AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Is this why your father sent you here?” His voice was rough and thick, two signs that he was already too far gone. “Is this the game you’re playing? Just like every other honey trap that has ever been set for me?”
For a moment, she seemed to vibrate. Her aquamarine eyes were wide and glued to his, but the look in them was haunting.
Because it was the same one he’d seen on her face in that hallway in Skyros Media. Right after her father had literally slapped her cheek.
Orion had now done the same himself, with his mouth.
Did he really need any further evidence that at the slightest provocation, at the first temptation, he became his father?
He remembered his mother, then, though he preferred not to think of her outside of a few stray, happy memories when he was small. But now he remembered those later years. How she would cry and wail, literally crumbling if King Max so much as glanced in her direction. Cringing and sobbing, until Griffin and Orion, though only boys themselves, had been forced to act as her protectors.
Deep down, Orion’s secret shame was that he’d grown impatient with her. His own mother.
You can’t cry in front of him,he’d told her once, furiously, with all the conviction of the overly serious child he’d been.You can’t show him that he’s hurt you.
But she had only done it more.
This time, he assured himself, he would do no such thing, no matter the provocation tonight. It surely wasn’therfault that he was so tempted by her. He waited for Calista to cringe away from him, assuring himself that he would understand her. He would support her. He would do whatever was necessary to—
But instead, she laughed.
It was scornful, bracing laughter, as much a relief as it was an assault.
Her hands found her hips, and she scowled at him, and all of that was better than cringing, certainly. Though Orion couldn’t say that it wascomfortable, exactly. Or that he liked it much. Only that it was better than the alternative.
“Honey trap,” she repeated, as if he’d called her a filthy name. “You must be joking.”
“Your father could have used the leverage he had on my father to do any number of things,” Orion said, perhaps a bit gruffly. “He chose to force our marriage. You tell me why a honey trap isn’t the first thing that would come to mind under the circumstances.”
“First I’ll point out the distinct lack of honey in the trap,” she retorted, her voice arch. “Who knew that the King of Idylla himself could be lured in with this much vinegar? I don’t really know what that says about you, Orion. But I don’t think it’s good.”
He wanted to kiss her again. He wanted to peel her out of those clothes and keep his mouth on her until she melted against him. And then he wanted to taste every last inch of her skin, until both of them were immolated. Until there was no telling the difference between spark and flame, fire and heat.
Him and her.
He was so hard it hurt.
But the hurt was a good thing. It was like a hair shirt, to carry on with his brother’s favorite monk analogy. It reminded him who he was.
“We have a ball to attend,” he told her, taking a deep pleasure in the fact he could sound so mild. So unbothered. He could see temper flash over her, and enjoyed that even more. “I don’t say this to stop you taunting me. Carry on all you like. You’ll just need to do it in the car.”
When he beckoned for her to precede him out of the room, he thought she might balk. He waited, oddly primed and charged, as she stared back at him, her hands in markedly unladylike fists at her sides.
Inside, hewanted. He ached with it.
And what was the matter with him that there was a very large part of him that wanted nothing more than for her to launch herself in his direction? For her to take a swing at him, even—the way no one else would dare?
Because one way or another, that would allow him to put his hands on her?
Instead, Calista lifted her chin, gathered the skirts of her dress in those fists of hers, and swept out of the room.
And he was a little too aware of the tension between them as they sat in the car, building up their defenses again, brick by brick. He consulted his mobile. He took calls that could have waited, had he wanted them to wait. All the while, Calista pointedly repaired her makeup and hair. He wondered if she knew how it felt to him—like she was easing those iron bars between them back into place. And locking them up, separately, in their original prisons.
He told himself he ought to have been grateful.
Tonight’s event was at the Royal Botanical Gardens, with portable heaters everywhere to ward off what passed for the chill in this first week of December. The gardens were lit up, with little lights sprinkled everywhere, so that more than one person remarked that it was as if they’d been set down in their very own Christmas ball. The sort that one could hang on a tree, and build traditions around—
Not that Orion, raised as he was by wolves in royal form, had ever had anything of the kind. Trees festooned about the palace, bristling with decorations, certainly. But their only family traditions involved making themselves scarce while King Max raged, then collapsed in a drunken stupor.
