Free In Defiance of Duty by Caitlin Crews Page B

and wait for him here. Much less actually say what she’d wanted to say for weeks now. She wasn’t sure it mattered either way.
    She let out the breath she’d been holding, closed her eyes and finished it. “I want a separation.” There was a beat. Then another. Her heart pounded so hard inside her chest that it actually hurt.
    “What did you say to me?”
    Her eyes snapped to his. They glittered dangerously. He looked particularly wild this morning, his dark hair mussed from sleep, his jaw unshaven, and only those trousers low on his narrow hips. His voice was the iciest she’d ever heard it, a frigid sort of growl that sliced into her like a blade. She had the panicked thought that trousers low on his narrow hips. His voice was the iciest she’d ever heard it, a frigid sort of growl that sliced into her like a blade. She had the panicked thought that if she looked down, she would see her own blood.
    But she didn’t look. She didn’t dare. She couldn’t tear her gaze away from his. She couldn’t do anything but stand there, frozen solid while he seemed to expand to fill the room and she was forced to remember that he was a dangerous, impossibly lethal man.
    He only pretended to be tame, she reminded herself, feeling breathless and faintly ill, because it suited him to do so.
    “I can’t possibly have heard you correctly,” he said, his voice that same cold lash.
    He didn’t move closer to her, but then, he didn’t have to. She could see every long, hard line of his big body, so dangerously still, all of that uncompromising male power coiled in him. Ready. Sex and command. It was so heady, so intoxicating, that she understood with no little despair that she would always want it—
    want him—no matter how miserable it might make her.
    But this was what men like Azrin did. They commanded. They ruled. They blocked out the whole world. They took. What had ever made her think she could stand strong and independent, her own person, next to this much power and force? She’d been lucky he’d let her play around in the fantasy of it all this time.
    Lucky, she repeated to herself, and it almost made her cry.
    “Are you planning to say something else?” he asked, in that dark, impatient tone that made her stomach turn over, hard, even as she felt too hot, too cold. “Am I to draw my own conclusions about this time you need? This separation? Or, let me guess, you are laboring under the delusion that I’ll just let you run back to Australia without a fight?”
    “I am not happy,” Kiara said then, finally, simply, and the words seemed to crack something open inside of her. As if she’d been afraid to say them, afraid to admit that she felt them, afraid of what would happen once she did …
    This, she thought then, wishing she could feel numb. Wishing this could simply be over somehow. Wishing that she had never sat down at that café table all those years ago. This was exactly what she was afraid of.
    “Are you sure?” His voice was so dark, with such a vicious kick beneath. “You seemed happy enough every time you came in my arms last night. I lost count, Kiara. How many times was it?”
    Some sickening mix of temper and desperation swirled in her belly and then pulled tight, giving her just enough false courage to lift her chin, square her shoulders and figure out some way to push the necessary words out of her mouth.
    “Yes, Azrin,” she said. “You’re very good in bed. Congratulations. But that isn’t the point, is it?” He spread his hands out as if in surrender, and she had the despairing thought that he’d never looked less like a supplicant. Even a gesture like this made him look like what he was—a bloody king, indulging her. Patronizing her, on some level, whether he knew it or not.
    “Why don’t you tell me what the point is,” he suggested, and there was less ice in his voice now and more of that deliberate, measured calmness that she found she hated. It smacked of that same