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The jets re-ignited in his eyes. A matching fire, of pure confusion, blazed through my psyche. “No,” I finally blurted. “That’s not the deal.”
Crazily, he laughed. Just a short spurt, as both his hands locked to those sinewy hips, but it threw me even more off-keel as he drawled, “The…deal?”
Huff. Not a pleasant one. Did he really need this all spelled out? “The deal where you finally get to make the difference. Where you stop being the damn lap dog.”
Hell. He wasn’t making this easy, still silently challenging me by canting his head to one side. With neck and hair porn added to the given temptation of his torso and that happy trail into his pants, it was a wonder I could still speak. But I did, dammit—and meant every word which rasped out.
“You’ve been waiting for this chance, Shiraz. You deserve it. Finally, everyone in Arcadia will recognize you as the hero you are…when you make one of their own your princess.”
His head came back up. As it did, fresh sharpness took over his face—something close to another laugh but not getting there.
“Is that what you think I want?” he charged softly. “To be ‘recognized’ as a hero?”
Confusion rockets, re-engage.“Isn’t it?”
Deep valleys formed across his forehead. His lower lip jutted, as an inner dilemma racked him. He looked ready to either put his head into the wall or between my thighs. For the sake of my sanity, I hoped he did neither.
“I never gave a flying fuck about being publicly hailed as a ‘hero’, Lucina. I simply wanted to do something worthy of the word—to give back, in some meaningful way, to my people.”
The bafflement burners were at full power now. “And you didn’t think you were doing that by successfully running the business of the country?”
“That was my job,” he explained. “Not my sacrifice.”
“And marrying Ambyr would have been that sacrifice.”
The tension in his face radiated down his body. “Yes,” he bit out.
My follow-up brimmed right to the surface. I didn’t want to ask it. I couldn’t not ask it.
“So what changed?”
Just like that, all the tautness left him. His hands slipped from his waist as an adoring smile lifted his lips—and impaled its brilliance into me.
“You got here.”
Heart soaring then tumbling. Soul rejoicing…then weeping. This still changed nothing. “So…the sacrifice thing is now old news?”
He shook his head slowly. “No. It simply changed.”
I forced out a soft laugh. Something had to balance out the weirdness of his energy. Not only because of its sobriety. It was his new serenity…
“Changed…to what?”
He began his answer with a backward step. Right into his closet. As I looked on, letting my puzzlement show, he pulled out a square of neatly folded clothing. Plunked it onto the bed in front of me. Only after a long scrutiny did I finally comprehend what I gawked at. That tangled pattern of tan, brown, and olive…
It was military camouflage.
“Our forces going for the special operations training with the Americans…”
It was my turn to jolt. As in a holy-freaking-God jolt. “Wh-what?”
“They need more technical specialists,” he went on, as if simply telling me the plot of some new book he’d read instead of a nuclear freaking bomb of information. “Personnel who can take data from multiple sources then swiftly process it into productive action for a huge team of operatives.” He crossed his arms, flashing a proud grin. “Sort of like M16 and James Bond, only with better gadgets.”
“Gadgets.” It spat out before I could help it, though I was stunned coherent words were even a thing for me right now. It was as ambushed as my heart and my soul. I splashed through the goo of another dimension, like Neo struggling to make sense of a new reality in The Matrix. Trouble was, the man I loved was still strolling around on the other side of the truth, gleefully talking about James fucking Bond.
“Quite a few, actually. There has been a great deal of pre-program reading to get through.”
All right, so he didn’t sound gleeful. He was pragmatic to the point of sexy, his posture hoisted by new professionalism, his gaze resolute and committed.
