Traded to the Desert Sheikh

by Caitlin Crews

  There was a glitter in her dark eyes he didn’t particularly like. She stood tall and inescapably regal there in the door. “We haven’t used birth control of any kind.”

  “No.” He didn’t avert his gaze from hers. “We have not.”

  “Is that how this works, Kavian? You think if you get me pregnant I’ll be forced to stay here?”

  He heard something far more ragged in her voice then, could see the echo of it in that storm in her too-dark eyes.

  “Have I made my intentions unclear?” He studied her face then, wondering at that raw thing inside him. It seemed to grow larger by the moment. “Have I deceived you in some way? Is this what your mother came here to tell you?”

  “Don’t blame her. She’s supposed to look out for me.”

  “Can you truly claim that was her goal?” He was incredulous.

  But Amaya stared at him, openly defiant. “You took advantage—”

  “Of your inexperience? Are we acknowledging that now? And I had grown so accustomed to the Whore of Montreal.”

  “You knew I was inexperienced. You knew I wasn’t paying attention to the things I should have been. You used that against me.” Her voice didn’t shake. Her hands weren’t in visible fists. And yet there was a certain sheen to her dark gaze that suggested both. “You want to keep me here against my will, no matter what it takes. Sex around the clock until I can’t see straight. Barefoot and pregnant for the next ten years. Whatever works.”

  “Please remind me, Amaya, of any moment in all the time that you have known me when I indicated otherwise.”

  Kavian heard his own voice then, so rough and dark in the quiet room, he might as well have kicked down the walls. He was certain he could see the way it slammed into her. He saw the way she gulped in a breath. He even saw the way she adjusted her stance, as if her knees had suddenly weakened beneath her.

  He didn’t recognize the feeling that moved in him then. Thick, dark. A rich thread of an agony he could not name, balling in his gut and sitting there like a stone.

  Shame, he realized after a stunned moment. And something like a keening hatred of himself and these battleground tactics on this woman who was no desert warrior, no matter how tough she appeared at times. He’d never felt anything like it.

  He didn’t much care to experience it now. He moved toward her, aware on some level that his careful veneers were cracking as he moved, the masks he wore shattering—

  But he couldn’t stop.

  “And what will happen when you get what you think you want?” she threw at him, all the tears she was not crying audible in the thickness of her voice, and he hated himself more. “What happens when I give you everything I have and the thrill is gone? When you use me up and cast me aside? Will you consider that an act of mercy, too?”

  “You should not listen to the rantings of a bitter old woman. I am not your father.”

  Her eyes swept over him, that bittersweet shine. “Are you sure about that? Because so far, the two of you seem very much the same.”

  He felt unchained then. Untamed. Wild beyond measure. And it did not occur to him to temper it at all as he moved toward her.

  Kavian didn’t stop until he was upon her, right there, looming over her until she stepped back and came up hard against the doorjamb.

  “Do you want me to apologize, azizty?” It was a growl from the deepest part of him. “In this fantasy of yours, do I beg your forgiveness?”

  “You wouldn’t mean a word of it even if it was a fantasy.”

  He stroked the tender skin of her elegant neck, trailing his fingers over her satiny flesh and the tumult of her pulse. He felt the way she trembled, and he saw arousal edge into that darkness in her gaze, whether she wanted it—him—or not.

  “No,” he agreed, despite those too-dark things that still moved in him. “I would not.”

  “Kavian.”

  He knew what she was going to say. He could see the words form on her lips, see them scroll across her face.

  “My mother—”

  “I will have that snake of a woman removed from the palace within the hour. She—”

  “She is my mother.” Her voice was a shocked whisper.

  “Do you think I cannot tell a bad mother when I see one? Can you have forgotten mine? Your mother is a viper. I want her and her poison gone from here.”

  “No.” Amaya’s voice was flat. Incredibly bold, for someone so much smaller than he was, so much more fragile, but she stared back at him as if she was unaware of those things. As if she was his equal in every way. As if she had every intention of engaging him in hand-to-hand combat if he didn’t do as she asked.

  As she commanded.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You heard me.” Her chin rose fractionally. “You cannot throw my mother out because you don’t like her. I don’t care if you don’t like her.”

  “You do not like her.”

  She frowned at him. “I love her.”

  “I cannot abide her.” He felt that stone in him, dragging down, threatening his ability to stand before her. Threatening far more than that. “She is envious of you. She whispers poison into your ears. You fear her.”

  “I feel sorry for her.” Her voice was even. Her chest rose and fell too quickly, he thought, and still she smelled of honey and rain and he wanted nothing as much as he wanted her. Nothing at all. “She was hurt a very long time ago, and hurt is what she knows. She can’t help the way she lashes out.”

  He shifted, feeling his mouth flatten as he traced unknowable symbols along the elegant line of her neck, feeling the way she shuddered at his touch. “She is a grown woman who has spent the bulk of her life manipulating others to do her bidding. I do not dance to the tune of fools. Why should I suffer her presence here?”

  He saw too many emotions chase each other across her face then, one after the next, and he felt them all like blows.

  When she spoke, her voice was quiet. “Because I asked you to.”

  Kavian shook his head, a harsh negation that had more to do with the memory of Elizaveta’s cold gaze, so much like the photographs he’d seen of his weak, vain, treacherous mother.

  “Then you can’t give me what I want. You can’t give at all.” She raised one shoulder, then dropped it, and he understood that she was not in the least afraid of him. Was that what roared in him, so much like desire? Like greedy admiration? “Don’t claim you want a queen to stand beside you, Kavian, when what you really want is your own way in all things.”

  “I want exactly what I claimed from the start.” His voice was practically a growl. “I am exactly who I have always been. More than that, azizty, I am exactly who you need.”

  “Then prove that. I’ve told you what I need.” Her dark eyes searched his face. “I don’t need you to understand, Kavian. I need to you listen to me for once.”

  He didn’t recognize the thing that swelled in him then. He didn’t understand why he felt as if he’d staggered blindly into a sandstorm and was being tossed this way and that. He only saw something unbreakable in her gaze. Tempered steel, forged in flames.

  “If it is what you want,” he said stiffly, because words of acquiescence were foreign to him and came slowly, thickly, “she can remain. She is your mother, as you say.”

  Amaya’s eyes glittered. He felt that like another blow, and then her hand came up and slid over his jaw. He felt that touch everywhere. His toes. His sex. His throat.

  “Thank you,” she whispered, as if he’d given her a kingdom. All the jewels in his possession. “Thank you, Kavian.”

  That stone thing in him sank deeper. Grew harder. And he hated it all the more.

  Kavian was finished talking. He hooked a hand around her neck and jerked her to him, noting with a fierce surge of satisfaction that her nipples were a
lready stiff when they came into contact with his chest.

  And then he bent his head and devoured her.

  He kissed her with all the roughness within him. That wild thing that battered at him. That uncivilized creature that would have locked her away if it could have, that still thought it might. That great stone, that vast weight, that exploded into hunger the more he tasted of her. The man he could not be for her burst from him and into that kiss. He took her mouth like a storm, a great dark invasion, holding nothing back—

  And she met him.

  More than met him.

  It was wild. Raw. Elemental.

  He didn’t know if she tore his clothing or he did. He knew he ripped open the bodice of her gown to get at her breasts, to worship them. He knew he sank his hands in the concoction of her hair, the great glory of it.

  And God, the taste of her. It blocked out the world.

  Then they were down on the floor, right there in his office, rolling and tearing at each other and wild. A hunger unlike any other roared in him, and in her, too. He could feel it as well as his own intense passion.

  He thrust into her with more need than finesse. She screamed out his name, and he dug his fists into the thick rug beneath them, holding himself still while she clenched and shook around him and rode out her pleasure, her fingers digging hard into his back.

  “Thank you,” she whispered again, like the blessing he didn’t deserve.

  And that was when Kavian began to move.

  * * *

  The banquet the night before the wedding that was being fancifully billed in all the papers as East Meets West at Last—a rather theatrical name for what was, at the end of the day, a rehearsal dinner—seemed to drag on forever, Amaya thought. Dignitaries and aristocrats, many of whom had come in days before, lined the tables in the vast ballroom. A band played. Servants outdid themselves, a brace of belly dancers performed during one of the early courses and Kavian lounged there at the head of the high table with his slate-gray eyes fixed on her as if he expected her to bolt at any moment.

  As if he could read her mind, even as she smiled and laughed and played her part for the assembled throng.

  The meal ended after what seemed like several excruciating lifetimes and the worst part was, Amaya thought as she stood and dispensed her thanks to the guests, this was all her fault. There was something wrong inside her. Twisted. Not right. There was no other explanation. How else could she come to terms with the fact that she simply could not resist this man? Because if she’d had any kind of backbone, as he’d pointed out to her himself, she’d have attempted to escape him. She’d have done it, come to that. And she wouldn’t have found herself standing here, poised to do the only thing worse than what she’d done to him six months back.

  “Are you ready for tomorrow?” Her mother’s voice sliced into her, but Amaya only smiled harder, hoping no one was paying too close attention as the crowd moved from the tables to the great room beyond, where desserts were to be passed instead of served, the better for the politicians to wield their trade as they moved from group to group.

  Was she ready? How could Amaya still not know?

  “Yes,” she said, because she didn’t want to second-guess herself. She didn’t want to keep ripping herself apart.

  “It’s the right thing, darling. You’ll see.” But what Amaya heard was that thread of triumph in her mother’s voice. That hint of smugness. “Men like him can only be the way they are. It never changes.”

  “Mother.” She had to check her tone, remind herself where they were. “You don’t actually know him. You know his title.”

  “I know men.”

  “You know what you want to know, and nothing more.” Amaya glanced around, afraid someone might have overheard that tense tone in her voice, but most of the guests had moved toward the other side of the great hall and on toward the waiting courtyard. She and Elizaveta were as alone as it was possible to be in such a great crowd.

  Her mother’s gaze was as cool as her smile was polished. “I don’t know what you mean, Amaya.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Amaya’s smile felt welded to her face. “This isn’t the place to discuss it.”

  They would have all their lonely lives for that, she thought—and she felt hollow. Utterly empty and dark. But that was to be expected. She wouldn’t be leaving Daar Talaas unscathed. She’d be surprised if she even recognized herself.

  “I don’t think I care for your tone of voice,” Elizabeta replied, her tone light. But her blue eyes were hard. “Is that the kind of disrespect you learned here? We can’t get you away from him fast enough.”

  “Did we live off a trust my father set up for me when I was a child?” Amaya hadn’t known she meant to fire that at her mother until she did it. And when Elizaveta froze, she wanted to grab the words back—except instead, she continued. “Is that how we survived those years? Because I must have misunderstood. I thought you told me we had to move around so much because we were destitute.”

  She saw the truth in her mother’s face, so much like her own. She saw the glitter of it in her mother’s gaze.

  “Things were a good deal more complicated than you can possibly understand,” Elizaveta said, her voice chilly in the warm room.

  “That’s all right, Mother.” It wasn’t until she spoke that Amaya heard the bitter edge to her words. That she felt it inside her, spiked and painful. “Lucky for you, I’m far more forgiving than you are.”

  She started to move away then, her emotions blinding her and her breath much too ragged, but her mother’s hand on her arm stopped her.

  “It’s not forgiveness,” Elizaveta said crisply. “It’s weakness. Haven’t I taught you the difference? Your trouble is, you make yourself a doormat for anyone who happens by and wishes to wipe their feet on you. That’s the difference between us.”

  Something cracked then, so loud and so huge that Amaya was surprised she didn’t hear screams from the crowd. It took her a stunned moment to understand that the palace hadn’t crashed down around them—that something had instead toppled over inside her. She could feel the aftershocks, shaking through her.

  She reached down and tugged her mother’s elegant hand from her arm.

  “I choose how I bend, Mother,” she said. She might have shouted it, though she knew she hadn’t—yet she saw the dazed look in Elizaveta’s eyes as if she had. Amaya could only wonder what expression was on her face. She found she couldn’t bring herself to care. “And to whom. I only kneel when I want to kneel, and that doesn’t make me a doormat. I’ve spent my life catering to you because I love you, not because I’m weaker than you. You’ve spent your life prostrate to your feelings for a man who forgot you the moment you left him, if not long before, because you were never as strong as you pretended to be. That’s the difference between you and me. I’m not pretending.”

  “You must be crazy if you think a man like Kavian thinks of you as anything but a conquest,” Elizaveta hissed.

  “Don’t mention him again,” Amaya said, with a certain finality that she could see made her unflappable mother blink. “Not ever again. He is off-limits to you. As am I.”

  “I am your mother!” Elizaveta huffed at her, as if Amaya had punched her.

  “And I love you,” Amaya said with a certain fierce serenity that reminded her of Kavian’s desert. “I always will. But if you can’t treat me with respect, you won’t see me again. It’s that simple.”

  For the first time in as long as she could recall, her mother looked old. Something like frail. But Amaya only gazed at her, and ignored the pity that made her heart clench tight.

  “Amaya.”

  “This isn’t a debate,” she said quietly. “It’s a fact.”

  She left her mother standing there, looking lost, for the first time in her memory. It took a few steps to rememb
er herself. To smile. To incline her head as regally as possible as she caught the eye of this or that noble personage. Amaya moved through the crowd as she reached the waiting courtyard, open to the night sky above with a series of decorative pools and fountains marking its center.

  Kavian stood on the far side of the pools, that stark, harsh face of his intent as he listened to the two Daar Talaasian generals before him. As if he’d sensed her approach, or her eyes on him, his gaze snapped to hers across the night.

  And for a moment there was nothing but that. Nothing but them. No crowd, no guests. No wedding in the morning.

  His face was as brutally captivating as ever, and she knew it so much better now. She felt him deep inside her, as if he’d wrapped himself around her bones, taken her air. She felt him as if he was standing beside her instead of across a grand courtyard, as if they were alone instead of surrounded by so many people.

  She thought she might feel him like this, as if they’d fused together somehow on some kind of molecular level, all the rest of the days of her life. Amaya told herself that what moved in her then, thick and harsh, was not grief. It couldn’t have been.

  “You do not look the part of the blushing bride to be, little sister.”

  Amaya started at the familiar voice at her ear, then controlled herself, jerked her attention away from Kavian and aimed her practiced smile at her brother.

  But Rihad, king of Bakri, did not smile in return. His dark eyes probed hers, and Amaya had to look away, back to where the man who had scandalously kidnapped her from a café in a Canadian lake town stood there so calmly, as if he’d had every right to do so. Quite as if there weren’t reporters everywhere, recording every moment of this night for posterity and dramatic headline potential, who wouldn’t leap at that story if she’d chosen to share it.