AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Don’t you dare take that tone with me,” her father had snarled, that dangerous note in his voice. The one Calista had gone out of her way to avoid hearing for years now—and had been mostly successful. Because she’d convinced him that she was obedient. His protégé, desperate for his approval. His successor who followed his every command. As close as it was possible to get to the son he’d always wanted but had never had.
But she knew in that moment that if she’d been within reach, he would have slapped her soundly.
Don’t go and ruin everything now, she’d warned herself.
“I’m sorry,” she’d said at once, the conciliatory tone bitter on her tongue. She’d tried to shift her body language where she sat, hunching her shoulders and making herself small, the way she’d used to do. Back when she’d been a girl, and her father’s rages had been a daily, inescapable trial there’d been no hope of escaping. “I just... Me as a queen? I can’t imagine it, Papa.”
She hated that word.Papa.As if there was some affection between them. As if her father was capable of such a thing as a paternal feeling. Or feelings at all.
But long ago, she’d learned how to soothe him, and calling himpapaas if she admired and revered him was one method. Sometimes the only way to make it through life in her father’s fist was to bow and scrape a little and tell him only things he wished to hear. As she’d grown, she’d learned that what a man like her father truly wanted from her was accomplishments he could claim as his own. So she’d thrown herself headfirst into making them happen.
She hadn’t gotten herself in a situation where she needed to bequite soconciliatory in a long while. She couldn’t say she liked the feeling.
Calista had been relieved to discover that she still had the knack for calming him when he settled himself in the chair on the other side of her desk, looking less furious and more...avid. She’d had to fight to conceal her shudder of distaste.
“I paid a great deal of money to secure your betrothal to Max’s royal spawn,” he’d told her, the remnants of his infamous temper still a little too obvious in his voice. “I expect you to honor that investment with a formal engagement and wedding.”
“Of course, Papa,” she’d murmured, aiming forsweetandhumble. “Have I ever let you down?”
Calista was able to make herself say such things because she knew full well that the takeover she’d been planning for years was close. The annual board meeting was December 23. That gave her what was left of the year to make sure all her ducks were in a row. Everything she wanted wasso closewithin her grasp she could almost reach out and touch it with her fingertips—
But if she got ahead of herself, she’d ruin everything. Overconfidence would lead straight to a loss. She knew that. Just as she knew she needed to win.
So despite her feelings on the subject, Calista had agreed to go ahead with this ridiculous engagement. And the wedding, she understood, theoretically would follow it. She had no other choice. Or, more accurately, her father had assumed she was fully on board because she knew better than to argue with him. It was pointless. Aristotle was obsessed with marrying her off to the brand-new king, and fighting with him about it would only get in the way of her true aims.
But she certainly hadn’t expected it to take so long to get her first audience with King Orion. His father had died in the summer and here it was November. She’d had to spend months acting as if she was not only interested in marrying the man, but devastated that he was ignoring their betrothal. She’d had to listen to her father complain endlessly about the situation and about how it was a personal insult to him.
Worse, she’d had to suffer her sister’s unapologetic cackling about her upcomingroyal wedding.
Still, Calista had come here today prepared to do what she needed to do. Pretend anything, act any part to hasten this along—not because she wanted to marry anyone, much less the king, but because it would give her father something to focus on while she gutted his company and made it her own. And the more her father focused on himself, the less he was likely to turn his attention to Melody.
Calista was determined to keep him from concentrating on her younger sister, no matter what.
But as she stared back at the new, young king, having acquitted herself marvelously—if she said so herself—with a little of those noble manners her teachers in boarding school had claimed she would never learn, she found herself revising her thinking on this whole big mess.
Because if what her father had ranted repeatedly was true, King Orionhadto marry her.
He didn’t have a choice in the matter.
And that meant Calista didn’t have to fall all over him. She didn’t have to pander to him, or try to smooth things over with him the way she did with her father. Unless she was very much mistaken, it meant she had to do nothing at all but show up.
“I’m not interested in any scandals either, actually,” she said now, with images of remote Castle Crag still spinning around in her head. She folded her hands in her lap, presenting him with the perfect posture she liked to roll out in the boardroom, where no one expected much from the blonde, pretty daughter of such a hateful man. They looked at her and saw a bimbo. Which was usually right about when she whipped around and sank her teeth into their jugulars. “But I’m also not interested in being threatened with fortresses on rocks a million miles from shore.”
He...froze. “I beg your pardon?”
Slipping back into her familiar corporate mode was comforting. Because there was something about King Orion that made Calista...edgy. He wasn’t what she’d expected, maybe. For one thing, the approximately seven trillion photographs she’d seen of him in her lifetime didn’t really capture him. He looked like the images she’d seen, with his close-cropped chestnut hair, grave hazel eyes, and that stern mouth. It was just that, put all together, he was a lot more than a novelty tea towel sold to tourists in all the shops.
Alotmore.
Her chest felt a bit tight and her pulse was a bit dramatic, if she was honest.
Part of it was that he was so shockingly fit. Rangy muscle, surprisingly solid, and packaged into a dark suit that should have made him look stuffy. But instead, it was cut so well that she found herself feeling remarkably patriotic about the way the fabric clung to his wide shoulders.
Even as he sat there and made pronouncements about what she would or wouldn’t do, all shewantedto do was move a little closer to see whether or not his abdomen was as hard and ridged as she suspected it was.
But more than all of that, it was that air around him. As if he emitted his own electrical charge. There was a sense of leashed power in him, in the way he held himself andwaited, almost, that she had not been expecting.
The same way she hadn’t been expecting a hollow, hungry thing deep in her belly to hum at the sight of him.
