Amaya couldn’t speak. Or move. She felt as if he’d hammered a giant nail straight into her and pinned her to her chair.
She thought of all the times Elizaveta had lectured her about her expectations, her terrible entitlement. She remembered the many, many times her mother had embarrassed her in front of others by claiming that Amaya was “her father’s daughter,” in a manner meant to suggest Amaya always selfishly wanted far more than her share, that she was greedy and ill-bred, that she was entirely, deliberately heedless of reality. She’d excused these things, one after the next, because she’d understood where her mother was coming from, what Amaya’s father had done. She’d assumed these things came from her mother’s panic at having to find ways to support them all on her own.
“I treat you like an adult because you would otherwise grow up coddled and spoiled like every other member of the Bakri line,” Elizaveta had said when Amaya was perhaps eleven. “The truth is that we have nothing. We are dependent on the kindness of friends.”
She’d meant her many lovers, the men who she’d never stayed with for too long, because they had always required such careful handling to put up with a woman with a sulky daughter in tow. Or so Elizaveta had always claimed.
“I don’t expect you to be as grateful as you should—that’s your father’s influence in you, I’m sure—but you must comprehend what there is to lose if you don’t do as I say.” Elizaveta had glared at Amaya as if she’d expected her daughter to argue, when Amaya had long since learned the folly of that kind of thing. Even then, even as a child, she’d known it was better to bend to those who could not. “We’ll lose everything. The roof above your head and the clothes on your back. Is that what you want?”
That had not been what eleven-year-old Amaya had wanted. The very idea had given her nightmares. And Elizaveta had never been a perfect parent, certainly. Life with her had always been complicated, but Amaya had been sympathetic because she’d understood that her mother hadn’t said those things to be cruel. Amaya’s father had broken something inside her, and sometimes it came out as poison. Amaya had learned not to take it personally... Or anyway, she’d tried her best not to take it personally.
“You are mistaken,” Amaya said to Kavian now when she could speak without that rough-edged thing inside her taking over and revealing too much. “I don’t know where you heard such a thing.”
“Had she married any of the men she found, she would have had to return you to your father and worse, to her way of thinking, give up her access to your money.” Another shrug, which made her want to throw her plate at him. A flicker in that gray gaze made her think he knew it, too. “This is not an attack, Amaya. This is simply a fact. I did not hear this through some grapevine or other—I’ve seen the paperwork.”
Amaya shook her head, so hard it almost hurt, and noticed her heart had started to kick at her, almost as if she was panicked.
“My mother was a self-made woman. She had nothing when she left Ukraine. She talked her way from minor dance halls into the fashion houses of Milan. She had nothing but her wit, her charm and her looks. That was how she entered her marriage to my father, and that was how she left it. If anything, I was a complication.”
It was only when she was finished speaking that Amaya realized her voice had risen, as if every sentence were a plate thrown, a blow landed on his wholly impervious form.
“She also had ambition,” Kavian said softly. He was so much more dangerous the quieter he got, she knew. She sucked in a breath against it. “Never forget that. She left Bakri because she was losing the sheikh’s favor. Better to leave and tell a sad tale across the years to a thousand receptive audiences. Better by far to hold the king’s daughter as ransom than to remain in Bakri as a neglected, forgotten wife. The sheikh would have banished her to one of the outlying residences, far away from the palace where she would wither away into irrelevance, and she knew it. That, azizty, did not suit your mother’s ambitions at all.”
Amaya stared at him, willing herself not to react in the way she suspected he wanted her to do. Her lips felt bloodless. Her stomach twisted—hard. “You don’t know anything about my mother. She was not ambitious. She was in love.”
She shouldn’t have said that. She shouldn’t have uttered those words. Not to him, not here. Not out loud—and she didn’t dare ask herself why that was. But Amaya couldn’t take them back, no matter how much she wished she could. She couldn’t make that taut, near-painful silence between them disappear, or do anything about that sudden arrested look on Kavian’s austere face. She straightened in her seat instead, and forced herself to meet that edgy gray gaze of his straight on as if she felt nothing at all.
“My father was a convincing man when it suited him.” She heard that catch in her throat and she knew Kavian did, too, but she pushed on. “He convinced a woman who had been born with nothing and raised to expect little else that he adored her. That he worshipped her. That he would remake his world in her honor.”
She didn’t point out how familiar that sounded. Just as she didn’t give that searing blast of temper in Kavian’s dark gaze a chance to form into harsh words on his lips.
“He lied. Maybe he meant it when he said it—what do I know? But my mother believed him. That was why she thought there was something she could do to regain his favor, to win back his attention once it drifted. Anything to make him love her again. But what my father truly loved was collecting, Kavian. He was always looking for his next acquisition. He didn’t lose much sleep over the things he’d already collected and shunted aside.”
He didn’t speak for a long, cool moment that careened around inside Amaya’s chest, leaving jagged marks. She tilted up her chin and told herself she could handle it. Him. Or survive it, anyway.
“Is that what you’re afraid of?” he asked.
She would never know how she held his gaze. How she managed to keep herself from reacting to that terrible, infinitely destructive question. She only knew that she did it. That she stared back at him, stone to his stone, as if her life depended on it.
“Are you talking about your mother, Amaya?” Kavian pushed at her in that quiet way of his that nonetheless made every bone in her body ache. She fought to restrain a shiver. “Or yourself?”
“Don’t tie yourself in knots looking for comparisons that don’t exist,” she managed to bite out at him, still channeling stone and steel and calm. “I’m nothing like her.”
“I am aware. If you were, you would not be here.” She hated the way he looked at her as if knew all the things she carried inside, her memories and her dreams and her darkest secrets alike. As if what Kavian enjoyed collecting was every last piece of her soul. And once he had them all, she couldn’t help wondering then in a panic, what would become of it? Or her? “And as fascinating as this conversation is, it doesn’t alter the fact that you require an entirely new wardrobe. You must look like my queen whether you feel like it or do not. Especially at our wedding ceremony, which, I hesitate to remind you, is in a matter of weeks.”
“I don’t want a ceremony.”
“I didn’t ask you what you wanted. I told you what was necessary and what I require.” His gaze glinted with amusement then, and that was much worse. It moved in her like heat. Like need. “Shall I demonstrate to you why you should begin to learn the distinction between the two? And the consequences if you do not?”
But Kavian’s consequences always ended the same way—with Amaya stretched out naked on the edge of some or other gloriously intense pleasure she worried she might not survive, begging him for mercy and forgetting her own damn name. So she only picked up her coffee again and took another sip, schooling her features into something serene enough to be vaguely regal and ignoring that wicked crook of his hard mouth as she did it.
“A new wardrobe fit for a queen?” she murmured, her voice cool and smooth. Stone and steel. Just like him. “How de
lightful. I can’t wait.”
“I am so pleased you think so,” Kavian said in the very same tone, though his gray eyes gleamed. “We leave for your first public appearance as queen tomorrow morning. I’m thrilled you’ll be able to dress the part at last.”
“As am I,” she said dryly. Almost as if she couldn’t help herself—couldn’t keep herself from needling him. “I have worried about little else.”
“Ah, azizty,” he murmured, sounding as close to truly amused as she’d ever heard him, “when will you understand? I am not a man who does anything by halves.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
IF HE WAS a good man, Kavian reflected the following day, he would not have set up his betrothed for this particular day of tests. He would not have tested her at all. Had it been about what he wanted, he simply would have kept her in his bed forever. He would have lost himself there in the sweet madness of her scent, the addiction of her smooth skin. The glory he’d found in her arms that shook him far more than he cared to admit.
But this was Daar Talaas and Kavian had never been good. He’d never had the chance to try. He was the king, and thus he did what was necessary for his people. If that happened to align with what was good, so be it. But he would not lose sleep over it if it did not.
He would sleep like an innocent, he assured himself, whatever happened in the desert that had forged him. It would be the making of Amaya, too, he knew. There was no other way.
After all, she had already taken the news of her mother’s true treatment of her in stride. Kavian dared to allow himself a shred of optimism that she would rise to whatever occasion presented itself.
They’d left the palace in the morning, taking a helicopter out to the stable complex on the far side of the treacherous northern mountains. They’d stood together in the center of the courtyard while his men, a sea of servants and stable hands, and a selection of his finest Arabian horses hurried all around them.
“Do you ride?” he’d asked, almost as an afterthought.
She’d been dressed like a Daar Talaasian noblewoman, in an exquisite dress that adhered to desert custom with her arms and legs covered and her head demurely veiled. It only made her every graceful movement that much more intoxicating, to Kavian’s mind, because he had the pleasure of knowing what was beneath. All her soft skin, the temptation of her hair, the sweet taste of her, woman and cream. But there’d been no veiling that cool gaze of hers, dark chocolate mixed with ice as it met his.
“I’ve ridden a horse before, if that’s what you mean. I’m sure you already know that my mother and I spent several summers on a ranch in Argentina.”
What he knew was far less interesting to him than what she chose to tell him. “Did you fall off a great deal?”
She stiffened almost imperceptibly, and those marvelous bittersweet eyes of hers narrowed. “Are you asking me if I’ve suffered a head injury?”
He’d kept himself from smiling by sheer force of will, and it was much harder than it should have been. Much harder than he could recall it ever having been before. “I am asking if I can expect you to topple off the side of a horse while you are meant to be riding it.”
“Not on purpose,” she’d retorted, and it had only occurred to him then that they weren’t in private any longer. That his men stood around him, closely watching this exchange with the scandalous woman who had evaded him for months—whom he had clearly not yet subdued. “Do you plan to ride me out into the desert, throw me to the sand dunes and then claim I fell off?”
They had been speaking in English, which was lucky as very few of his men understood a word of it. The fact that he’d been nearly smiling at her in obvious indulgence, however, was less lucky. Any softness, any hint of a crack in his armor, would be exploited as a weakness by his enemies. Kavian knew that all too well.
He couldn’t have said why he cared so much less in that moment than he should have.
He’d given the order then. It had taken only a few moments for the small party to mount up, and when he’d looked back down at Amaya she’d been standing there, doing an admirable job of keeping herself from frowning at him. He’d seen the effort she expended in the way her dark eyes crinkled in the corners.
“Did you ask me all those questions for your own amusement?”
“Yes,” he’d replied dryly. “I am a hilarious king. Ask anyone.”
And then he’d simply reached down from the back of his horse, clamped an arm around her middle and hauled her up before him.
He’d felt more than heard the tiny noise she made, somewhere between a gulp and a squeak, and he knew that had he found her pulse with his mouth, it would be going wild. Yet she only gripped the arm he’d banded around her abdomen and said nothing.
“Courage, azizty,” he’d murmured, his voice low and for her ears only. “Today you must prove you are the queen my people deserve.”
“But—”
“Whether you wish it or do not. This is about Daar Talaas, Amaya, not you or me.”
He’d felt the breath she’d sucked in and he’d thought she’d planned to argue further, but she hadn’t. She’d been quiet. Perhaps too quiet, but there’d been nothing he could do about it then—or would have done if he could, if he was honest with himself. A test could hardly matter if it was without some peril. So instead, he’d given the next order and they’d ridden out into the desert, deep into the far reaches of the desolate northern territories.
It was not an easy ride by any means, but Amaya did not complain, which pleased Kavian greatly. She did not squirm against him, nor divert his attention any more than the simple fact of her there between his legs, her pert bottom snug against the hardest part of him as they rode, distracted him.
He found it impossible not to notice that she fit him perfectly.
They reached the encampment by midafternoon, after hours spent galloping across the shifting sands, racing against the sun itself at this time of year. Fierce men on bold horses met them some distance away and led them the rest of the way in, shouting ahead in their colorful local dialect. The collection of tents that waited for them had the look of a makeshift traveling camp instead of a permanent settlement, despite the goats and children who roamed in and around the grounds and told a different tale. Kavian knew that it was all a deliberate, canny bit of sleight of hand. The truth was in the quality of the horseflesh, the presence of so many complacent and well-fed camels, the fine, sturdy fabric of the tents themselves.
It could have been a scene from any small village out here in the desert, unchanged in centuries, and there was a part of Kavian that would always long for the simplicity of this life. No palace, no intrigue. No political necessities, no alliances and no greater enemy than the harsh environment. Just the thick heat of the desert sun above, the vastness and the quiet all around and a tent to call his home.
Though he knew that was not the truth of this place, either.
“What are we doing here?” Amaya asked as they rode into camp, and he wondered what she saw. The dirt, the dust. The sand in everything. The rich, dark scent in the air that announced the presence of the tribe’s livestock, horses and camels. The suspicious frowns from the people who could see at a glance that she was not one of them. The lack of anything even resembling an amenity.
There was no oasis to cool off in here, because it was another fifteen minutes or so farther north, fiercely guarded and zealously protected for the use of this tribe alone—but Amaya couldn’t know that. The women who clustered around the fire, beginning their preparations for the evening meal, eyed them as their party approached but made no move to welcome them, and Kavian imagined how they must look to Amaya. But he knew what she could not—that their seeming poverty was as feigned as the rest.
Nothing was ever quite what it seemed. He came here as often as he could to remember that.
“I have co
me a very long way to have a conversation,” Kavian told his betrothed, and that, too, was only a part of it.
“To settle a dispute?” Amaya asked. She didn’t wait for him to confirm or deny. “The king himself would hardly ride out to discuss the weather, I suppose.”
Kavian pulled on the horse’s reins, bringing the Thoroughbred to a dancing stop in front of a line of stern-faced elders, all of whom bowed deep at the sight of him. He inclined his head, then swung down from the horse’s back, leaving his hand resting possessively on Amaya’s leg as he stood beside her.
He greeted the men before him, introduced Amaya as his betrothed queen and then they all performed the usual set of formal greetings and offers of hospitality. It went back and forth for some time, as expected. Only when the finest tent belonging to the village’s leader had been offered and accepted, as was custom, did Kavian turn to Amaya again and lift her down from the horse.
“That wasn’t the Arabic I know,” she said, in soft English that sounded far sweeter than the look in her eyes. “I caught only one or two words in ten.”
He didn’t laugh, though he felt it move in him. “Let me guess which ones.”
“Did you accept the man’s kind offer of a girl for your use?” she asked, and though her voice was cool, her eyes glittered. “They must have heard you’d gone from seventeen concubines to one. A tremendous national tragedy indeed.”
He could have put her mind at ease. He could have told her that the girl, like so many of the girls he was offered in these far-off places that never advanced much with the times, was little more than a child. He had taken many of them back to the palace, installed them in his harem and given them a much better life—one that had never included his having sex with them. He could have told Amaya that such girls accounted for most—though not all, it was true; he had never been a saint by any measure—of the harem he’d kept. He could have told her that there had never been any possibility that he would take a young girl as his due tonight and more, that the elders had known that, hence the extravagant effusiveness of their offers.
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