Piper’s eyes widened, and her hands locked firmly around the back of his neck. She drew him in for a gasping kiss, and when they broke apart, it was her turn to speak to him. “Please, Camil. It’s not fair. Make it even.”

  Make it even. She wanted his release as much as he wanted hers. His pleasure, as much as he wanted hers. It was equal between them, and the thought of it was so hot that it yanked him into his own orgasm. Camil stroked into her, harder this time, abandoning his attempt to be sweet and careful, and Piper’s body responded, letting him in.

  She came again with a low cry as he rode out his own orgasm. It gripped him by the hips and tugged with such force that he lost his breath. Lost everything, except the sensation of her wet heat around him and her soft body under his and the way she whispered to him, again and again, that she needed him inside her, that she loved him there, that he should stay.

  “Don’t leave,” she chanted. “Don’t leave.”

  He shivered out the last wave of pleasure. “I’ll stay,” he said against the pulse at the side of her neck. “I’ll stay.”

  8

  “I need pancakes.” Piper whispered the words in Camil’s ear two weeks later as they lay in his bed in the palace, Camil sprawled out on the pillow, Piper already awake.

  She’d been awake for an hour, and the lack of pancakes was becoming a problem. It had started as a dream. She’d been sitting in a diner like the one she’d gone to with her mom back home. In the dream, the waitress had slid a plate in front of Piper. On that plate was the most perfect stack of pancakes she’d ever seen. It could have starred in a TV commercial.

  Piper had been lifting her fork toward that stack when she woke up.

  It was still early, and she didn’t want to wake Camil, so she did the responsible thing and tried to go back to sleep. It was an abject failure. Nothing but pancakes would soothe this need inside her.

  “Hmm?” Camil said, mostly into the pillow. It was truly a shame to wake him up. With the morning sun slanted over his skin and his lean, hard body sprawled out on the bed, he was gorgeous. Her stomach growled again. Gorgeous or not, he wasn’t pancakes.

  “I need pancakes. Can we go down to the kitchen?”

  He rolled over enough to kiss her cheek, shaking his head with a grin. “We can go anywhere you’d like. It’s my palace, after all.”

  At times like these, she especially appreciated Camil’s ability to wake up and spring into action. They were dressed and headed down to the kitchens in a matter of minutes, her hand on his arm in a way that no longer felt like a chivalrous joke. It felt sweet, like something they did together just for the joy of touching one another.

  Unlike the rest of the palace, which was easing into the day, the kitchen was awake and bustling. Piper cleared her throat, catching the attention of the kitchen manager, a woman named Sarai. She looked at them wide-eyed.

  “Do you mind some interlopers?” Piper said, her throat nearly catching with the question. If Sarai kicked her out, they’d have to shop for ingredients and go to her apartment, and that would take so much time.

  “What did you have in mind?” Sarai put on a smile, probably for Camil’s benefit.

  “I’m making the prince breakfast.”

  “Of course,” Sarai said, though the wary tone didn’t quite dissipate. “Let me show you to an open prep table.”

  Sarai assigned them one of the line chefs to bring ingredients from around the kitchen and went back to her work. The young chef watched Piper with open curiosity. “What can I get for you?”

  She rattled off the list of ingredients. “And I want to assure you,” she said when she was done, “that I’ll clean up any mess I make.” Piper would have plenty of time. Camil was always getting torn away for one business meeting or another, so he couldn’t linger here with her all morning.

  Piper had flour in the bowl and was ready to add milk when she remembered she’d brought Camil with her, too. “Do you want to help?”

  “No.” He had not stopped grinning all this time, as if a trip to the kitchen with her was the highest entertainment. Camil grabbed one of the sleek, stainless-steel stools that dotted the kitchen and pulled it up near the table. “I want to watch the master.”

  Back to the pancakes. Her stomach growled, her mouth watered, and she’d never wanted to eat anything this much in her entire life. It was more powerful than wanting cake on her birthday. More powerful than wanting a drink at the end of a long work week. More powerful than wanting her favorite food, which was pizza from a hole-in-the-wall place two blocks from where she’d grown up in Pittsburgh. Tears pricked Piper’s eyes, but she blinked them away. No crying over pancakes, no matter how much her pregnancy craving screamed for attention. No matter how hard her pregnancy hormones tried to take over.

  Her saving grace was that she had made pancakes hundreds of times, just like this. Her mind carried on with the careful mixing and the addition of a hint of vanilla and the beating.

  “This is elaborate,” commented Camil.

  “If you do it this way, you don’t get that egg taste.”

  There would be no overwhelming egg taste in these pancakes. She hated that taste in an unbalanced batch of pancakes that hadn’t been properly constructed and mixed. Especially not today, when she wanted them so badly that her mouth watered every time she thought of those sweet, perfect circles.

  Piper poured the batter into the skillet as eight neat rounds and watched until the bubbles appeared. Until they burst and stayed open. Then she flipped them, adding two at a time to the plates she’d set out. Four on each plate. Piper flipped off the stove and put the remaining batter aside.

  Camil caught her eye as she buttered the pancake stacks and poured syrup lightly over them. “I’m surprised you have maple syrup here.”

  He scoffed, his eyes light. “Of course we do. Pure Vermont syrup, for all our visiting guests and the royals who prefer it.”

  The prince of Al-Fahr peered at the pancakes from his seat at the table, then got up to get Piper a stool, too. He set it out for her, then glanced at the plates in her hands.

  “Are you ready?” she asked.

  “Yes.” His sure tone didn’t match his expression. Camil was a coffee and fruit kind of guy, so pancakes were probably a little heavy for him.

  “Trust me,” she said. “We can always work off the extra calories later.”

  Camil huffed a laugh. Piper set out the plates and took her seat, then carved into her stack with the side of her fork. Now that the moment had arrived, she wanted only one thing more than she wanted to eat her pancakes—to see Camil take a bite. She lifted the bite to his mouth, raising her eyebrows.

  He opened his mouth, his hazel eyes on hers, and took what she offered. Camil’s face brightened, then brightened some more—pure delight.

  “They’re sweet,” he said. “Like you.”

  “You’re too much,” she said, but he was already leaning in for a kiss. He tasted like syrup, and at the touch of his lips to hers, her craving intensified. It wasn’t just for pancakes anymore, but for him, for the taste of him and the feel of him and everything about him. Camil brushed his tongue along her lower lip and Piper made a little noise of approval. This was the way to have pancakes—with Prince Camil, who was the first man to ever make her feel this way with a kiss. Shivery and warm and desperate to go back to bed with him.

  Someone cleared his throat behind him, and they jumped apart at the noise. Piper’s face burned with immediate shame, but she couldn’t help but turn to see who waited at the kitchen exit nearby.

  Jal. Camil’s father. The sharp downward curve of his lips was more than disapproval—it was disappointment.

  “I’d like to speak with my son,” announced the sheikh. “Now.”

  Camil nodded to Piper. “We’ll talk soon,” he promised, but a sick fear lodged in the pit of her gut. What if they didn’t talk soon? What if palace security arrived to take her back to her apartment? Camil followed his father out of the kitchen, and Piper was left alone in the crowd with a perfect stack of pancakes, one bite missing.

  She dropped the fork on the plate. Her stomach twisted too much for her to eat them.

  As soon as they reached his father’s office, as soon as he’d shut the door, Camil’s father rounded on him.

  “What are you doing with Piper?”

  Camil’s heart pounded, but he shrugged. “We’re friends helping each other out on mutual projects.”

  Jal stalked around his desk, picking up a newspaper as he went. His face twisted. “Camil. Please, tell me you’ll grow up and see sense. No one is fooled. The whole palace is buzzing with rumors about your relationship.” He tossed the paper down in front of Camil.

  The photo was on the front page. A picture of Camil and Piper looking cozy in Camil’s Bentley Continental. They’d used a relatively tame headline—Meet the Crown Prince’s New Lady Love—but the implication was clear. They knew Piper had been seen at the palace. They knew she hadn’t been leaving at night.

  “This dalliance,” his father said, his tone razor-sharp calm, “is unbecoming for a crown prince. What do you think is going to happen when it becomes clear that Piper is pregnant? She’s going to start showing eventually.”

  His face went hot. The urge to argue, to defend himself, reared up in him and nearly fought its way out. But Camil knew he didn’t have a leg to stand on. For the past two weeks, they’d been playing house. Enjoying each other while palace life went on around them. Ignoring the inevitabilities that would come upon them whether they were ready or not.

  They hadn’t made a solid plan for what would happen with the baby. They hadn’t made a solid plan for anything.

  “Father—”

  His father held up a hand. “Marry Piper and make her the future queen of Al-Fahr or keep her out of sight like the sheikhs of the past have done with all their mistresses.” The weight of history came down on Camil’s shoulders. The weight of the past. The weight of what all those other men had done when they fell in love—

  When they fell in love—

  He wasn’t in love with Piper. He cared for her, certainly, and she was pregnant with his child, but this raw, angry feeling in his chest wasn’t love. It was disappointment in himself for not seeing the writing on the wall. Camil shouldn’t have been taken by surprise. And the overwhelming softness he felt for her, the overwhelming desire...those were something else entirely.

  Love did not exist. Not like that. It couldn’t exist like that. The only thing that did exist was dangerous infatuation that inevitably led people to heartache and sometimes worse. He wasn’t in love with Piper. He didn’t want that for her, or for himself—that unavoidable crash and burn. All he wanted was to renovate that desert palace, to prove to his father he was ready to take over the sheikhdom, and to rule with a head and heart free of entanglements.

  Camil opened his mouth to answer but no words came. His mind had gone blank, fogged with so much emotion that he couldn’t speak.

  His father lowered his hand and rested his knuckles on the top of his desk, his expression softening by the smallest possible degree. That would be all Camil got from him on this.

  “We can set her up in a lovely home so that she can raise your child out of the public eye,” Jal offered, and Camil heard the concession underneath the hard tone. “She can even take Farah as her personal assistant.”

  Jal took his seat behind the desk and reached for one of the leather portfolios stacked neatly to one side.

  Discussion over.

  Camil nodded and went for the door. It had been such a pleasant start to the day—Piper in his bed, and then Piper in the palace kitchens, getting flour in her hair and grinning down at the pancakes she was making. She’d been so happy. He’d been so happy. And now he felt like a piece of smashed pottery.

  “Camil.”

  “Yes?” Camil looked over his shoulder at his father, who peered at him from the desk, the portfolio still closed in his hands. For a moment, a wild hope burst into being that his father would relent, would tell him that he understood the situation Camil was in and that he could take his time. That, in fact, he trusted Camil to be able to navigate this in the best way possible for himself and for Piper and for the child yet to be born.

  “You’ll make your choice soon,” Jal said. “Before the press gets wind of the pregnancy and ruins everything.”

  9

  He had to tell Piper what his father had said. They had to make a plan, and the first step in making that plan would be to break the news.

  But Camil couldn’t do it. He couldn’t bring himself to go seek her out, sit her down, and have that conversation. He couldn’t even bring himself to leave his office. Instead, he gathered his work close, and when he couldn’t pretend to look at plans and proposals for another second, he picked up the phone.

  Let there be some good news today.

  The architect Camil had hired to renovate the desert palace answered on the first ring. “Prince Camil,” he said jovially, and Camil’s shoulders eased. This man sounded too calm, too in control, for there to be bad news. “I was just about to call you. I have several designs for you to review. Now, I could email you the pictures, but if you come here in person, you’ll be better able to judge the spaces.”

  “Of course. I’ll leave for the palace tomorrow morning. Expect me by ten.”

  “Wonderful. I’ll see you then, Prince Camil.”

  Good enough news. Having something to approve was better than having nothing. But he was no closer to figuring out what to say to Piper about his father’s ultimatum. He spent the rest of the day thinking about it, and it was still crowding out all his other thoughts when he sat down to dinner in his rooms with Piper. She asked him about his day, and he could hardly remember his own answer. Fine. It had been fine, except that his father had given him an ultimatum.

  She hovered her fork thoughtfully over the lamb dish in front of her. “I have a bit of news. I’ve exhausted the material in the archives.”

  “Oh?” It shocked him to hear it. Camil had always imagined the research portion of her project to be endless, with the archives extending on into infinity. Wrong again.

  “Yes. From everything I’ve gathered, I can most probably substantiate your great-grandparents’ story. It’s not totally definite because I don’t have a firsthand account from either of them, but I can start writing.” Piper arched an eyebrow. “And you can desecrate the monument to their love while knowing that they were, at least, telling the truth.”

  The comment speared through him, sharp and irritating, and Camil blinked away his own surprise at how immediately it bothered him. Piper had always been opposed to the renovation, ever since he’d told her about it. But tonight her disapproval rankled. All he could summon was a nod. Camil felt her watching as he pretended to focus on his food, though he hadn’t been hungry since the meeting with his father.

  It was the quietest dinner he’d ever had with Piper, and there was a special kind of awfulness to the stilted tension between them. It was nothing like the peace they’d shared over the last couple of weeks. When they’d been together in the evenings, they often sat together in large pockets of silence.

  By the end of the meal, a certain desperation had settled into the pit of his gut. Back in his rooms, he turned on a movie—some drama Piper had mentioned a few days before. Camil hadn’t seen it, so they agreed to watch it together.

  Piper started yawning halfway through. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, as if they were in a theater and she was worried about disrupting the other patrons. “I’m not very tired, but lately when I sit down for long enough, it sort of…comes over me.”

  A side effect of the pregnancy, no doubt. His father’s ultimatum nagged at him. Now didn’t seem like the moment to break the news—not when they were just getting comfortable again after the strange energy at dinner.

  As soon as the credits rolled, Piper stood up and bent to brush a kiss to Camil’s cheek. “I’m going to get ready for bed.”

  Piper padded into the en suite bathroom in Camil’s master bedroom, and for the first time he could recall, she didn’t shut the door.

  Camil couldn’t take his eyes off Piper as she moved through the familiar routine of brushing her teeth and washing her face and moisturizing her skin. He meant to look away, but over and over again, she drew his gaze. What a process. He’d never stopped to consider what all went into a woman’s process for preparing for bed. Why would he have? Camil didn’t care what women did before bed. If he was honest, it had rarely crossed his mind.

  So why couldn’t he stop watching? Why was he so entranced with her? Perhaps it was the routine. Piper seemed to be thinking about other things while she went through the motions. She wasn’t self-conscious. Wasn’t thinking of him at all. This was just how she got ready for bed. The casual intimacy struck him like a fist to the chest. Camil was being allowed to watch her remove her armor, so to speak.

  He wrenched his eyes away from Piper and cast around for something else to look at. Something else to do. He had never wanted to be allowed this kind of intimacy. Never hoped for it. It was the kind of thing that went along with love, and love was always a disaster. This behavior—doing these things in front of him—it was what he would expect from a serious girlfriend or a wife.

  Piper wasn’t that.

  Right?

  They’d had an agreement about that. Hadn’t they?

  After she was finished in the bathroom, he brushed his teeth with clinical efficiency and climbed into bed beside her. As Camil reached for the light, she put a hand on his arm.

  “Why are you so tense?” Her soft question made his heart thump. “You look like you’re in pain.”

  Perhaps he was in pain. His father’s words, his judgment, had cut deep. Camil had sworn from a young age that he wouldn’t fall in love because it always ended badly for people. He just hadn’t anticipated that it would go badly so early, and with such involvement from his own father. The ultimatum chafed at him. Part of him had wanted to propose to Piper in his own time, in his own way. Part of him had begun to consider the idea that marrying her would make his life better, not constrain it. But now that his hand was being forced—