she didn’t want to eat anything. She didn’t want to be here at all.
Amaya had read entirely too many ancient myths in her time. She knew how this went. A few pomegranate seeds and she’d find herself forced to spend half her life trapped in the underworld with the King of Hell. No, thank you.
She refused to accept that this was her fate, like her mother’s before her. She refused.
So she didn’t follow him. She didn’t dare move a muscle. She was afraid that if she did, the graceful, high ceilings would crash down and pin her here, trapping her forever.
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.”
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
