If you marry him, scandals like that will seem like mountains made out of molehills, a small voice within told her. If you do not, they will take over two countries and drown them both...
She knew what she had to do if she wanted to survive. She’d set everything in motion. But that didn’t make any of it easy. She cared a great deal more about what would happen in the wake of this decision than she had half a year ago.
Obviously. Or she wouldn’t still be here.
“You look something very much like happy these days, Rihad,” she said after a moment, “I don’t think I realized that was a possibility.”
For him. For her. For any of them.
He frowned. “Amaya.”
But she refused to do this. She couldn’t do this—and she’d already revealed too much. There was too much at stake.
“Not here, please.” She forced another smile. “I will no doubt burst into tears at all your brotherly concern and it will cause a war, and I’ll forever be known as that selfish, emotionally overwrought princess who caused so much trouble. There’s a reason Helen of Troy doesn’t have the greatest reputation. It’s not worth it.”
“Listen to me,” Rihad commanded her, in that voice of his that reminded her that he was not only her older brother. He was a king. Her king.
Amaya remembered his own wedding to his first wife, which had come at the end of a week of celebrations in Bakri City. That, too, had been arranged. Amaya had been a small girl, in awe. She’d thought the fact of the wedding itself meant the bride and groom had loved each other. And in truth, Rihad had always told her that he and his first wife had gotten along well.
But it was nothing next to what was between him and Sterling, his second wife. That much had been obvious at a glance when they arrived the day before. Their connection crackled from the many tabloid articles that had been written about them, which in turn paled next to the sparks they struck off each other in person. Amaya didn’t pretend to understand how that could be, when Sterling had spent a decade as their late brother, Omar’s, mistress.
She only knew that she and Kavian didn’t have the same thing. What they had was dark and physical. A terrible wanting that she was absolutely certain would destroy them both. It was not the calm affection of Rihad’s first union. Nor was it the obvious intimacy of his second.
It was an agony.
“It will not be pretty if you fail to go through with this wedding,” Rihad said in a gruff sort of voice. “I can’t deny that. But I won’t force you to the altar. I do not care what claim he thinks he has.”
Amaya looked across the great courtyard to find Kavian again, and again his dark gaze met hers, so gray. So knowing. So fierce and hard at once, searing straight into her like a touch of his warrior’s hands.
And she understood then.
It was the night before the wedding she’d been trying to avoid for more than six months. And Amaya was deeply and madly and incontrovertibly in love with the man she was meant to marry in the morning. She thought she had been since the moment they met, when those slate-gray eyes of his, so dark and so patient, had met hers and held.
Shifting everything else.
Changing the whole world.
She loved him. She understood with a certain fatalism, a shuddering slide that seemed to have no end inside her, that she always would.
And if she married him, she would become her mother. It was a one-way ticket to Elizaveta’s sad life, no matter what Amaya might have told her earlier. If Amaya had Kavian’s children, would she treat them the same way Elizaveta had treated her? Once he tired of her and cast her aside, would she spend the rest of her days wandering from lover to lover, playing out the same sort of vicious games and making everyone who came near her as unhappy and bitter as she was?
There were fates worse than death, Amaya thought then, her head thick and dizzy with this knowledge she didn’t want. And that was one of them.
“Are you all right?” Rihad asked, the beginnings of a frown between his brows. “Amaya?”
She would never know how she managed to smile at her brother then, when inside her, everything was a great storm. There were no foundations left. She loved Kavian and she couldn’t have him and all was ash. Ash and grief and a terrible darkness that scarred her even as it burrowed deep. Because he’d showed her who he was. How he was made. He’d showed her how much he could bend already—and it was so little. Too little.
What would happen when he no longer bothered to try?
“Don’t be silly,” she said to her brother, the king of Bakri like their father before him. The ruler who had traded her to this man she’d never escape, not really, not intact. She was already in pieces. She understood she would never really be anything else.
When she betrayed Rihad, Rihad and Kavian and two kingdoms between them, she imagined she would shatter even more. Turn to dust out there somewhere on that same lonely circuit, making history repeat itself in her mother’s bitter wake.
And that was still better than staying with Kavian and loving him until it killed something in her. Better to love a brick wall, she thought miserably. It was far more likely to love her back.
But here, now, she widened her smile and tried to look as if she meant it. She thought from Rihad’s expression that she almost pulled it off. Almost. “I’ve never been better in my life.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
AMAYA FELT HIM behind her, as though he was a part of the shadows out on the terrace not long before dawn. Darker and more electric.
But she didn’t look over her shoulder at him. She kept her eyes trained on the soft lights that spread out in the valley below her, making the old city sparkle in the lingering dark. The great immensity of the mountains rose on the other side of the ancient valley and beyond it, the great desert stretched out in all directions and had taken up some kind of residence in her soul without her knowing it until now.
Up above, the stars waited. A bright smear across what was left of the night, fading away by the moment.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” she said when she thought she could speak. When she thought she could push the words out around the heaviness that was turning her to concrete inside.
“Because you think I am bound by tradition or because you hoped to be halfway to Istanbul by now?”
Kavian’s voice was soft. But so lethal there was no chance whatsoever that she might have missed it.
Still, Amaya took her time facing him. When she did, she had to catch her breath against that instant surge of sensation that almost took her from her feet. She had to reach back behind her and hold on to the railing that kept her from plummeting over the side of the high palace walls.
He was dressed all in black. Again. He looked like some kind of assassin, in the same way he had that day back in Canada that felt like lifetimes ago now. His strong arms were folded over his black T-shirt and he was barefoot beneath his black trousers, and her body shivered into that instant, near-painful awareness that she thought would never leave her. He was as much a part of her as the heart that knocked much too hard against her ribs. More.
“You told me at the party that I could have this one last night alone to—”
“Spare me the lies, Amaya.”
She jolted at that. At that harshness in his voice, stamped all over his face.
“I haven’t said anything,” she heard herself say, as if from afar. “How could I have lied?”
“Did you pack a bag?”
Her throat went dry then. How long had he been watching her tonight? “No.”
“You did. Not a suitcase, merely a rucksack, but I think you will agree that is splitting hairs at best.”
Her heart was a riot in her chest. “Have you been spying on me, Kavian? The night before our wedding?”
“Our wedding.�
� He let out a little laugh, entirely devoid of humor. “What I cannot figure out is why you are still here. Your mother was so explicit in her instructions to my men, who I believe she thinks she managed to turn against me. You were to sneak out through the palace kitchens. She would have transport ready to take you through the tunnels and spirit you out of my evil clutches at last, the better to humiliate me further in the eyes of the world.”
Amaya wanted to die, right where she stood. She felt that dizziness return and with it, all that wet heat behind her eyes she tried desperately to keep at bay.
“I know you might not understand this,” she said as best she could. “But she loves me, too, in her way.”
The look he gave her should have set her on fire. Amaya felt singed as if it had. She straightened from the terrace and took a step toward him, but stopped when he lifted one of his hard, scarred hands.
“Do not come any closer to me.” Dark and brutal.
“Kavian—”
But she couldn’t finish. His gray eyes were the darkest she’d ever seen them. The night around them was edging into blue, but his gaze stayed much too black. And for the first time since she’d met this man, there was no glimmer in there. No relief.
“You conspired with a woman who is little better than a cobra to run from me, again, after you prevailed upon me to let her stay here when I wanted her removed,” he said, as if he was rendering judgment. “But this time, I was to stand at the Western altar you insisted upon and wait for you. Is this not so?”
“Kavian.”
“I do not know what it is you want that I have not given you.” His voice was a dark throb then, as much inside her as it was in the air between them. “A kingdom. A throne. Me. I do not know what you think you will find out there.”
Amaya didn’t know when her arms had snuck around her own middle, only that she held herself tight as if, were she to let go, she would fall apart. And still she couldn’t look away from him.
“I imagine you must want declarations, poetry. I am not that man. I am brute force poured into an old throne, masquerading as a man. I am not soft. I cannot shine the way others do, perhaps. But I would protect your life before my own. I would worship you all the rest of my days.”
“You would keep me here.”
“You like it here.” He didn’t precisely shout that last. He didn’t have to. “I watched you for days before we picked you up in that lakeside town. You were miserable.”
“I was on the run!” she protested, but she was shaken.
“You were lost and alone,” he gritted out at her. “But then, I have met your mother, Amaya. You always were.”
She sucked in a breath, and it hurt. All of this hurt. It always had.
“I hate it when you do this,” she seethed at him. Maybe at herself. “You don’t know anything about me!”
“I know everything about you,” he threw back at her, harsh but certain. “That is what I have been trying to tell you. I do not know how to date. I am not romantic. But I saw your face, I heard your voice and I altered my world to have you. I have nothing else to give you but that.”
“What if I don’t want it?”
He moved then. He crossed the terrace like lightning and he hauled her against him, his tough hands wrapped around her biceps, yanking her up on her toes. He put his face directly in hers.
“You have never wanted anything more in your life.”
Amaya pushed at him, but he didn’t let her go, and the tears she’d tried to keep at bay poured over and ran down her cheeks. And Kavian was like an avenging angel towering over her, forcing her to face the things she most wanted to pretend she didn’t see.
“I’ve told you from the start what I wanted,” she threw at him, desperate and wild. Because she loved him, and she knew where that led. She knew who it would make her, what she would become. “Let me go, Kavian. Just let me go!”
She saw something rip across his face, too harsh and too dark to bear, and then he opened up his hands. Impossibly, he released her. She staggered back, catching herself against the railing again, unable to look away from him and unable to catch her breath.
Unable to believe he’d done it.
He was breathing as heavily as if he’d been running, and for a taut, electric moment, that was all there was. That and what was left of her heart.
“I will honor my military commitments to your brother,” Kavian said, and for a long beat, then another, Amaya had no idea what he was talking about.
Then she did. And it was as if he’d extinguished the stars that easily.
“Hear me, Amaya,” he said in that same voice, all command. All of him a king who had won his throne with the strength of his own hands. And more, the man who had conquered her with a glance six months ago, no matter what lies she’d told herself since. No matter her contortions. Her desperate pretense. “I will not pursue you. I will not come after you.”
She couldn’t speak. She told herself she should feel relief. She should. She was sure she would start at any moment, once it sank in.
“If you do not have a doctor forward the results of a pregnancy test exactly one month from now, I will send one of my physicians to you and have him administer it. If you are pregnant—”
“I can’t be.” Her voice hardly sounded like hers. It was too thick, too distorted. Broken, she thought. “I can’t possibly be.”
His eyes glittered in the strange, predawn light.
“Then you have nothing to worry about. I am sure you will find that convenient.”
And she realized then that she’d never seen him look at her like this before. So cold. So remote. That he had never before seemed anything but fascinated with her, even when he was wild with rage, with passion.
This was a Kavian she didn’t know. And that revelation smashed the remaining pieces of that broken heart of hers into smithereens. Until nothing remained but dust. And regret. And that loneliness she’d always carried deep inside her, like her own bones.
“Do you need me to sign something?” she asked.
He didn’t appear to move, or even to breathe. Yet she thought she saw a muscle clench in his lean jaw.
“Why?” His voice was a dark lash. “You signed many things six months ago. Your word, your signature, your promises—these are all meaningless.”
She wanted to reach out and touch him, but she didn’t dare.
“Kavian—”
“You wanted to go, Amaya.” His voice was so harsh it bordered on cruel then. “Go. You do not need to sneak off through the tunnels like a refugee. I will have the helicopter waiting, and the plane. You can take it wherever you wish. Just make certain you also take your mother.”
“I thought...” She had no idea what she meant to say and she swayed slightly on her feet as if the ground buckled beneath her. “I thought you wanted...”
“I want you,” he bit out. “But I will not force you and I will not play this game any longer, where you pretend that is what I am doing when it is what you want. Go, Amaya. Be free. But remember, I know you. This is the only real home you’ve ever known. I am.”
And she knew he was right. Maybe that was why she fought it.
Maybe that was why she was still here. Standing here, almost as if she’d been waiting for him to find her.
Still, she fought. “It’s a big world. There are a lot of places out there.”
He shook his head. “You’ve seen them all. You’ve been dragged everywhere. There are no secrets out there, Amaya. You know them already.”
“I don’t belong here.” She only realized she was whispering, raw and broken, when she saw a hint of that calm gray in his eyes again, edging out that awful blackness. That cold.
“Azizty,” he said with absolute certainty, “this is the only place you belong. With me.”
; “You want my abject and utter surrender. You want me to kneel in front of you. You want me to beg.”
“Perhaps,” he said simply, “that is because you do, too, after you fight it for a time. You are simply too afraid to accept that we both want this. We both like this. This is what we were born to do, together.”
“Kavian—”
But he shook his head, cutting her off.
“The sun is rising,” he said. “The day is upon us. You have a decision to make, Amaya. I suggest you make it as quickly as possible. Then go, if you mean to go. I have a wedding to cancel and a terrible scandal to manage.”
And then he turned on his heel and walked away from her.
She couldn’t believe it. It didn’t make any sense. He was not the one who left, she was. She couldn’t breathe—
And then the desert sun peeked over the far hills, and the golden light bloomed, molten and bright, blinding her as it poured down into the valley. It washed over the palace, wrapped her in its instant warmth, transformed the world.
And Amaya understood, at last.
The lesson of the stars, of that great weight. Of the desert. Of the sun.
All of these things were love.
They did not bend, they simply were. They could not be altered or changed, they were far too immense. They were infinite. What did it matter what her mother said? What did it matter what the world said, for that matter? Or those voices inside her that told her what she should feel, not what she did feel?
The only thing that had ever mattered was love. And when she looked in Kavian’s beautiful gray eyes, she’d always seen that greatness, that eternity, that sheer and shocking boundlessness.
Why wouldn’t she surrender? Wasn’t that the point?
And for a man like Kavian, who had done what he had, who ruled this stark and uncompromising place and had for more than a decade—what had his acquiescence to her on the subject of Elizaveta been if not the equivalent?
Amaya scrambled forward then, flinging herself into the great suite, her feet slippery against the marble floors. He wasn’t in their bedroom. He wasn’t in the grand shower. She raced down the long hall, frantically checking the salons as she passed, and was almost to the point of hysteria when she found him standing in his office again, a mobile phone in his hand.
Traded to the Desert Sheikh Page 16
