Traded to the Desert Sheikh

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“Take off the rest of your clothes, Amaya,” Kavian said, and there was no mistaking the royal command. The powerful imperative. Or that surge of something inside her that wanted nothing more than to obey him. At once.

“I can’t think of a single reason why I would do that.” She managed to meet that gaze of his. Hold it. “More important, I don’t want to take the rest—any of my clothes off.”

“That is yet another lie. Soon there will be so many they will block out the desert sun above us, and I have no intention of living in such a darkness. Know this now.”

That had the unpleasant ring of prophecy or foreboding, or perhaps more than a little of both, and it was as if her pulse had gotten too hard, too loud. It hammered at her.

“It’s not a lie simply because it’s something you don’t want to hear,” she threw at him, forcing her knees to lock beneath her, to stop their wobbling. “You don’t own the thoughts in my head. You can’t order me to think only the things you like.”

His gray eyes gleamed, and there was not a single part of him that was not hard, unflinching. Tempered steel. Barely contained power. She’d seen softer, more approachable statues littered about the sculpture gardens of Europe.

“It is a lie because you do, in fact, wish to take off the rest of your clothes.” His voice was so quiet it almost disguised the cut of his words, the way they sliced into her. Through her. “More than that, you wish to give yourself over to me the way you did before, but this time, not in a sudden rush in a hidden alcove. You wish to run like honey against my palms and shake apart when I claim you. Again and again.”

“No.” But she scarcely made a sound.

“You are mine, Amaya. Can you doubt this? You shake even now, in anticipation.”

“I was never yours. I will never be yours. I will—”

“Hush.” An expression she might have called tender on another man, one not carved directly from stone and war and the cruel desert all around, crossed his brutally handsome face. He reached over and fit his hard palm to her jaw, cradling her too-hot cheek. “I did not know you were an innocent, Amaya. I would never have taken you like that, with so little consideration for anything but passion, had I known. You did not have to run, azizty. You could have told me.”

And something yawned open inside her then. Something far more terrifying than the things he made her feel when he was autocratic and overbearing. She was drawn to him even then, yes. More than simply drawn to him. But this... She shoved the great sinkhole of it away in a panic, afraid it might spill out with that hectic heat she could suddenly feel behind her eyes. Afraid it marked her as weak and disposable, like her own mother before her.

Amaya jerked her cheek back, out of his hold, as if his palm had scalded her.

“I...” She felt too much, all at once, buffeting her from all sides. Her memories and the present wound together into a great knot she couldn’t begin to unravel—and was afraid to poke at, lest it fall apart and show him too much. She lied again, hoping it would push him back into temper, or put him off altogether. Anything but that hint of softness. Anything but that. “I wasn’t innocent. I was the Whore of Montreal while I was at university. I slept with every man I could find in the whole of North America. I ran because I was bored—”

Kavian sighed. “And now I am bored.”

She didn’t know what he would do then and felt oddly bereft when he only stepped back from her. His dark gaze pinned her to the pillar behind her for a long, uncomfortably assessing moment that could easily have lasted whole years, and then he simply turned and dove into the nearest great bath.

It should have been a relief. A reprieve. She should have taken it as an opportunity to regroup, to breathe, to figure out what on earth she was going to do next as that solid, smooth warrior’s body of his cut through the water and briefly disappeared beneath it.

But instead, she watched him. That marvelous, impossibly strong body could not possibly have been the product of a fleet of personal trainers or hours on modern gym equipment. He used every part of his intense physicality in everything he did. He was a smooth, powerful machine. And he fit here, in this age-old place. A weapon carved directly from the mountains themselves, beautiful and graceful in its way, but always, always deadly. Lethal in every particular.

Kavian surfaced in the middle of the pool and slicked his dark hair back from his face, his gaze like a punch, even from several feet away. Then he reached up with one perfectly carved arm and threw something toward the far end of the pool. It arced through the air and landed with a wet splat, and Amaya felt drunk. Altered. Because it still took another few moments to realize what he’d thrown was his boxer briefs.

And another jarring thud of her misbehaving heart to realize what that meant. That he was naked in all his considerable glory. Right there. Right in front of her.

She had to get a hold of herself, she thought sternly, or she was at definite risk of swallowing her own tongue and expiring on the spot. Which the Whore of Montreal would have been unlikely to do, surely.

“I don’t understand what’s happening,” she said, forcing herself as close to an approximation of calm as she could get.

“Do you not? And yet you claimed you were no innocent. I’d have imagined that a woman of so much sordid experience would scarcely blink at the sight of a naked man in a pool.”

He was no longer touching her. He was no longer caging her between his masterful body and that pillar. He was no longer even near her. So there was absolutely no reason that Amaya should have been standing there at the edge of the pool, staring at him as if he were holding her fast in one mighty fist.

“Is this—do you really want to—right here? You dragged me straight off the plane without any discussion or—”

He was pitiless. He said nothing, only watched her as she cut herself off and sputtered off into nothing as if she really were the artless, naive little girl he seemed to think she was already. She hated it. She hated herself. But she stood there anyway, as if awaiting his judgment. Or his next command.

As if it didn’t matter what she felt, only what he did.

You know where that goes,she reminded herself with no little despair. You know exactly where that leads, and who you’ll become, too, if you let this happen.

But all the vows she’d made to herself—that she would never lose herself so completely, that she would never disappear into any man until she could not exist without him the way her mother had done, until the loss of his affection sent her staggering around the planet like some kind of grieving gypsy with a thirst for vengeance and a child she resented—didn’t seem to signify as she stood there in nothing but boy shorts and a T-shirt in the harem of the sheikh who had claimed her.

“This is a bath,” Kavian said evenly. Eventually. Long after she was forced to come to several unfortunate conclusions about how very much she was like her mother, despite everything. “I dislike flying. I want the recycled air washed off my skin as soon as possible. And I want the last six months washed off you.”

* * *

Amaya shivered, visibly, and Kavian tamped down the roaring beast in him that wanted nothing more than to put his hands on her and drag her to him, and who cared that she was anxious? He needed to be inside her. He needed her—and he had long since stopped needing a damn thing.

But he would not leap upon her like a feral thing, no matter the power of will it required to keep himself from doing so. This was no pretty diversion he was trying to lure into his bed for the night, not that he had ever needed much more of a lure than his name or his mere presence. Amaya was his queen. She would bear his sons, stand at his side, raise his heirs. She deserved what passed for a courtship here in this hard place he loved with every part of himself despite what he had done for it and no matter that there was only one possible, foregone conclusion.

This was a long game he played, with clear objectives. Like all the games he’d played in his time. And won.

So Kavian waited. He, who had not had to wait for much of anything since the day he reclaimed his father’s throne. He, who had already waited for this woman for half a year, unaccountably. He, who was better used to women throwing themselves at him and begging for his notice.

He, who had never had a woman run from him in his life, before now. Before Amaya.

It was of little matter. She was here. She would stay here, because he willed it so. The world would return to the shape he preferred and do his bidding besides, and he would be inside her soon enough.

“Each pool is a different temperature,” he said in the faintly bored tones of a tour guide, as if that fire in him didn’t threaten to consume him whole despite the water he stood in. “There are any and all bathing accessories you could possibly require, from handmade soaps crafted here in the old city by local women to the finest luxury products flown in from Dubai.”

She was beautiful even when she was obviously nervous, standing there in a small white T-shirt that she obviously wore nothing beneath and those stretchy little shorts that made her hips look nothing short of edible. Her legs were even longer than he’d imagined, and perfectly formed, giving her a bit more height than the average woman—which meant he would not dwarf her in bed or out. Her narrow feet were pale and delicate, and she’d painted her toes a cheerful, bright blue that made his chest feel tight and hit him as critically important, somehow. Though he knew that was foolish.

“Come in, Amaya,” he said, invitation and order in one. “You will be the happier for it.”

Her head canted slightly to one side. “Do you promise not to touch me?”

He let his gaze move over that full mouth of hers that he’d dreamed of, these past months, more than he cared to admit. That thick, dark hair he wanted to see swirling around her shoulders and that he wanted to feel slide across his own skin. Those small, proud breasts and the peaks he had yet to taste that he could see poking against the sheer fabric of her T-shirt, perhaps an invitation she didn’t mean to extend. The hint of that smooth, olive expanse of her belly between her panties and her shirt, which he wanted to spend a very long time learning with his mouth. And that tempting triangle where her legs met, that he wanted to lick his way into until he forgot his own name.

Kavian took his time dragging his gaze back up her tempting body, noting the goose bumps that marked her arms as he did, and then smiled when his gaze tangled with hers again.

“No,” he said. “I certainly do not.”

Her lips parted as if that threw her off balance, but then she moved—and not away from him, as he’d expected. Instead, she walked along the edge of the pool toward the wide steps that led down into it from one side.

“Well,” she said, with a certain primness that reminded him of that way she’d laughed at her brother in that long-ago video, and coursed through his veins like that same sweet wine. “I have nothing against hygiene, of course.”

“Merely against sheikhs?” Perhaps, he thought with some surprise, he had it in him to tease after all. Only Amaya. Only alone.

“Sheikhs and kings and desert palaces,” she agreed, her gaze touching his, then moving away again as she made her way down the wide stairs and on into the water, still wearing that shirt and those sexy little shorts as if they were some kind of swimming costume. “Awful things, I think we can all agree.”

“Your misfortunes are vast, indeed. Of all the princesses I have chosen to become my queen over the course of my life, your burden is by far the heaviest.”

Amaya moved farther into the water until it lapped at the sweet indentation of her waist, and skimmed her palms over the surface of the pool on either side of her, as if testing the water’s temperature. She kept herself out of his reach, which Kavian could not abide a moment more. He moved toward her.