“Yes, Your Highness.” The woman was clearly unhappy with being dismissed, leaving her dresses behind for someone other than her to handle. But she obeyed.
Zara didn’t think she would ever get used to that. The fact that ultimately Andres would have to be deferred to, and beyond him Kairos. She fell somewhere beneath the two of them.
It isn’t as though you had any power back in the encampment. People put you on a pedestal, but you had no choices.
She ignored herself again, focusing instead on the growing sense of dread she felt as Elena walked out of the room, leaving her alone with Andres.
“So?” She lifted her hands, then brought them back down, gripping the fabric of the gown. “Am I suitably altered into your preferred image?”
“You have a ways to go yet,” he said, his tone dry. “You still look a bit wild.”
“Perhaps because I am a bit wild. Have you ever thought that no amount of work will change that? No matter how sleek you make me look, it will not change what’s inside?”
“As far as I’m concerned, outward appearance is the best place to start. Changing who you are on the inside is a much more difficult task.”
“Speaking from experience?”
One side of his mouth curved upward. “Experience at not managing to change it, certainly.”
“If you haven’t managed to change after all your years of living in this palace, what makes you think you will manage to change me and in only a couple of months?”
“I don’t have to change you, not really. I only have to make it look as though you have changed. And that, I have ample experience with.”
“I thought the ultimate goal was taming.”
The other corner of his mouth turned up, and he was smiling now. Yet she didn’t get the sense that there was any humor in it. “Let me ask you this. Do you think I am tame?”
She looked him over, at the perfectly tailored lines of his suit, the aristocratic cut of his features. He could have been carved, rather than made. A Greek statue with life breathed into it, rather than a man born of a woman.
He was beautiful. She found nothing feminine about the descriptor. She would call the forest, the mountains back in Tirimia beautiful, while they were, at the same time, uncompromising and dangerous. She had a feeling Andres was both of those things in addition to being beautiful. His brother, Kairos, exuded danger, authority. With Andres it was less immediately apparent.
But she could see it. She could sense it.
Possibly that was due more to the fact that he had pulled her out of the bathtub yesterday and thrown her onto his bed, than any kind of sixth sense on her part.
Still, she was confident in her answer to his question.
“No. You aren’t,” she said.
“But I appear to be. Or rather, I appear to be when it suits me.”
“Is that what you are suggesting I do? Behave the part of princess in public?”
“I should like for you to be a little bit more tame than you already are, as I have no interest in being bitten.” Something changed in his eyes as he said the words. Anger morphing into something else entirely. To a molten heat she could swear radiated from him. Something she couldn’t quite sort out. There was a lot of that between them.
“I have never bitten anyone in my life. Your concerns are unfounded.”
He arched an eyebrow. “Are they?” He took a step toward her, his dark eyes boring into hers. “If I were to grab you now and throw you down on that bed, you wouldn’t bite me?”
Her heart was fluttering so fast she could scarcely catch her breath. “Why would you do that?”
“Do not tell me you are so naive that you are unaware of what a man wants from a woman,” he said, something hard, dangerous in his tone.
“Of course not,” she said, her throat feeling tight, her face hot.
“You know what a husband wants from his wife, then,” he said.
It felt as if a fire had broken out over her body, burning her in the most intimate places. She should strangle him with his own tie for daring to speak to her in such a manner. She should certainly not be overheating. “But I am not your wife.”
He reached out, taking her chin between his thumb and forefinger, his hold firm, his eyes locked with hers. She should move away from him. She should kick him. She did neither.
“You will be my wife. In every sense of the word. I do like that dress,” he said, his gaze roaming over her body. “I do wonder, though, if I would like it better on the floor.” He leaned in closer, and her breath caught. “I wonder, if I stripped it from your body, if I were to try and claim you, would you try to bite me then?”
“Try it,” she said, her voice trembling, “try it and see, you bastard.”
“Dirty talk. I like it. If you think that’s going to push me away, I hate to disappoint you.” He moved closer then, his lips a whisper away from hers. And she found that rather than wanting to draw away, perversely she wanted to lean in closer to him. She could feel a connection forming between them, physical, real, tangible. She wanted to solidify it. She didn’t want to break it. How long had it been since she felt connected to anyone? How long had it been since anyone touched her? “Sadly, for you, disappointing people is what I do best.”
Then he moved away. She felt his withdrawal like a gale-force wind. Making her feel disheveled, cold.
“I resisted the urge to eviscerate you with my teeth,” she said, trying to keep her tone stiff. “Perhaps I am not as uncivilized as you seem to think I am.”
“Perhaps I’m not as civilized as you think I am.”
“If you’re trying to frighten me into submitting to your marriage plan, I’m afraid I must deliver the disappointing news that it will not work.” She swallowed hard, calling on all her strength to form the next sentence, to meet his gaze while she spoke the words.
He laughed, a dark, humorless sound. “Silly woman. I don’t need your submission. I need your cooperation.”
“Is there any way I can help you without marrying you?”
“No. There isn’t.”
She gritted her teeth. “That’s very inflexible of you.”
“I am inflexible. In this instance largely because my brother is. I owe him. I disappointed him once, and I cannot do it again. This is my atonement. You are my penance.”
“I suppose in that case lowering yourself onto my body will be much like crawling over broken glass.”
He chuckled, which angered her because those words had cost her. Because she was dealing in subject matter she was not well versed in, trying to play that she was sophisticated. As if the things he said were unremarkable. And when she reached for a comment she thought might shock him, he didn’t even have the decency to look fazed. “To the contrary, I imagine lowering myself onto your body—as you so eloquently put it—will be the most enjoyable portion of our enforced union.”
“Why marriage?” she asked, feeling desperate. “Why not... I suppose I don’t understand what else I could do, because I’m not entirely certain why it is you need me.”
“I must marry you because Kairos gave the order for me to do so. Kairos asked me to do so to improve relations between Petras and Tirimia. Presumably there are more detailed explanations available, but he didn’t give them, and I didn’t ask. The reasoning was irrelevant.”
“And yet you do not seem like a man who would normally feel that way. I can’t imagine that you’re docilely lying down and