say that as if I do not regret everything already,” she murmured, but he heard a teasing note in her voice. He could see the sheen of it in her gaze. “Whether you threaten me with it or not.”
“I don’t make threats, Amaya. I make promises.”
She smiled. “And it should worry you, shouldn’t it, that one is indistinguishable from the other?”
He dragged his thumb up, then down, enjoying the friction almost as much as the way her lips parted slightly at the sensation. She was his, he thought then, on every possible level. She was surely running out of ways to deny that—and their wedding would put an end to it, once and for all.
But there were miles to go first. Kavian had the suspicion they might be the hardest yet, like any long siege in its final hours. Better to concentrate on the details and assume the rest would fall into place. He reminded himself of the reason he’d come into her dressing room.
“Your mother arrived at the international airport in Ras Kalaat and is en route to the palace,” he said, watching her face.
Amaya flinched slightly, so very slightly that had he not been studying her, he might have missed it entirely. She swallowed again, and he saw the pulse in her neck leap, though her face went blank. Panic? Fear? He couldn’t tell.
He hated that he still couldn’t tell.
“Now?” she asked.
“She will be here in the palace within the hour.” He released her arm, straightening in the doorway, frowning down at her. “Were you expecting her? You have gone pale.”
“I expected she would attend my wedding, yes,” Amaya said. Carefully, he thought. Much too carefully. He was reminded of the mask she’d worn when he’d first met her and it was like a howling thing in him, the urge to tear it off. “I’m her only child, after all, and she is my only remaining parent.”
She blinked too hard, then looked around as if she was casting about for an escape route, and it hit him. He’d seen that look on her face before, heard that exact same note in her voice. It had been the night of their betrothal ceremony.
And in the morning, she’d been gone.
“What you did not expect, if I am to read between the lines, was that this wedding would ever come to pass,” Kavian finished for her. He wanted to touch her again, but didn’t, and it hurt like a body blow. “Someday, Amaya, I hope you will come to understand that I keep the promises I make. Always.”
She stepped back from him and he felt it like the deepest cut. It took everything he had not to haul her back where she belonged. He watched her pull in a deep breath, as if readying herself for battle.
“It should matter to you that this is not what I want,” she said.
It was laughable—and yet Kavian did not feel the least bit like laughing. “You don’t know what you want.”
“That’s astonishingly patronizing. Even for you.”
He shrugged, never shifting his gaze from her face. “You ran, I caught you. I will always catch you. That is the end of it.”
“It should make a difference that I didn’t want to be caught,” she bit out, as if sobs lurked just there behind her eyes.
“Did you not? It seems to me that if that were the case, you would not have returned to Canada at all, and certainly not to Mont-Tremblant.”
Amaya jerked her gaze away from his then, but he didn’t stop.
“And, of course, you could have fought me. Showed me how opposed you were to this union instead of merely making announcements.”
“I’ve done nothing but fight you from the start.”
“Yes,” he said, and she shivered at his tone. He almost smiled at that. “That is precisely how I would categorize the way you melted in my hands at our betrothal ceremony. And then all over me in that alcove. And then again, how you walked straight into the pools here to join me, wearing almost nothing. What fighting tactics were those, exactly? And to what end?”
She couldn’t seem to make herself look at him, but he could see the impact of every word he said. They moved over her, making her tremble, and he’d already confessed his sins. She already knew he was a terrible man. He could not regret this. He did not try.
“You seek my touch and respond to it, always.” His voice brooked no argument. It was a statement of flat, inconvertible fact. “Meanwhile, you have not been held here under lock and key or even under special guard. You were left to your own devices out in the desert. You could have made an attempt to leave at any time, yet you have not.”
“You would have caught me.”
“That is an inevitability, I grant you, but it is a question of where. After all, it took me six months the first time. Yet you have not tried.”
“Do you want me to make an escape attempt, Kavian?” She turned to glare at him. “Because I thought the point of this was that you wanted a biddable little wife to live out her life at your beck and call.”
He felt himself go still.
“That is the first time you have used my name when I have not been touching you, Amaya,” he pointed out, and she shuddered. “Who knows? Someday you may even address me as if I am a man with a name, not a strategy to be employed toward your own increasingly convoluted ends.”
“Isn’t that the point of this?” she asked, and he hardly recognized her voice. “We are nothing but strategies for each other. Cold and calculated. Surely that’s the point of an arranged, political marriage.”
“You did not have to prove yourself to the villagers out in the northern territory. Where was the calculation there?”
“It was politically savvy on my part, nothing more.”
“You could have complained about your treatment here to your brother at any point over these last weeks and caused a major diplomatic incident.”
“He is newly married with a small child.” She tipped that chin of hers up into the air, because this was what she did. She fought. She never simply surrendered. He admired that most of all, he thought. That indomitable will of hers, like the desert he loved. “He is somewhat busy, I imagine.”
“You could have called me a monster when I showed you who I am,” he said quietly. She jerked at that, as if he’d hit her. “Others have before you. Will you call the fact that you did not political, too?” He did not let himself think about what he might do if she did. But her eyes were slick with misery and she didn’t say a word. “Do you know what it is you want, Amaya? Or do you fear that you already know?”
“None of that means I want to marry you,” she whispered.
“Perhaps it does not,” he agreed. “But it does suggest that the chances are very good that you will anyway.”
“If you remove all the threats from this relationship,” she replied now, her voice revealingly thick, “we don’t actually have one.”
“I
