. Then another.
Outside the car, in the wedge between door and vehicle, she could see Orion waving at the crowd. At his subjects. And what was left of her time was ticking away, second by second.
She reminded herself this was a distraction from her plan, not the plan itself.
And she reminded herself that none of this mattered. What mattered was surviving it intact so she could do whatshewanted to do. Orion was being blackmailed. Calista was simply doing what was expedient.
Orion turned slightly, extending his hand back into the vehicle.
She didn’t lie and tell herself that wasn’t a sovereign command, because she knew it was.
God help her, but she wasn’t ready. She hadn’t thought this through. It had been one thing to sit in a private room in the palace and shoot off her mouth, but this was something else. This was terrifying.
She wasterrified.
Orion waited with a kind of brooding, intense patience, his hand extended.
Calista found herself mute, frozen, and lost all the same in that grave gaze he settled on her.
Every inch of him a king. Her king. There was no doubt that the way he looked at her was an order from on high.
And on some distant level, she was astonished to find that it worked. She couldn’t seem to grasp onto a full thought in her head, but her body obeyed him anyway. She was moving automatically, reaching out to grasp his hand, like a deep, blooming flame when his strong fingers closed around hers.
For an eternity, there was only that. The flame and the bloom of it, eating her whole. His hand in hers. And the way their eyes caught, her still in the shadows of the car and him outside.
Her heart seemed to wallop her inside her own chest, like it was a weapon, and worse, he wielded it.
And then everything sped up.
Orion helped her alight from the car in another smooth, easy show of strength, though Calista rather thought it looked like nothing more than good manners. She tucked that away, because the fact the king was built like a god felt like a burst of sunshine deep inside her.
There was a smile on his face as he greeted her, though perhaps only she could see it didn’t match the intensity of the way he looked at her.
“Optics, my lady,” he murmured near her ear as he brushed a cool kiss across her cheek, and then he turned.
Presenting her to the crowd.
