Traded to the Desert Sheikh

by Caitlin Crews

  Amaya couldn’t speak for a long moment. She thought of a tiny boy who’d lost everything and had been given only vengeance in return, out here in this harsh, desolate place without a single hint of softness. It made her heart hurt, as if he were the great sky pressing into her, as impossible and as far away. As beautiful and as untouchable.

  He had been a lost child and they had made him into a stone. And now he thought it was a virtue.

  “I’m sorry,” she said softly. “That seems like an undue burden to place on a child.”

  “You misunderstand me.” His gaze was too dark. His eyes glittered. “I am not telling you this story because I regret what happened to me. What is there to regret? I was lucky.”

  “You are also now the king.”

  “I am.”

  “Does that mean...” She searched his face, but he might truly have been made of marble then. He was that unyielding. “Blood begat blood?”

  “It means that I grew up,” Kavian said quietly. With a deep ferocity that tugged at her in ways she didn’t understand, as if his story was changing things inside her as he told it. Shifting them. “It means that I dedicated myself to becoming the necessary weapon to achieve my ends. And it means that when I had the chance, I exacted my vengeance, and know this, Amaya, if you know nothing else about me. My single regret is that the man who murdered my family could die but once.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  IT WAS A TEST, Kavian reminded himself harshly. The most important one.

  This had all been a test. The long ride into the most remote part of the Daar Talaas Desert, abandoning her to see what she would do under the watchful eye of the woman he’d long considered his real mother. Then this. Throwing out the bloody truth of his family and his own dark deeds to see what she would make of them.

  To see what Amaya was made of, after all. Who she really was when there was nowhere to run. If she was, truly, the one woman who could embody all he wanted.

  Kavian stood there, stone-faced before this woman he had chased across the world, and awaited her reaction. It would determine the whole of their future.

  He told himself he didn’t care either way. That his heart was as much stone as he knew his expression was. There were some who had found his pursuit of vengeance unforgivable. There were others whose interest in his past had always seemed too avid for his comfort. This was nothing but a test to see where Amaya would fall on that spectrum.

  It would set the stage for how he handled his marriage going forward, nothing more. Either she would prove herself a worthy queen, a woman like his foster mother, who was braver than most men, his queen—or she would simply be a wife with a lofty title who would eventually give Kavian his heirs.

  It matters little which way she goes, he told himself then.

  But he found that he was frozen in place, awaiting her judgment, all the same.

  Amaya swallowed hard, but she didn’t shift her gaze from his. She still stood tall before him. The warm light from the lanterns made her look gilded, standing there with her glorious spill of dark hair all around her and her perfect breasts visible beneath that silky little shift she wore. She was still so pretty it almost felt like an attack. An assault. It rolled over him and flattened him. It took out his defenses like a kick to the knees.

  But he had no intention of showing her that.

  “You obviously expect me to clutch at my pearls and faint,” she said after a long, long moment.

  “Aim for the bed,” he advised her. “The rug is not as soft as it appears.”

  “Did you torture him?” she asked.

  He hadn’t expected that. He considered her more closely.

  “No,” he said at last. “He was the butcher. I wanted only what he took. If not my family, then the throne.”

  “Did it change you?”

  He blinked, and ignored that heavy thing inside his chest that seemed to bear down hard at that, as if his heart was still wrapped in those same old chains.

  As if he was.

  “No,” he said after a moment, when that harsh pull inside him faded. Or became more bearable somehow. “The change you mean happened much earlier. When I accepted that I would become what I hated in order to do what I must. I do not regret avenging my family. I regret only that I share anything with the man who killed them—that in order to honor my family I became a murderer, just like him.”

  “No.” Her voice was fierce then, immediate, and her eyes glittered. “Nothing like him. You could never be anything like him. He killed children for his own selfish gain. All you did was take out a monster.”

  And Kavian had not realized, not until that moment, how very much he’d needed to hear her say that. How much he’d needed proof that she was who he’d thought she was from the start. He didn’t want to analyze it. He didn’t want to consider the implications. To hell with all that.

  She was looking at him as if he was some kind of hero. Not the monster he’d long ago accepted he’d had to become because he’d had no other choice. She was looking at him as if—

  But he couldn’t let himself go too far down that road. He couldn’t risk it.

  “Come here,” he gritted out at her, and he didn’t smile when she jerked slightly at the harsh command, or even when she obeyed. He crossed his arms over his chest and peered down at her as she drew near. “Kiss me.”

  Amaya swayed toward him, the light playing off the silken shine of her shift and the smooth intoxication of her skin. She hooked one hand over his forearm where it crossed the other, and then she went up on her toes and slid her other hand along his jaw as if she sought to comfort him. And he felt the wholly uncharacteristic urge to lean into her palm, as if she was sunlight and he could bask in her a while.

  Just a little while, something in him urged.

  “Does this mean I passed your test, Kavian?” she asked him, a smile in those dark chocolate eyes and teasing the corners of her lips. “Or are there more hoops I must leap through tonight?”

  He smiled then. Triumph and need and that heavy thing in his chest that made his heart beat too fast, too hard. He didn’t want to name it. He refused.

  “It means I want you to kiss me,” he said, as if hunger for her weren’t tearing at him, deeper and more ravenous than any he’d ever felt before. As if he could stand here all night, ignoring it. “I do not believe I was unclear.”

  “A kiss is my only reward for hours on a horse and hard labor by the fire?” She was teasing him again. Kavian understood that, even though he rather thought she took her life in her hands when she dared do it. Or maybe that was his life she held, and she was squeezing it much too hard as she went. So hard, it was almost a struggle to breathe. “That hardly seems equal to the effort I put out today to please you. Shouldn’t you be the one to please me for a change?”

  “Kiss me,” he suggested, darkly, “and you will find out exactly how pleasing I can be, azizty.”

  She didn’t laugh, though he felt it there in the air between them, music and magic, as if she had. She hooked her other hand around his neck and stretched herself up toward him, and he let her. He waited.

  Amaya hovered there for a moment, her mouth a scant breath from his, her dark gaze solemn. Kavian remembered, suddenly, their first meeting. That same look in her eyes as they’d met his for the first time. The promises she’d made him then.

  And that next morning, when her brother had come to tell him that she had fled the palace, her whereabouts unknown.

  “If you break another vow, Amaya, I will not be quite so forgiving.” He hadn’t meant to speak. He hardly knew his own voice when he did.

  But her lips curved slightly, only slightly, and she didn’t pull away. “Has this been your version of forgiving?”

  He could hardly hear her over the thunder of his own heart.

  �
�You’ll understand if I find that confusing.”

  “You are the only living creature I have ever forgiven anything.”

  It was a confession, gruff and unexpected. And he should not have made it to her, Kavian knew, but it mattered to him that she had not looked at him with horror drenching those lovely eyes once he’d told her his story. It mattered to him that she’d sought to defend him instead.

  He could not for the life of him understand why it mattered.

  Why she did.

  Only that she had from the start. That she made him believe he could have a different sort of ending than the one he was certain he deserved.

  “I’m honored,” she said quietly now, like nothing so much as another promise, one more solemn vow, and then she kissed him.

  She was as sweet as she was enticing, and he drank her in. He let her explore him, tasting him and teasing him, kissing him again and again until he could feel the catch in her breath.

  And then, when he couldn’t take it any longer, he slid his hands deep into her hair, he hauled her against him and he took control.

  If the tent had ignited around them, he wouldn’t have noticed.

  He simply lifted her to him so that she wrapped her long legs around his hips and her arms around his neck, and still he plundered her mouth. He angled his jaw and he took the kiss deeper, kissing her as if his life depended on it. As if he could kiss her forever. As if time had stopped for precisely this.

  And then, when she was making those wild little sounds in the back of her throat that were more precious to him than all the jewels in his possession, in the whole of his treasury and all of his museums besides, he carried her over to the bed and laid her down on the soft cloud of linens.

  He stretched out above her, pressing her deeper into the bed and taking her mouth again. And he kept on kissing her. He could not seem to taste her enough. He could not seem to slake his own thirst.

  Her hands moved all over him as if she was learning him with her fingertips, soaking him in. He shifted, slipping a hand down to cup the sweet heat of her in his palm. He held her there until she moaned, and only then did he move, slipping beneath the lacy underthings she wore and thrusting his fingers deep into her molten core.

  It was his name she cried when she shook around him, and Kavian hoarded that to him like another vow. Her voice against the night, brighter than the lanterns that lit the space around them, etched deep inside him like letters carved into the stone of his own heart.

  He was filled then with a kind of wild desperation he’d never felt before. He needed to be inside her, or die of it, and he hardly knew what to make of it when he saw his hands shook slightly as he rid her of her little slip and those lacy panties she wore, then peeled off his own boxer briefs.

  Nothing mattered but that slick initial thrust, so deep inside her they seemed more like one, and even that was not enough.

  It will never be enough, a voice within him whispered.

  And just then, he didn’t care.

  He gathered her close. His arms wrapped around her, her mouth against his neck. And he rocked into her, slow and easy. A pace he kept even when she started to shift, to writhe. To move her own hips against his, trying to buck at him and make him go faster.

  He laughed, a dark jubilation that seemed to come from every part of him, while she dug her fingers so hard into the skin of his back that he could feel her nails.

  And still he held that torturous pace. A slow thrust in, a long drag back. Again and again, driving them both insane.

  “Please,” she began to whisper. “Please, Kavian. Please.”

  She was flushed red. Her whole body went stiff and she threw her head back, and Kavian had never seen anything so beautiful in all his life. He pounded into her, his own promise and his own solemn vow, over and over, like a prayer.

  And when she burst into flame again, white-hot and endless, she took him with her.

  * * *

  The ride back across the hot sands was different.

  Everything is different, Amaya thought.

  She sat between Kavian’s legs again, with all his lean strength and male heat wrapped around her, hard against her back as the sleek Arabian stallion galloped so smoothly south. She couldn’t understand the things that moved in her without name, making her feel as if she hardly knew herself any longer.

  The desert stretched out before them and around them, shimmering in the heat, immense and treacherous. Amaya had always hated the desert. The stifling heat. The sheer barrenness and lack of life. The profound emptiness. Its inescapable presence, vast and creeping closer all the time...

  Yet that was not at all what she felt today. She wanted the desert to go on forever, vast and unknowable, as immense and beckoning as the sea. Or maybe it was this trip that she wanted never to end. And she had no earthly idea how to feel about that. About any of it. About what had happened out there between them, making the world itself feel altered around them.

  It had something to do with how Kavian had woken her that morning, lifting her into his arms and then settling them both into a great tub she hadn’t seen the night before, tucked away behind a screen in the far reaches of the tent. She’d winced as she tried to move in the warm, fragrant water, and he’d made a low, rumbling sound that had not quite been a growl.

  “Behave,” he’d ordered her. “You must let your muscles soak or you will find the ride back sheer agony.”

  And she’d tried to behave. Truly she had.

  But he’d been so hot and hard behind her, his strong arms so perfectly carved as they’d stretched out along the high sides of the bath. The hardest part of him had been like steel, pressed tight against her behind. She’d only shifted position once. Then twice, without really meaning it. Then again, to test the little thrill that had washed through her, before he’d let out a sound that had been something between a laugh and a curse. Both, perhaps. His big hands had gripped her around the waist and he’d lifted her up before settling her on him again, but this time he thrust hard and deep inside her while he did it.

  He’d angled them both back again into their original positions, so she’d been lying sprawled over his chest again, her back to his front. And his hardness buried so deep inside her she almost climaxed from that alone.

  And then he’d done nothing.

  “Is that better?” he’d asked mildly after a moment, and it had been exquisite, to have him so deep within her and to feel his voice like that, a rumble against her spine, the tease in it like a drug. “I plan to sit here and soak myself, Amaya. If you wish to do anything else, you must do so all on your own.”

  But even as he’d said that, his big hands, even warmer now from the water, moved to cover her breasts, sending a kind of delirious electricity rocketing through her as he cupped them, then brushed his thumbs over the tight peaks.

  Amaya had tipped her head back so it had been cradled on his wide, hard shoulder, the urge to poke at him as impossible to ignore as his hardness snug inside of her. “I thought you liked to be in charge. That you insisted upon it. I thought that went with the kingly territory.”

  “I think I can handle a single bath,” he’d assured her in that dark, stirring way that made her stomach flip and her core clench hard against the length of him deep within her. “Do as you like, and we’ll test that theory.”

  So that was what Amaya did.

  She’d quickly discovered that he’d severely limited her range of motion—but that maybe that was the point. The delicious challenge of it. She’d moved her hips in a sinuous, rocking motion that had them both breathing hard in only a few strokes, and then she’d given herself over to it. She’d learned the beauty in the sweet, slow slide. The lazy circle, all white-hot sensation and endless pleasure.

  And all the while his wicked hands had moved between the tight peaks of her
breasts and the hot center of her need, helping her build that fire between them, and pouring his own kind of gas on the flame. Until she hadn’t been sure who was in charge and who was simply reveling in the heat between them, or why such a thing should matter.

  Until she’d forgotten to care.

  She had ridden them both to a slow, hot, shattering finish that she’d been sure had left her completely boneless. Destroyed inside and out. And she’d been fiercely glad that they hadn’t been facing each other, because she was terribly afraid Kavian would have seen too easily all the ways she was ripped wide open. That her vulnerability was written right there across her face.

  But she thought he knew, even so.

  When it had come time to climb back on the horses and head south toward the palace, she was grateful. It had meant long hours for her to put herself back together before anyone could study the ways she’d fallen apart. Before she had to admit it to herself, how broken she’d become out there. Or, far worse, how much she’d liked it. Hours to hide herself away again, behind a mask she hadn’t understood she was wearing until he’d torn it off.

  “I’ve never understood the appeal of the desert,” she said now, forgetting to censor herself as the sprawling royal stables came into view before them. Was that relief she felt that this ride—this odd interlude—would soon be over? Or something far more complicated?

  “Never?” He made that low sound that was his form of laughter, that she found she craved all the more by the day. “But you are the daughter of a mighty desert king. It is deep in your blood whether you understand it or not. It is your birthright.”

  “I’ve never cared much for sand,” Amaya said.

  “Is this where you try to put up all your walls again, azizty?” His mouth was right there at her ear, and his voice was a dark flame that lit her from within, that dark current of amusement ratcheting the heat in her even higher. “How many ways must I take you before you understand that there will be no walls between us? There will be nothing but surrender. It would be better by far if you accepted this now.”