Traded to the Desert Sheikh

by Caitlin Crews

  She had the distant impression that he looked surprised, but she didn’t wait to look any closer. She simply threw herself at him, trusting that he would catch her—

  And he did.

  He always did.

  “I let you go,” he said darkly as he set her on her feet, and she watched him go still again as she kept going, sinking right down to her knees before him. More than that, she felt every single muscle in his body go taut beneath her hands.

  “I love you,” she said.

  And for a long, long time, it seemed, ages and epochs, there was nothing but that arrested look in his eyes and that mad clamor in her chest.

  “Yes, azizty, I know,” he said at last, the arrogant man. “I have been trying to tell you this for some time.”

  It was better than love poems from another. Far better. And the words rolled out of her then, an unstoppable force, like the brand-new day over those old mountains all around them.

  “It doesn’t matter if you can’t love me back,” she assured him. She meant it, with every last part of her. “I don’t want to be like my mother. I don’t want you to sleep with a whole new harem when I get pregnant, every time I get pregnant. I don’t want to share you with anyone. I don’t want to disappear in you, bending and bending until there’s none of me left.” She pulled in a shuddering breath, tears slicking her vision, so he was nothing but a dark, blurry blade there above her. “But if that’s the price, I can pay it. I will. Because you’re right, Kavian. You’re right.” She was shaking, and she gripped the material of his trousers in her fists. “This is the only place I belong. With you.”

  She thought he would laugh then. Order her to remove her clothes so he could surge deep inside her, showing her precisely how they fit. Prove, once again, that he was a man hewn from stone, not flesh.

  And she wanted that. She wanted him, however she could have him. There was no shame in that. There was only love.

  But instead Kavian breathed in deep, then let it out. Long and hard, as if it hurt.

  And then His Royal Highness, Kavian ibn Zayed al Talaas, ruling sheikh of Daar Talaas, sank down on his knees before her.

  His mouth crooked in the corner at her thunderstruck expression. And then he reached over and took her face in his hands, cradling her as if she was infinitely precious to him.

  “This is love,” he said, his voice a deep rumble. “This is what it looks like. You haunted me from the moment I saw you. I hunted you across the world. You live in my body, you move in my veins, you are my blood. You are mine.” He shook his head, his gray eyes stern, his mouth that unsmiling line she adored. “You will never be like your mother. She loves no one and she never will. You will never have to worry about me betraying you, pregnant or not. I do not share well. I do not expect you to be any more giving in that area than I am. And there is no price to pay, azizty.” He angled his head closer, brushing his mouth over hers. “There is only this.”

  He kissed her, and the world was made new. He kissed her, and he loved her, and Amaya felt as large as the desert, as bright as the stars, as golden straight through as the sunlight that danced through the room.

  Kavian angled his head away, waiting until she opened her eyes and looked at him. That serious, warrior’s face of his, harsh and tough. That hard mouth. Those ruthless gray eyes. He was stark and made of stone, and he was hers. He was all hers. She thought it might take her a lifetime or two to get used to it. At the very least.

  “I love you, Amaya,” he said, quiet and true. And it sang in her, like a great chorus with no end. His mouth shifted into that little crook that was his smile and lit her up from the inside out. “Marry me.”

  She smiled and snuck her arms around his neck, moving closer so they were flush against each other, still down on their knees. Together.

  “Are you asking me?” she teased him. “Because that sounded a lot like another order. A royal command.”

  “I am asking you. I doubt such a thing will happen again.” He slid one hand up into her hair, the other down to grip her hip, holding her close.

  She smiled at him, holding nothing back. Surrendering everything, risking everything, and she’d never felt stronger in all her life. Or more sure.

  “Marry me, Amaya.” Those gray eyes of his gleamed. “Please.”

  Terrifying sheikhs did not yield to anything, Amaya thought then, and this sheikh least of all. He’d proved that a thousand times.

  But it seemed even Kavian could bend.

  Just a little.

  Just enough.

  “I will,” she said softly. And she held his gaze, the way she hadn’t done when they signed all those papers. The way she hadn’t before she ran from him the first time. Because this time, she knew what she was vowing, and she meant every word of it. “I promise you, Kavian. I will.”

  And then she wound herself around him, pressed her mouth to his and showed him exactly how much she meant it.

  * * *

  Kavian claimed his queen in a grandiose ceremony that was reprinted in a thousand papers all over the world and broadcast on far too many channels to count. Bakri and Daar Talaas, united as one in the eyes of the world and against their common enemies.

  His wife, his at last.

  “This way,” he told her with complete satisfaction when they were bound to each other in three languages, two religious systems and under the laws of at least three countries, “there can be absolutely no mistake. You are mine.”

  “I am yours,” she agreed, with a smile that nearly undid him.

  And she was. Finally, she was.

  More than that, she was the queen he’d always dreamed she’d be. She was beautiful enough to stand at his side and make the nation sigh in wonder. And she was capable enough to do her good works, dirtying her hands when necessary, making the nation love her as he did. The people admired her as much for leading him on a merry chase as for her eventual surrender, and they called her the strong queen, like the old poems, as if they believed she was as much a warrior queen as he was her warrior king.

  They loved her.

  They loved her even more when she gave him his first son some eight months after their wedding, bringing Kavian’s own bloody circle to a far happier conclusion. This son would not need to avenge his father. This son would not need to wonder what kind of man he was—he would know.

  And they called for national holidays when Amaya gave him his first daughter a year and a half later, the prettiest little girl in the history of the world—according to the besotted king, who considered making that declaration into law.

  Kavian made her the greatest queen in the history of Daar Talaas.

  But Amaya made him a man.

  She loved him fiercely and fully, and demanded nothing but the same in return. She fought him as passionately as she made love to him, and he learned how to bend. Just a little. Just enough. She forgave him and she redeemed him, every day.

  She taught him. Every day, she taught him. He did not have her mother thrown in his prisons as he’d wanted, and he saw the benefit of that as the years passed. Elizaveta would never be warm or cuddly, or even, to his mind, tolerable—but she was a far better grandmother than she had ever been a mother.

  “She has softened,” he said to Amaya one day. They stood together in the old harem, watching Elizaveta and the children play in the desert sunshine that danced through the courtyard. The blonde woman laughed as she held his squirming five-year-old daughter aloft. When she was with their children, she was unrecognizable. “I would never have believed it.”

  “She’s not the only one who has softened,” Amaya said, and only smiled at him when he glared at her in mock outrage.

  “I am a man of stone, azizty,” he said, but he couldn’t keep himself from smiling. Amaya didn’t try. She laughed at him instead, and the world stopped.
The way it had when he watched a video of her a lifetime ago. The way it would, he was certain, when they were both old and gray and addled.

  “You are a man,” she agreed, and surged up on her toes to kiss him, hard and sweet and fast. Kavian felt her smile against his mouth, and deep in his heart besides. “My man.”

  And then she took his hand in hers and led them out into the sun, and all the bright days of their future.

  * * * * *

  Keep reading for an excerpt from HER NINE MONTH CONFESSION by Kim Lawrence.

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  Her Nine Month Confession

  by Kim Lawrence

  PROLOGUE

  London. Three years earlier.

  IT WAS SIX A.M. when Lily woke, thanks to her internal alarm clock—an inconvenient genetic quirk that always woke her at this hour. She knew she wouldn’t be able to snuggle down and have another half-hour under the duvet, but for a few moments she resisted pushing her way through the thin layer that separated sleep from full wakefulness.

  On the plus side she was never late and it was amazing what you could achieve in that quiet hour or so before the rest of the world, or at least her loud neighbour in the adjoining flat, woke.

  She silenced the tedious inner voice that insisted on seeing the bright side of everything with a scowl and pushed the heavy swathe of tangled curls from her face. Lying there with one arm curved above her head, she focused on her justified resentment of people who could roll over and fall back to sleep. Normal people who overslept, even her own twin, Lara, who, it was no exaggeration to say, could sleep through an earthquake. But no, not her, every morning it was the same old...same old...

  Only it wasn’t.

  A fresh furrow appeared between her delicately delineated brows as a remaining sleepy corner of her mind told her actually something was different, but what?

  Had she actually overslept?

  Eyes closed, she reached out for her phone on the bedside table. Patting her hand flat, she hit a couple of unfamiliar objects before she found it. Opening one eye, she glanced at the screen and read the predictable and unsociable hour. She clutched the phone to her chest—naked chest! Was that relevant? she wondered as she hitched the sheet up over her shoulders. No, the something different was not the time or her naked state.

  So what was it?

  She looked around. This was not her room.

  The belated recognition hit her as she struggled to focus. Her entire body felt as though she’d just run a marathon—not that she ever had or in all probability ever would. But last night...last night!

  Her green eyes snapped wide open as the memory of the night before hit her like a bolt of lightning. At least that explained the aches in places she hadn’t known she had.

  She pressed a hand to her left breast where her heart was trying to batter its way through her ribcage. The rush of blood in her ears was a deafening roar as she turned her head slowly...very, very slowly. What if she’d been dreaming? She gritted her teeth, prepared for an anticlimax that never came.

  A fractured sigh left her parted lips... It was real, not a dream; he wasn’t a dream.

  She blinked, bringing the face on the pillow next to hers into focus. A stab of sizzling longing lanced through Lily’s body as she greedily absorbed the details of his symmetrical features, committing each plane and angle to memory. Not that she would ever forget him or last night!

  He had a face that inspired a second glance and inevitably a third. The sleeping man’s chiselled bone structure was dramatic, a broad intelligent forehead, high carved cheekbones, square chin with a sexy cleft, thick darkly defined brows, an aquiline nose and wide, expressive mouth. If pushed to select an individual feature that set him apart, Lily decided it would have been his eyes.

  Beneath heavy lids and framed by lashes that were as dark as his hair and crazily long, his eyes were the deepest, most electrifying blue she had ever seen.

  Looking at his sleeping face now, there was something different about him. It took her a few seconds to work out that the subtle difference was something that wasn’t there. It was an absence of the restless energy that hung about him like an invisible force field when he was awake.

  It would have been an overstatement to say it made him look vulnerable, but it did make him look younger. Even with the dusting of stubble in the hollows of his cheeks and across his jaw there were enough reminders of his younger self to make Lily’s thoughts slip back. Memories that were now tinged with a rose-tinted nostalgia that had been absent that first time she’d seen him.

  She’d known about him, of course. The estate, where her father was the head gardener, and the village had been buzzing with gossip about Benedict, the boy born with the silver spoon, the boy doted on by his proud grandfather. While everyone else had got excited about the fact that he had just moved into the big house, Lily had nursed a quiet and growing resentment.

  Warren Court, one of the most important houses still in private hands in the country, was just five hundred yards from the estate cottage where Lily lived. She had known, even then, that in all other ways it was a planet, a whole universe, away. She had been totally prepared—actually determined—to dislike the rich boy.

  And then her dad had died and she’d forgotten about Benedict, not even seeing him standing beside his grandfather at the funeral. She had thought no one had seen her slip away when she’d escaped from the churchyard and headed for the pond where her dad had skipped stones from one side to the other.

  Something he’d never do any more.

  She’d picked up a big stone, weighing it in her hand before launching it into the air. Her heart had felt like the stone as she’d watched it sink, then another and another until her arm had ached and her face had been wet with the tears she’d ignored. But she hadn’t been able to ignore the voice or the crunch of leaves as someone had come to stand behind her.

  ‘No, not like that, you need a flat one and it’s all in the wrist action. See...’ She’d watched the stone skip lightly across the water.

  ‘I can’t do it.’

  ‘Yes, you can. It’s easy.’

  ‘I can’t!’ Fists clenched, she had rounded angrily on him, tilting her head because he was so tall. She’d vented her grief and frustration at the intruder, screaming, ‘My dad is dead and I hate you!’

  That was when she’d seen his eyes. So blue, so filled with sympathy as he’d nodded and said simply, ‘I know, it stinks.’ Then he’d handed her another stone and she could still remember how it had felt smooth and cold on her hand. ‘Try this one,’ he’d said.

  By the time they’d left, she had made a stone skip three times and she had decided she was in love.

  It had been inevitable really. Lily had craved romance and the boy who was almost a man had seemed like the amalgam of all the heroes in the novels she devoured. Not only had he lived in a castle, but to her youthful self he had seemed like the embodiment of a dark and brooding hero. Mature—he was five years older than her—sporty, sophisticated. Lily had woven an intricate web of wildly unrealistic fantasies around him. Fantasies she’d dreamed would come true. Until the nigh
t of the ball...

  * * *

  She had been waiting for weeks for the annual estate workers’ Christmas party, hosted by Benedict’s grandfather in the massive Elizabethan hall of Warren Court, where her mother was now the housekeeper. She knew that Benedict, who had graduated from Oxford that summer and was doing something important in the City, according to his grandfather, would be there.

  Lily had spent hours getting ready. Persuaded Lara, who had much better fashion sense and many more clothes thanks to the tips she got at the hotel where she waitressed on Saturdays, to lend her a dress. Then finally Benedict had arrived and the first thing she’d noticed was how different he’d looked, remote somehow in his sleek dark suit. Before she’d had time to absorb all the details, she’d seen that he wasn’t alone.

  ‘I am so-o-o bored, darling.’ The tall designer-dressed blonde, who had spent the night sneering, hadn’t even bothered lowering her upper-crust voice with its tortured vowels as she’d drawled, ‘When can we leave? You didn’t tell me the place would be full of the local yokels.’

  Followed by Lara never missing an opportunity to tease Lily about her ill-disguised crush. ‘Drooling, Lil? So not a good look, sweetie. If you want him, go get him.’

  Lily had finally snapped. ‘I don’t want him. I don’t even like him! He’s boring and totally up himself!’ she’d declared before she’d turned and seen Benedict standing behind her.

  Since that embarrassing moment she hadn’t seen him or thought about him, not for years. Obviously his high profile meant that she saw his name sometimes, though not often—the financial pages were not really her thing and she didn’t have a clue what an investment tycoon was.

  What she hadn’t expected was to bump into him coming out of a bookshop.