Traded to the Desert Sheikh

by Caitlin Crews

  The hug was perfunctory, the highly European double-cheek kiss a performance, and Kavian wanted to throw the older woman across the room. He wanted her hands off Amaya, that surge of protectiveness coming from deep, deep inside him, and it took all of his considerable self-control to keep himself from heeding it.

  “I’m so glad you came,” Amaya said to her, quietly.

  And Kavian reminded himself that this was still her mother. Amaya actually meant that. It was the only reason he did not throw this creature from his palace.

  “Of course I came,” Elizaveta replied, bright and smooth and still. It wedged beneath Kavian’s skin like a blade. “Where else would I be but by your side on your wedding day?”

  “Your maternal instincts are legendary indeed,” Kavian interjected, like a dark fury from above, his gaze the only thing harder than his voice. “The world is a large place, is it not, and you have explored so many different corners of it with Amaya in tow. An unconventional education for a princess, I am sure.”

  Elizaveta inclined her head in a show of respect that Kavian was quite certain was entirely feigned. Amaya stared back at him, stricken. And he could not hurt her. He could not.

  “But I welcome you to Daar Talaas,” he said then, for the woman who would be his wife. His perfect queen. He waited for the older woman to raise her head, and then he nearly smiled. “I do so hope you will enjoy your stay in my palace. What a shame it will be so brief.”

  * * *

  “He is rather Sturm und Drang, isn’t he?” Elizaveta asked Amaya when they were alone hours later, after a long day of formal greetings and diplomatic speeches. She sounded arch and amused and faintly condemning besides. As if this were all a terrific joke but only she knew the punch line. “Even for a sheikh. I’d heard rumors. Is he always quite so...commanding?”

  Amaya was certain commanding was not the word her mother had been about to use just then. They sat in the charming little garden that adjoined Elizaveta’s guest suite with hot tea and a selection of sweets laid out before them. Amaya shoved an entire almond pastry into her mouth with a complete lack of decorum, because it was far safer to eat her feelings than share a single one of them with her mother.

  “He is the king of Daar Talaas,” Amaya replied once she’d swallowed, aware that her mother had probably counted every calorie she’d just consumed and was mentally adding them to Amaya’s hips. With prejudice. She can’t help who she became, she reminded herself sharply. This isn’t her fault. It probably took her more to come here than you can imagine. “Commanding is simply how he is.”

  Elizaveta leaned back. She held her tea—black, no sugar, of course—to her lips and sipped, never shifting her cold gaze from Amaya.

  “Tell me what you’ve been up to,” Amaya said quickly, because she could practically see the way her mother was coiling up, readying herself to strike the way she always did when she felt anything, and Amaya didn’t think she could take it. “We haven’t talked in a long time.”

  “You’ve been so busy,” Elizaveta said, in that light way of hers that wasn’t light at all. “Traveling, was it, these last six months? One last hurrah before settling down to this marriage your brother arranged for you?” She didn’t quite frown—that would have marred the smoothness of her forehead, and Amaya knew she avoided that at all costs. “I hope you enjoyed yourself. You must know that a man in your betrothed’s position will demand you start having children immediately. As many babies as possible, as quickly as possible, to ensure the line of succession. It is your foremost duty.”

  “There aren’t any lines of succession here,” Amaya replied, because concentrating on dry facts was far preferable to thinking about other things, like the total lack of birth control she and Kavian had used in all this time. Why hadn’t they thought about that? But even as she asked herself the question, she was certain that he had. Of course he had. He thought of everything. She trained her gaze on her mother, because she couldn’t fall down that rabbit hole. Not now. Not while Elizaveta watched. “Not in the classic sense.”

  “Every man wants his son to rule the world, Amaya, but none so much as a man who already does.” Elizaveta smiled, which only made a chill snake its way down Amaya’s back. Had Elizaveta always been so obvious a barracuda? Or was this simply her reaction to being back in this world again—when she’d avoided it all so deliberately since leaving Amaya’s father? “You are so very, very young. Are you certain you’re ready to be a mother?”

  “You were a mother when you were nineteen.”

  “I was not nearly so sheltered,” Elizaveta said dismissively. She shook her head. “I cannot fathom how you could end up in a place like this, with all the advantages I provided you over the years. I had no choice but to marry your father when he appeared like some fairy story to spirit me away. You have nothing but choices and yet here you are. As if you learned nothing.”

  Amaya should not have felt that like a noose around her throat. It shouldn’t have mattered what Elizaveta said. It shouldn’t have hit her so hard, right in the gut.

  “You told me my father swept you off your feet. That you were in love.”

  She sounded like the child she had never been, not quite. She couldn’t help herself.

  “Yes, of course I told you that,” her mother replied, arch and amused again. “That sounds so much more romantic than reality, does it not?”

  “Anyway,” Amaya said tightly, because she didn’t believe Elizaveta’s sudden nonchalance on this topic after years of wielding her broken heart like a sword, “there’s no point having this discussion. I’m twenty-three years old, not nineteen. I’m not even remotely sheltered. And most important, I’m not pregnant.”

  You can’t possibly be pregnant, she told herself ferociously.

  Her mother turned that cool blue gaze on her, washed through with something enough like malice to make Amaya’s stomach clench. Despite herself, she thought of the things Kavian had said about her. That she had lived off Amaya. That she had lied about that—and who knew what else?

  “That’s clever, Amaya. Once you are you will be trapped with him forever.”

  Trapped was not the word that came to mind, which was more than a little startling, but Amaya frowned at her mother instead of investigating that. “Luckily, it’s not up to him.”

  But Elizaveta only smiled again.

  Stop making her out to be something scary, Amaya snapped at herself. She’s not a demon. She’s nothing but an unhappy woman. This is her hurt talking, not her heart, and anyway, you don’t have to respond.

  “Of course not, darling,” Elizaveta murmured. She leaned forward and put her teacup back on its saucer with a click that seemed much too loud. “I’ve never seen you in traditional attire before. Not even when we still lived in Bakri.”

  Amaya had to order herself to unclench her teeth. To curve her lips in some rendition of a smile. “I am not in traditional attire. You can tell because I am not wearing a veil.”

  “I wonder if this is merely a stepping stone toward a more traditional arrangement.” Elizaveta’s shrug was exquisite. It somehow conveyed worry and a kind of jaded weariness at once, while also making her look infinitely delicate. “A sleight of hand, if you will. He lures you in by pretending to be a modern sort of man and then—”

  “Mother.” It was so absurd she almost laughed. “There is not one thing about Kavian that is the least bit modern. If that’s the lure, he’s already failed. Spectacularly.”

  Elizaveta moved to her feet and then wandered with seeming aimlessness around the small courtyard, as if she was taking in all the green and the riot of bright flowers. As if she’d never beheld their like before. “What a charming suite. I adore all these flowers. What part of the palace is this?”

  Amaya understood where she was going then. Perhaps it had been inevitable from the start, given how furious her
mother had always been at her father. Given how hurt she still clearly was.

  “The guest part,” she replied. Grudgingly.

  Her mother smiled over her shoulder, but her gaze was hard. “Is that its formal name, then? How strange.”

  She watched her mother trail her always elegant, always red-tipped, always diamond-studded fingers along the petals of the nearest bougainvillea vine.

  “I think you know perfectly well that this is technically part of what was once considered the harem complex,” Amaya said quietly. “But Kavian does not keep a harem.”

  Her mother glanced at her. “Not now, you mean.”

  “He kept a harem before we met, if that’s what you’re trying to tell me so subtly.” Amaya was proud of how cool she sounded. How very nearly bored, as if the number seventeen were not flashing behind her eyes. “But then, he’s never claimed to be a monk.”

  Her mother turned to face her, and Amaya was struck, as she always was, at how much she looked like the darker version of her mother’s precise blond beauty. Where Elizaveta was like an ice sculpture, carved to sharp perfection, Amaya was so much softer. Blurrier.

  Misshapen, she’d always thought. And yet today she found she was glad they weren’t more similar.

  “Did he give up his concubines for you?” Elizaveta asked, with that pointed smile that was her fiercest weapon. “That is enough to make the heart sing, I am sure.”

  Amaya had not spoken to her mother much in the six months she was on the run. There had been enough speculation in the papers that Amaya assumed Elizaveta had guessed that her daughter had run away from an arranged marriage, but Amaya had never confirmed it. Now she was happy she’d played it that way. That she’d confided nothing. That Elizaveta knew nothing at all about Kavian, or Amaya’s relationship with him.

  “Kavian is deeply romantic,” she told her mother, giving her all to that lie. “He might not show it to you or the world. But he is a hard man who has only one bit of softness, and that’s me.”

  Her heart skipped a beat at that, as if it was true. More—as if she wanted it to be true.

  But her mother’s cold eyes gleamed. “Is that what he told you?”

  “I wouldn’t put much stock in it if he’d told me,” Amaya said, and even smiled. “I’ve learned one or two things from you, I hope. Actions speak louder than words, isn’t that what you always said?”

  “And when you are big and fat and ugly with his child, as you will be often,” Elizaveta said, as if she was agreeing, “you must anticipate that he will see to his needs as he pleases, with as many other women as take his fancy. Men always do. That is their favorite course of action, Amaya. Always. Especially men like him, in places like this.”

  Amaya rose to her feet and skimmed her hands down her skirts, angling her head high. She wasn’t eleven. She didn’t have to listen to this. She certainly didn’t have to believe it.

  “I’m sorry if that was your experience, Mother,” she said quietly. “It won’t be mine.”

  And she hadn’t understood until she said it out loud that she wanted that to be true. That more of her wanted to believe in Kavian than didn’t.

  She had no idea what to do with that.

  “Does he love you, then?” Elizaveta asked, her voice so light. So terrible. “Or has he merely claimed you?”

  Whatever she saw on Amaya’s face then made her cluck in what sounded like sympathy. It washed over Amaya like something far more acidic, and wrenched at her heart besides.

  “Darling.” Elizaveta shook her head, and Amaya felt everything inside turn to ice. “They’re not at all the same thing. And a woman must always know where she stands, or she will spend her life on her knees.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  KAVIAN KNEW THE MOMENT Amaya walked into their rooms as the afternoon edged toward evening that her mother had gotten to her. He could hear it in the heaviness in her step out in the foyer. The particular weight of her silence.

  The pen he’d forgotten he was holding snapped in his hand and he muttered a curse, throwing the pieces into the wastebasket that sat beside his desk in his private office, the pen fragments making an oddly satisfying sound as they hit the metal sides.

  He wished it was the poisonous Elizaveta instead.

  “You are not truly planning to sneak past me, are you?” he gritted out, as if to the walls around him. As if to the ghosts that the locals claimed had plagued this place for centuries. “Do you imagine that is wise?”

  A moment later, Amaya appeared in the doorway. She was still wearing the gown she’d had on in the throne room earlier, which displayed her femininity so beautifully and yet with such exquisite restraint that it made his throat hurt. That hair of hers that he was beginning to view as an addiction he might well succumb to completely was still caught up in all the braids and twists that he thought made her look something like ethereal. Something so much more than merely a bartered bride, his for the taking, though she was that, too. She was everything.

  She was so lovely—so very much Amaya and his—it made his chest feel hollow. Scraped raw.

  But it took her too long to raise her gaze to his and when she did, those chocolate eyes of hers were much too dark. Too troubled by far. He eyed her from across the span of the room, temper beginning to pound through him as if he were running flat out across the desert sands, straight on toward the enemy.

  Amaya crossed her arms over her chest and he hated it. He hated the defensive gesture itself. He hated that she felt she had to make it. Even after he’d combed the whole of the earth for her. Even after everything he’d told her. Even though she knew the truth about him and it had not made her hate him.

  Apparently only her mother could do that.

  He wanted to throw back his head and howl, like some kind of wild thing, all claws and fangs.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” Amaya’s voice was a scrape against the quiet and did very little to calm him.

  “How am I looking at you?” he asked. Mildly. “As if I think you might be rationalizing a new way to betray me even as we stand here?” He studied her. “Are you?”

  Something sparked in her dark eyes. “I can’t betray you, Kavian. By definition. First I would have to pledge myself to you in some meaningful way, of my own volition.”

  “Careful, Amaya.” His voice was rougher, deeper. “Be very, very careful.”

  The elegant column of her throat moved as she swallowed, but she didn’t look away.

  “Did you sleep with all seventeen of the women you kept here in your harem?”

  He muttered something harsh in Arabic that he was quite certain she understood, but she only tipped that sweet chin of hers higher and let that mouth of hers go mulish. “It’s a simple yes or no question.”

  “Ten of my so-called concubines were under the age of fifteen,” he told her, and it was a remarkable experience for him. He had never explained himself to another living soul, as far as he could remember. He had never felt the slightest compulsion to do so. “They were gifts from each of the ten tribes who live in the great desert, as is tradition. I brought them here to educate them, to make them aristocratic women who could do as they pleased rather than chattel to be bartered and traded in the desert encampments. Most of them are currently studying abroad, or have made excellent marriages.” He tried not to grit his teeth. “And, no, I did not sleep with these teenagers, Amaya. My tastes run to grown women, as you should know better than anyone.”

  She didn’t crack. “Seven women, then.”

  “My predecessor kept a number of women. When I got rid of him I sent those with children to the far reaches of the desert, as I could not allow them to remain under my roof. It makes me look weak in the eyes of many of my subjects. Soft in ways that could hurt me.” He shrugged. “As long as they dedicate themselves to living quiet
lives free of political intrigue, they may do so safe from my interference.”

  “You mean, as long as they don’t show signs of trying to wreak the sort of vengeance you did, you’ll let them live.”

  He didn’t back down. “Yes.” He let his brows rise. “Does this offend you, Amaya? I have told you. Daar Talaas is not Canada. You may cringe from our brand of justice all you like, but that doesn’t make it any less effective.”

  “I didn’t cringe.” She shifted. Swallowed again, as if against a lump in her throat. “But that doesn’t mean I necessarily support it, either.”

  “Two of my predecessor’s concubines remained in the palace after I took it back,” Kavian told her. “But I never touched them. I merely allowed them to stay here after he was gone, as they had no families to take them in. It was widely considered an act of mercy.”

  She stared at him for a long while. Kavian felt a muscle in his jaw clench tight. His entire body tensed, as if he was moments away from launching an attack. Or perhaps warding one off.

  “And of the five other women you kept here?”

  He shook his head. “I am a king, Amaya. Should I have dated instead? I hear it is fashionable to do so online these days. Perhaps that would have worked. I could have put up an ad, I am sure. Single sheikh seeks companion for sex on command, no possibility of marriage, yet many financial and residential perks.” His voice was like acid. “I’m certain the tabloids would have loved that. They are so fond of me already.”

  Her gaze was hot and level at once. “And of the five—”

  “I am not answering any further questions about the harem I disbanded when you asked me to do so. When I promised you I would, because of the two of us, I am the one who keeps promises.” He watched her flinch at that, but he couldn’t seem to modify his tone at all. “The harem I did without for six months while you led me on a merry chase across the planet. Do you truly wish to discuss this, Amaya?”