Traded to the Desert Sheikh

Or maybe she was afraid of something else entirely—and of naming it, too, because she knew exactly where this ended. She’d witnessed it as a child. She’d lived through its aftermath. It didn’t matter how hard her heart beat. She knew better.

“How many women did you keep here?” She meant to sound arch and amused, a great sophisticate who could handle what was happening here and the fact of a harem, but that wasn’t at all how it came out. She felt the searing look he threw her way, though she didn’t dare look over at him, felt it sweep over her skin, making her wish she hadn’t discarded all her winter outer layers on the plane. Making her wish there was some greater barrier between them than the simple, too-sheer T-shirt she wore.

“Seventeen.”

“Seven—you’re messing with me, aren’t you? Is this your version of teasing?”

“Do I strike you as a man who teases?” he asked, mildly enough, yet she could hear the heft of his ruthlessness beneath it, the deadly thrust of his intent, like the rock walls all around them.

“You kept seventeen women locked away here.” She felt as if she were in the helicopter again, that wild ride like a slingshot across the mountains. “And you—did you—at night, or whenever, did—”

She couldn’t finish.

“Did I have sex with them?” he finished for her, his voice smooth and dark, and it moved in her in all the worst possible places. It made her feel greedy and panicked, exactly the way she’d felt in that terrible alcove in her brother’s palace when she lost her mind. And everything else. “Is that what you want to know, Amaya?”

“I don’t care,” she threw at him. “I don’t want to know anything. I don’t care what you do.”

“Do not ask questions if you cannot handle the answers, because I will not sugarcoat them for you.” His voice was so dark, so harsh. Inexorable, somehow, as it wrapped around her. “This is no place for petty jealousies and schoolgirl insecurities. You are the queen of Daar Talaas, not a concubine whose name is known to no one.”

She jolted at that, as if he’d electrocuted her. “I’m not the queen of anything!”

And it was as if her body only then realized it could move if it liked and that she wasn’t trapped here—not yet—and so she whirled around to face him again.

A mistake.

Kavian had stripped down to boxer briefs that molded to his powerful thighs and made Amaya’s head go completely, utterly blank. No harems. No concubines. Nothing but him. Kavian.

And when she could think again, it wasn’t an improvement. There was still nothing but that vast expanse of his steel-honed chest, ridged and muscled in ways that defied reason, that made her mouth water and her knees feel wobbly. He was beautiful. He was something far more intoxicating than merely beautiful,more overwhelming than simply hard,and yet he was a harsh and powerful male poetry besides.

Her mouth fell open. Without realizing she’d moved at all, Amaya found her hands clamped tight over her heart as if she was afraid it might burst from her chest.

She was, she realized. She was afraid of exactly that.

“I hope you are finished asking these questions I suspect you already know the answers to, Amaya,” Kavian said with that dark, quiet triumph in his voice that washed through her like a caress and made her body feel like someone else’s. As if it belonged to him, the way it had once before, and she hated that she couldn’t get past that. That she felt indelibly marked by him. Branded straight through to her soul. Owned whether she wanted to be or not, no matter that she knew better than to let herself feel such things. “Now take off your clothes.”

CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_6759103f-bc96-59b6-9650-a558f4526241)

AMAYA COULDN’T POSSIBLY have heard him correctly.

“I would strip down all the way myself,” he was saying, his eyes never leaving her face as he started toward her again. “But I imagine that if I did so, you would faint dead away. And the marble beneath your feet is very hard. You would hurt yourself.”

“I would not faint.” She cast about for some way to convince him, then settled on the easiest, most provocative lie. The one most likely to repel a man like him. “I’ve seen battalions of naked men before as they paraded in and out of my bed. What’s one more?”

“No,” he replied as he closed the distance between them, and there wasn’t the faintest hint of uncertainty on his face, in his hard-edged voice. “You have not.”

Amaya’s shoulders came up against one of the great stone arches, which was how she realized she’d backed away from him. She’d been too lost in his dark gaze to notice anything else. And then he was in front of her and it took every bit of self-preservation she had left not to let out that high-pitched sound that clamored in her throat, especially when he didn’t stop stalking toward her until he was right there—

If she breathed out, she would touch the golden expanse of his skin. That glorious, warrior’s chest with all those fascinating planes and stone-carved shallows that begged for her fingers to explore. That she hungered to taste in ways that made her head spin.

But then, she could hardly breathe as it was.

“I told you to remove your clothes, azizty.”

His mouth was so close then. She could feel his breath against her lips, particularly when he said the unfamiliar word she was terribly afraid was some kind of endearment. She was more afraid that she wanted it to be an endearment, that she was starting down that slippery slope. She could taste him if she only tipped forward—and she would never know how she managed to keep herself from doing exactly that.

She wanted it as much as she feared it. The push and pull of that made her feel something like seasick, though that certainly wasn’t nausea that pooled in her. Not even close.

“I’m not very good at following orders,” she managed to say.

There was the faintest suggestion of a curve to that grimly sensual mouth, entirely too near her own.

“Not yet, perhaps,” he said. “But you will become adept and obedient. I will insist.”

Time stopped, taut and desperate in that tiny sliver of space between them, and the past tangled all around the present until she hardly knew what was happening now as opposed to what she remembered from the night of their betrothal ceremony.

She could feel his hands in her hair, holding her elegant upswept braids in his palms, holding her head still as he’d taken her mouth like a starving man, again and again and again in that private corner of the Bakrian Royal Palace where they’d gone to “discuss” the very formal, very public promises they’d made to each other. She could feel him again as she had done so then, hard against her as the rest of the world ignited. She could feel that catapulting passion as it had eaten them both alive and made her into someone wholly new and entirely ungovernable, could feel the way he’d hitched her up between his tough, strong body and the alcove’s hard wall, and then—

But that had been six months ago. This was here, now, in a great room of bathing pools and echoes, the ghosts of seventeen harem girls and that silvery awareness in his slate-gray eyes.

Amaya thought he would simply bend forward and take her mouth again, the way he had done then, with that low, animal noise that still thrilled her in the recesses of her own mind, still made her nipples draw tight and her toes curl even in memory—

He didn’t.

Instead, he shifted and knelt down before her, making what ought to have been an act of some kind of submission feel instead like its opposite.

She should have felt powerful with him at her feet. Bigger than him at last. Instead, she had never felt more delicate or more precarious, and had never felt he was larger or more intimidating. It didn’t make sense.

And her heart stopped pretending that what it was doing was beating. It wasn’t anything so tame, so controlled. It tried to rocket straight out of her chest.

It took her a confused, breathless moment to realize that he was removing her boots, one at a time, and then peeling off her socks, as well. The cool stone beneath her bare feet was a shock to her system, making her remember herself in a sudden rush, as if Kavian had thrown open a window in all this stone and let a crisp wind in.

She reached over to shove him away from her, or that was what she told herself she meant to do, but it was a mistake. Or maybe she hadn’t meant to do anything but touch him, because her hands came up hard against those powerful shoulders, and she couldn’t describe what she did then as a shove. She couldn’t seem to think. She couldn’t seem to do anything but hold on to all that heat, all that fiercely corded strength, and when he tipped his head back to fix her with one of those unsmiling looks of his that wound deep inside her like some kind of spiked thing, laying her bare, she didn’t say a word.

She didn’t tell him to stop.

His hands moved to the waistband of her jeans, and the denim was shoved down around her thighs before she took another breath, then around her ankles. And she still didn’t tell him to stop.

“Please,” she said as his big hands wrapped around her ankles, when it was much too late. “I can’t.”

But she didn’t know what she meant. And he wasn’t caressing her; he was undressing her with a ruthless efficiency that stunned her into incoherence. He surged to his feet and pulled her against him with an arm banded low around her hips—not an embrace, she realized as every nerve inside her sang out in something a little too much like exultation, but so he could kick her jeans out from beneath her. And when he was done, her palms were flat against his gloriously bare chest and she could feel that great, scarred hand of his at the small of her back, and she thought she really might faint, after all.

“Can you not?” he asked her in that low, stirring voice of his, his head bent as if he was moments away from another one of those drugging, life-altering kisses that had ripped her whole world apart six months ago, so far apart even half a year on the run hadn’t put it back together. “Are you certain?”

And she didn’t mean to do it. She didn’t know why she did it. But she arched her back as if she couldn’t help herself, and her breasts were so close then, so very close, to pressing against him the way she remembered they had that once, that delirious pressure that had undone her completely.

Kavian let out a small, indisputably male laugh then that did nothing at all to soothe her, and then, unaccountably, he let her go.

She stumbled back a step, and might actually have crumpled where she stood had that cool stone pillar not been right there behind her. She dug her fingertips in to it as if it were a life raft and still, her breath was as shallow as if she’d run a marathon or two.