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.
“Take off the rest of your clothes, Amaya,” Kavian said, and there was no mistaking the royal command. The powerful imperative. Or that surge of something inside her that wanted nothing more than to obey him. At once.
“I can’t think of a single reason why I would do that.” She managed to meet that gaze of his. Hold it. “More important, I don’t want to take the rest—any of my clothes off.”
“That is yet another lie. Soon there will be so many they will block out the desert sun above us, and I have no intention of living in such a darkness. Know this now.”
That had the unpleasant ring of prophecy or foreboding, or perhaps more than a little of both, and it was as if her pulse had gotten too hard, too loud. It hammered at her.
“It’s not a lie simply because it’s something you don’t want to hear,” she threw at him, forcing her knees to lock beneath her, to stop their wobbling. “You don’t own the thoughts in my head. You can’t order me to think only the things you like.”
His gray eyes gleamed, and there was not a single part of him that was not hard, unflinching. Tempered steel. Barely contained power. She’d seen softer, more approachable statues littered about the sculpture gardens of Europe.
“It is a lie because you do, in fact, wish to take off the rest of your clothes.” His voice was so quiet it almost disguised the cut of his words, the way they sliced into her. Through her. “More than that, you wish to give yourself over to me the way you did before, but this time, not in a sudden rush in a hidden alcove. You wish to run like honey against my palms and shake apart when I claim you. Again and again.”
“No.” But she scarcely made a sound.
“You are mine, Amaya. Can you doubt this? You shake even now, in anticipation.”
“I was never yours. I will never be yours. I will—”
“Hush.” An expression she might have called tender on another man, one not carved directly from stone and war and the cruel desert all around, crossed his brutally handsome face. He reached over and fit his hard palm to her jaw, cradling her too-hot cheek. “I did not know you were an innocent, Amaya. I would never have taken you like that, with so little consideration for anything but passion, had I known. You did not have to run, azizty. You could have told me.”
And something yawned open inside her then. Something far more terrifying than the things he made her feel when he was autocratic and overbearing. She was drawn to him even then, yes. More than simply drawn to him. But this... She shoved the great sinkhole of it away in a panic, afraid it might spill out with that hectic heat she could suddenly feel behind her eyes. Afraid it marked her as weak and disposable, like her own mother before her.
Amaya jerked her cheek back, out of his hold, as if his palm had scalded her.
“I...” She felt too much, all at once, buffeting her from all sides. Her memories and the present wound together into a great knot she couldn’t begin to unravel—and was afraid to poke at, lest it fall apart and show him too much. She lied again, hoping it would push him back into temper, or put him off altogether. Anything but that hint of softness. Anything but that. “I wasn’t innocent. I was the Whore of Montreal while I was at
