Kathleen Creighton - The Rebel King

"Always…" His tongue could barely form words. They were whispers, mere puffs of air. "You have the power…but I think…if you don't plan to let me inside you now…you should just kill me at once…put me out of my misery."

He heard her breath catch…felt her body shift…her hand gently encircle him…the first exquisite giving of her tenderest places. He gasped when he felt resistance. "Rhia-luv- are you-" But she silenced him with a quick, breathless kiss, and slowly, slowly her warm body accepted…adjusted…enfolded…welcomed him.

She drew a shuddering breath and whispered. "Are you still in misery?"

His hands held her hips as he set himself more deeply inside her, and his silent laughter jolted him…and her. "Misery? No…but did you kill me after all? Because I think…this must be Paradise."

Her shaken laughter joined his and then was extinguished in their merging mouths…in hungry, questing, greedy, heedless kisses. His arms encircled her. brought her down to him. held her as close to him as he dared-and then, almost before he knew what she was doing, she was leaning back, bringing him with her so that they were both sitting upright, still holding each other, still together, still entwined. She wrapped her legs around him and he felt himself nested deep inside her, as deep as he could possibly go. And he felt her mouth blossom into a smile.

"Now…neither one of us is on top," she murmured, teasing his moistened lips with the words. "That's the best way, isn't it?"

"The best way possible." he agreed, and bringing one hand up to cradle her head, brought her mouth deeply to his again.

She began to move then, a smooth undulation of spine and muscles, a sensuous rocking that stroked every part of him at once, and he was dizzy with the pleasure of it…lost in desire. He felt his mind leave him. aware only of building pressure, an urgency like nothing he'd ever known before. His hands moved over her back and his body thrust against her rocking, hard…and harder…and her breaths became frantic whimpers. She tore her mouth from his at last and he buried his face in the hollow of her throat and pressed his mouth against the leaping pulse there while her back arched and tightened like a bowstring.

He said something to her…he didn't know what. She gave a little sobbing cry and he felt the tension inside her break and her body ripple with the shock waves, waves that caught him up and carried him with her. helpless as a rag doll in a flood.

When his mind came back to him he was in a quiet, peaceful place, dazed and battered but exhilarated, too.

He lay back slowly, bringing her with him. Her body was still wracked with shivers, so he reached for the edge of the comforter that was folded across the foot of his bed and flipped it over them both, wrapping her in its warmth and his arms. Then he lay silently holding her. Unknown emotions were swelling inside him, making it impossible for him to speak. He wondered about her silence, wondered if it was because she felt the same emotions, and what she would call them if he asked. Knowing he wouldn't ever ask.

Finally, when her body had stopped quaking and the comforter's warmth became too much, he folded a corner of it back and kissed her damp forehead, and she stirred and slipped to one side, leaving her head pillowed on his shoulder, her arm across his torso and one leg companionably tucked between his.

"Sony, luv," he murmured as he stroked a hand idly up and down her back. "I hate to say it, but…I'm afraid the word that comes to mind, once again, is…unprecedented."

Her body rippled with laughter. "Works for me," she said in a sleepy purr that made him think, for the first time in a while, of a cat.

He woke to find himself alone, the comforter smoothed and tucked against his side where Rhia's body had been. He realized, though, that it wasn't her absence but a sound that had awakened him. a sound that came from somewhere far off. like a cry in the night. That's what he thought it was, at first-someone crying. Then he realized it was music, and he thought it was the most beautiful and at the same time the saddest sound he'd ever heard.

He knew he wasn't dreaming it; certain demands and discomforts of his body left him no doubt that he was fully awake. Throwing back the comforter, he got up and walked naked to the bathroom he shared with Phillipe, noting as he did that Phillipe's bedroom door was still open a few inches, indicating he hadn't, as Nikolas had expected, returned from his evening's celebrations. Nikolas quickly took care of the demands and discomforts, washed himself and put on a bathrobe, then went in search of the music, and Rhia. He was certain he'd find both in the same place, and he did.

She was in the courtyard, sitting on a low semicircular stone wall that skirted the base of a fountain set into the courtyard wall. The fountain wasn't running at that time of night, and the water lay still and dark at her feet, reflecting the moonlight in turgid undulations. She was wearing a light robe that must have been Maman's that hung open to reveal the scrap of lace she called panties and a sleeveless top like the undershirts some men wear. It hugged her breasts and slender torso like skin only slightly paler than her own. Her back was propped against the courtyard wall and her bare legs were drawn up, cross-legged under her. Moonlight lay around her like spilled milk and glinted subtly on the instrument in her hands.

He stood in the kitchen doorway and listened to the saxophone's mournful wail, not wanting to interrupt her, letting himself fill up with a sweet melancholy, the kind only a sad song could make him feel.

He must have made some movement, or maybe she only sensed him there. In any case, she let the music die to a whisper, then lowered the saxophone and sat waiting for him. her head back and resting against the wall.

Unable to read her expression and not knowing why she was out here in the courtyard playing the blues alone in the moonlight, he went to her slowly, hands in the pockets of his bathrobe to keep from reaching for her.

"Regrets, luv?" he asked softly, a sharp little pain lodging near his heart.

She shook her head. Reaching out a hand, she caught the belt tie of his robe and pulled him closer. Then, instead of lifting her face for his kiss, she simply leaned her head against him. Unfathomably moved, he stroked her hair for a moment, then sat behind her on the fountain's base and settled her against him. With his arms wrapped around her and his lips against her hair, he murmured. "Then why the sad song?"

"It's called the blues," she said with a hint of a smile in her voice. "You don't need to be sad to play the blues."

He kissed the top of her head, closed his eyes and inhaled the sweet fragrance of her hair. "But you are, aren't you." It was a statement, not a question.

She let out a breath, and it was a minute or two before she answered, in a voice that was husky and soft. "Yeah. I guess I am. A little."

"Why, luv?"

"I don't know. I think-" He felt her body strain as she hauled in another breath, as if she had vast spaces inside that air couldn't reach. "I came here to bring you back. It's my job to bring you back. You are the crown prince of Silvershire. It's your duty to go back. But…" her voice became a breaking whisper "…dammit, I can't help it. I don't want you to go."

He tightened his arms around her and rested his cheek on her head. "I don't want to go either."

"But you're going to…aren't you." She didn't make it a question.

He let out a breath, and it was a long time before he answered, "Yes, I guess I am. I think…I must."

She turned her face into the hollow of his neck. "Yeah. That's why you're going to make one helluva great king, you know that, don't you?"

He was shocked to feel a warm wetness on her face that could only have been tears.

The Lazlo Group's sleek black helicopter churned across the waters of the channel on the morning sun's glistening path. Rhia, watching the wakes of ships and the Channel Islands- Alderney, Guernsey, Jersey-drift by below, thought it was like being the lone traveler on a broad superhighway paved in gold. She tore her gaze from the sparkling vista and glanced again at the man sitting silently beside her, narrowed eyes focused intently on the hazy outline just coming into view on the horizon. A cold little frisson of misery rippled through her. This morning there was no sign of the Nikolas Donovan she'd come to know, the cynical charmer from the Paris apartment, the carefree, flirtatious grape picker-somewhat more earthy than expected. The skillful and incredibly tender lover. This, she thought, must be the man Corbett Lazlo had warned her about, the hard man, the rebel who for years had organized and led a powerful and dedicated opposition to the monarchy in Silvershire. A man both respected and feared.

The man who'd made love to her, made her feel things she'd never felt before, the man who'd made her laugh…and cry, was a stranger to her now.

She was glad the clatter of the chopper's rotors and the headphones they both wore made conversation difficult, if not impossible. What would they have talked about? Impersonal things, probably, fit for the ears of the chopper pilot-an unnecessary recap of plans for the coming reunion with Nikolas's father, King Weston, perhaps. It was to be a private meeting, held in strictest secrecy, not at the royal palace in Silverton, or even at the official royal retreat in Carringtonshire, but at a little-known hunting lodge in the Lodan Mountains in the province of Chamberlain, the king's ancestral home. Those present at the historic meeting would include King Weston, Nikolas, Rhia and a few trusted members of the king's security staff. Those were the terms both the king and Nikolas had agreed upon. The details had been left to Rhia and other representatives of the Lazlo Group to work out.

And after the reunion…what then? Rhia's job would be done, another difficult assignment successfully completed. And Nikolas… what would become of him?

Bleakly, she watched a muscle work in the side of his jaw, his steely gray eyes fixed on the approaching coastline. Would he accept the charge that had been taken from him at birth and assume the crown he'd always despised? Become king…and thus forever beyond her reach? Would she ever again feel his hands on her body, taste his mouth, smell his skin?

Pain knifed through her and she drew a sharp, gasping breath, just as the chopper swept over the lacy edge where the lapping Channel waves met the rocky shores of Silvershire.

The helicopter's route brought them into Silvershire's airspace just north of the town of Dunford, in Danebyshire. As they crossed the gleaming ribbon of the Dane River. Nikolas nudged Rhia with his elbow and pointed; she nodded in reply. It was an acknowledgment, nothing more. He knew it wasn't necessary for him to tell her Dunford was where he'd lived and worked for the past five years, teaching history at Dunford College of Liberal and Fine Arts. She would have learned that fact, and just about everything else there was to know about his life, from the Lazlo Group's dossier. Though right now, looking down at the slate roofs and church spires of the town and the campus, he felt as disconnected from that life in spirit as in body.

That was his past. No matter what happened at the coming meeting, he had to accept that he could never go back to the way things had been.

Though he stared out his side of the chopper, watching its shadow flit across the forested landscape below, he was intensely aware of the woman sitting beside him. She was dressed once again in the black pants and leather jacket she'd worn for breaking and entering Phillipe's flat in Paris, though the chemise had been replaced by a black pullover embroidered just above her left breast with the green-and-gold plaited pentagram that was the Lazlo Group's logo.

Rather ironic, he thought, that she should be the one bright spot for him in all of this, when she was the one who'd yanked him out of his former life and pitched him kicking and screaming into this new one he'd never dreamed of nor wanted. In any case it would have been idiotic to blame her for it, and he didn't. She'd only been doing her job. And as for what had happened between them, he acknowledged that was more his doing than hers, and furthermore, in his selfishness he'd caused her some degree of pain.

Still, he couldn't bring himself to regret what had happened… making love with her. Or to contemplate the possibility that it might never happen again.

To block that thought, he turned his mind instead to the coming meeting. Another irony, that was. He'd tried so many times, as head of the Union for Democracy, to arrange a meeting with His Majesty, to discuss his plan for phasing out the centuries-old and outdated monarchy and ushering in a form of democratic government based-in his opinion quite reasonably-on that of their neighbor, Great Britain's responsible monarchy. In the past, he'd never gotten past Weston's advisors-not hard to understand their diligence, perhaps, since most of their jobs no doubt depended on keeping the status quo. And now…here he was, on his way to a private, one-on-one meeting with the king at his secret mountain hideaway. But not to discuss politics.