CHAPTER TWO
AKEEMHADLIED.
The royal plane was a hotel. The double-decker private jet was the largest and fastest ever to take to the skies. He could have her right here, right now, in a multitude of rooms. Send her back to her insignificant life with only the marks he’d leave on her body with no one being the wiser. He’d bite and suck, and—
Beast.
His hand gripped the metal rail. Breaking his rhythm behind her.
The word was a murmur in his mind. An echo of the name his father had called his only son—his only child—and yet it scraped across his skin.
He was not feral any more. He did not cry when he was sad. He did not shout when he was angry. He was not the boy who, gifted with a small stuffed toy, had taken it to his room and torn the legs off. He was not the teenager who had answered with his fists when the boys in his class had mocked his trousers with their worn-out knees and his yellowing shirts.
He was not the boy who had been presented to his father, which had unleashed in him a rage knitted so tightly into his being that he’d scared himself. Even with guards holding his wrists above his head, his anger had swelled inside him. Bigger than him. Stronger. Untamed and ferocious.
No, he was not that boy any more, and he did not give in to his basic needs on a whim.
This was strategic, he reminded himself, shutting out the memory of those guards and his father’s voice. He moved faster, urging her up the stairs. This one night was planned. Necessary. Seduce and destroy. Not only Charlotte, but the past, and any lingering remains of the boy he could never be again. The boy nobody had wanted. The boy his father had forbidden him to be.
Watching the gentle sway of her hips, he followed behind her as she climbed the stairs and entered the palatial aeroplane. There were no staff to greet them. Under his orders. No one would see her. No one would know. Only him.
She was his last tie to the past and he would sever that rope.
He stayed in sync with her every move as she tentatively padded onto the brilliant white carpet stretching the length of the first small lounge and acting as her personal runaway. Tight curls kissed the hollow at the base of her spine that he’d known so well. She was undoubtedly curvier. Even from behind, in that awful black blazer, he could see the swell of her hips and the prominent dip of her waist.
‘Akeem?’
Her voice was gentle. Hesitant. She didn’t turn. Simply stopped. Looking ahead and not behind. He’d spent nearly a decade trying not to look back. Not to feel. Think. But she’d always been there. Taunting him.
‘Keep going,’ he insisted, and after a brief hesitation she walked through the next open door in its gilded frame and entered the main salon.
With a press of a button the obscured glass came together as double doors behind them. His heartbeat raged to a deafening crescendo, so fast it almost hurt.
She was all his now.
Charlotte halted, and moved her head from side to side, taking in the shuttered windows lining the walls, the plush sofas draped in beige and gold running along each wall. A sound of awe escaped her, and he felt himself swell.
Open-mouthed, she drank in the surroundings he lived in every day. The slashes of light carefully designed to illuminate the highly polished wooden panels and hand-carved tables. Everything shimmered with a gold hue—including her.
She was looking straight ahead, and he watched her gaze stall. The throne. High-backed, and made from the finest yellow metal, encrusted with Taliedaa’s very own rare jewels.
She gasped, and the sound was thrilling. He only wished his mouth was on hers so he could taste it. Taste the sweet taste of victory from her plush little mouth.
‘Sit, qalbi,’ he ordered.
Big green eyes turned to him. ‘But where?’
Where did she think?
He strode towards her, backing her up into the only place she could sit. The throne with its clawed feet. It hadn’t been designed for comfort. It had been created to bring everyone’s attention in the room to the person who sat on it.
It was his throne now. And he wanted his eyes on nothing but her. Because only for today—only for one night—she would taste and feel everything that belonged to him. Recognise everything he had become. That he would become.
A king.
Her hands pinched together in front of her. ‘Here...?’
Akeem leant towards her and reached down beside her waist to grasp the seatbelt.
‘I can do it,’ she said, and her fingers brushed against his as she tried to take it from him. She stilled, craning her neck to look into his eyes.
He’d felt it too.
The surge.
‘Allow me,’ he said, pulling it around her and clipping it closed.
Licking her plump lips, she drew his gaze. He followed her tongue as it moistened the outline of those lips he’d dreamt of too often in the night’s dark.
His eyes moved over her face. From the slight crevice below her nose to her high cheekbones. To her eyes. A deep emerald-green with slashes of gold highlighting her right iris. He had not forgotten those eyes. But he would.
Soon there would be no more dreams.
‘Outside...’ she started. ‘You said King? Not Prince?’
He stiffened. ‘My father passed away a few weeks ago and I will take his role as King, officially, in two weeks.’ With one last tug, he fastened her tightly into the seat.
‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ she said.
But he wasn’t sorry.
‘As I am for yours,’ he said instead.