Because she’d seen what leaving a heart behind in a harsh place like this could do to a woman, hadn’t she? She’d spent her entire childhood handling the aftermath of her ever more brittle mother’s broken heart.
But that particular organ was all too traitorous, she’d realized then, when she walked into a gilt-edged room that Kavian clearly used as a private office and saw the portrait of the man himself hanging there on the wall, in thick oils and bold shades that made him seem a part of the very desert he commanded. And her heart had thumped at her. Hard.
Too hard, as if it had its own agenda.
She’d rubbed at her chest, annoyed that the attendants had taken her clothes from her and given her nothing to wear but a silky thing she refused to acknowledge was some kind of negligee and a raw-silk wrapper to ward off the complete lack of chill in the air. She might as well have been laid out on a silver platter, trussed and bound for Kavian’s pleasure—
That was not a calming image. She’d shoved it out of her head, but not before her entire body had broken out in goose bumps. Damn him.
She’d finally settled on Kavian’s dressing room. It was a vast space, much larger than the dormitory rooms she’d lived in while in halls at university and probably bigger than the whole of the flat she’d shared with three other postgraduates during her brief time in Edinburgh. She’d ignored the rows of exquisitely cut suits that had clearly been made in the finest couture houses for Kavian alone, the traditional robes in the softest and most gorgeous of fabrics that she couldn’t help touching as she passed, all the trappings of a great man who could dress to kill in any scenario he chose.
She’d ignored the somersaults her heart and belly did at the sight of all that sartorial splendor that summoned him to her mind as if he’d stood there before her, those slate-gray eyes gleaming silvery and lethal.
And then she’d crawled into the farthest, darkest corner and curled up amid a selection of what appeared to be stout winter boots and dark wool overcoats, hiding herself from view.
She’d meant to wait him out. To see what he’d do when he returned to the suite—as he’d do soon, she had no doubt, because she’d been quite certain he’d meant every word he said to her near the bathing pools—and if maybe, just maybe, the fact that she’d been moved enough to hide from him would impress her position on him with far more emphasis than mere words.
But she hadn’t planned to fall asleep.
She jolted awake with a terrific start, but for a panicked moment she couldn’t figure out what was happening. Kavian loomed above her, and the world spun drunkenly and by the time Amaya understood what was going on, he’d hauled her out of her hiding place and into his arms.
“You have the mark of my boot upon your face,” he said, his voice cool and yet with all that power of his seething beneath it, like the darkest shadows. “How very dignified you are, my queen.”
Amaya would have said she wasn’t particularly vain, that there’d been no point with a mother like Elizaveta, who had been a model in her youth, and yet her hand moved to her cheek anyway. It felt nothing but hot, and the way he gazed at her while he held her against that steel-hard chest of his didn’t help.
“It should tell you something that I’m willing to go to such lengths to avoid you,” she said, hating the rasp of sleep in her voice. She tried to pull herself together despite the fact that he’d started to move—but every step he took made her far too aware.
Of him. His strength. His heat. The hardness of his chest, the granite bands of his arms around her. And of herself, too. The way the silk moved over her skin. The lick of flame that followed every soft, sleek shift of the fabric against her belly, her hips, her breasts.
“It tells me a great many things,” he agreed, in what did not sound like a particularly sympathetic tone of voice.
He shifted her, which had the cascading effect she most wanted to avoid, a spinning sort of caress that sank deep into her core and was nothing short of a full-body betrayal. She sucked in a breath audibly. He glanced down at her as he moved through the door, out of his dressing room and into the larger sitting area that lay between it and the actual bedroom she hadn’t wanted to investigate too closely earlier.
She could see sunlight on the far side of the sitting room, drowning the terrace that ran the length of it in all that golden desert light, and she couldn’t have said why that made her breath catch. As if she’d imagined he could only come after her in the dark? But she’d known better, surely. Kavian didn’t play by any rules. Ever.
But she kept trying to make him. What other choice did she have?
“Does it tell you that you are a monster?” She knew it was dangerous to poke at him when he was holding her like this, when there was no possibility of escape. But she couldn’t seem to stop herself. “That you are so overwhelming and so unreasonable that I was forced to hide in a closet to try to get through to you?”
“That,” Kavian said. “And the fact that you are desperate. I suspect you think that if you act like a child, I might be tempted to treat you like one instead of the woman we both know you are.”
There was no reason that should have stung. “I’ve never claimed I was a child.”
“That is wise, Amaya, as the definition of a child is markedly different in my country. We, for example, do not coddle our young well into their twenties, then welcome them into our homes again until such a time as they feel sufficiently inspired to begin an adult life. We expect them to assume their duties far younger, and then take responsibility for the choices they’ve made. I myself was a soldier at thirteen and something far less palatable when I was barely twenty. I was never treated like a boy.”
“If you think either one of my parents coddled me in any way, at any point in my life, you’re insane.”
She hadn’t meant to say that, certainly, and could have bitten her tongue once she did. Kavian only gazed down at her for a brief, electric instant—but that glimmering moment of contact seared through her.
“I know exactly who and what you are,” he said as he strode through the far door into his bedchamber, a stately affair in dark woods and richly masculine shades of red and gold. “Whether you stage melodramatic displays in my closet or race across the planet in a bid to humiliate me in front of the world, it is all the same to me. It will all end right here.”
And then he set her down on his bed.
As punctuation.
Amaya expected him to leap on her, but of course he didn’t do that. He simply stood there before her, a part of the magnificence of the room, the palace—and at the same time its intensely masculine focal point. He’d donned a pair of very loose white trousers that flowed around him and somehow made him look even more like the desert king he was than anything else she’d ever seen him in. And that was it. He folded his arms over the golden expanse of that carved and battered chest of his that shouldn’t have been half so appealing, and watched her.
And she wanted to run. In her head, she threw herself to the side, she scrambled across the slippery gold coverlet and leaped from the mattress, she threw herself off the side of the terrace into thin air to escape him—
But in reality, she did none of those things. She was frozen into place. She was too tense and she couldn’t quite breathe and she hurt... Except she realized, one shuddering, shallow breath after the
