Traded to the Desert Sheikh

by Caitlin Crews

  “Canada is not your home.” Still he lounged there, as if this were a casual conversation. As if he weren’t holding her between his hands like a giant, malicious cat, and toying with her because he could. Because he felt like it. Because he enjoyed using his damn claws. “You were born in Bakri. You lived there until you were eight years old. Then you and your mother wandered for the next decade. Here, there. Wherever the wind blew her, that is where you went. The longest you stayed anywhere in that time was fifteen months at a family-owned vineyard in the Marlborough wine region of New Zealand’s South Island. Is that the home you mean? It pains me to tell you that the gentleman you stayed with then moved on from your mother’s much-vaunted charms some time ago and now has a new family all his own.”

  Amaya remembered crisp mornings in a late New Zealand winter then, walking through the corridors of rich dirt and gnarled vines with the friendly man she’d imagined might make Elizaveta better. Happier, anyway—and he’d seemed to manage it, for a time. She remembered the long white-capped mountain range that stretched out lazily alongside her wherever she went, reaching from the vineyard she’d called home that year toward Blenheim and the sea in the east. The skittish sheep and curious lambs who marked her every move and bounded away from any signs of movement in their direction, real or imagined. The stout and orderly vineyards, set in their efficient lines all the way north to the foothills of the Richmond range.

  Most of all she remembered the thick black, velvety nights, when the skies were so filled with stars they seemed messy, chaotic. Magic. Weighted down, as if, were she to blink, all that fanciful light might crush her straight down into the rich, fertile earth like nothing but another seedling. And yet somehow they’d made it impossible for Amaya to believe that she could really be as terribly alone as she’d sometimes felt.

  She hadn’t thought about that period of her life in a very long time. Elizaveta had moved on the way Elizaveta always did and Amaya had stopped imagining anyone could fix what her father had broken. She felt something crack inside her now, as if Kavian had knocked down a critical foundation with that unexpected swipe—but he was still talking. Still wrecking her with every lazily destructive word.

  “Or perhaps you are referring to your years at university in Montreal?” He didn’t wait for her to answer. “While it appeared to be a city you enjoyed, in many respects, you left it as often as possible during your studies. You went to the mountains, as we have established. But also to Europe. To the Caribbean for sun in the midst of all those relentless winters. And you left Canada altogether shortly after your graduation for Edinburgh, where you took up a very unsuitable job in a local pub while you made the most feeble of gestures toward a master’s degree in some or other form of literature at the university there.”

  Amaya wanted to make a gesture toward him that was anything but feeble, but restrained herself. Barely. She felt the prick of her own nails against her palms, and wished she could sink them into him instead.

  “It’s not up to you to decide what feels like home to me. My life is not something that requires your input or critique.” She fought to keep her voice even. “You can tell because I didn’t ask you for either one.”

  “Unfortunately for you, it is indeed up to me.” Kavian shrugged, and it was not a gesture of uncertainty on a man like him. It was another weapon, and Kavian, she was beginning to understand all too well, did not hesitate to use the weapons he had at his disposal. “You do not have a home, Amaya. You never have. But that, too, has changed now. Whether you are prepared to accept that or not is immaterial.”

  She couldn’t breathe. She felt as if he’d thrown her down a staircase, as if she’d landed hard on her back and knocked all the air from her lungs, and for a moment she could do nothing but stare back at him.

  “I want to be somewhere you are not,” she managed to grate out, finally.

  “I am sure you do. But that is not among the choices available to you.”

  “This is a huge palace. There has to be a room somewhere you can stash me, far away from everything and everyone. I don’t care if it’s a dungeon, as long as it’s nowhere near you.”

  Where she could figure out how to breathe through this, recover from this. If that was even possible.

  Where she could work out what the hell she was going to do.

  “There are many such rooms, but you will be staying in mine.”

  He only watched her, utterly without mercy. And she didn’t know which was worse, the wet heat threatening to spill from her eyes, the simmering flame deep in her core that she wanted to deny, the shaking she couldn’t quite seem to control now he’d upended the whole of her life in a few short sentences or the fact that he’d trapped her here. In every possible way, and they both knew it.

  “No,” she said.

  But it was as if she hadn’t spoken. It made her wonder if she had.

  “I apologize if this distresses you, but I am not a particularly modern man,” Kavian replied. He did not sound remotely apologetic. Nor did he look it. “I do not trust what I cannot touch. I want you in my bed.”

  Bed. The word exploded inside her, ripping through her with a trail of white-hot images that centered on his mouth, his hands, that body of his above her and around her and in her—

  “I don’t want to be anywhere near your bed. You’ve already done as you like with me in an alcove, a pool—why can’t we leave it at that?” She sounded hysterical. She felt hysterical. “Why can’t we just leave it?”

  Kavian, by contrast, went very, very still, though his dark eyes burned.

  And she felt another foundation crumble into dust at that look on his face.

  “The next time I take you, Amaya, two things will happen,” he said softly. So very softly. It was a whisper that rolled through like a battle cry. “First, it will be in a proper bed. I may not be civilized, precisely, but I do have my moments. And I wish to take my time. All the time in the world, if necessary.” He waited for her to shudder at that, as if he’d expected it. Then he nearly smiled again, which was its own devastation. “And second, you will use my name.”

  “Your name?”

  “You have yet to utter it,” he pointed out, and she could see that though he still lounged there, though his voice was almost as languid as he looked, there was absolutely nothing mild about him at all. That mildness was an illusion he used to do his bidding, nothing more, like everything else. “I assume this is yet another attempt on your part to maintain distance between us. Is it not?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about. I say your name all the time, usually as a curse word.”

  “You will use my name.” He didn’t rise. He didn’t have to. It was as if he held her tight between those hands of his even as he reclined in his chair. She was sure she felt the press of his palms, like all those New Zealand stars when she’d been thirteen, crushing her deep into the earth. “You will sleep in my bed. You will give yourself to me. There will be no distance between us, Amaya. There will be nothing but my will and your surrender.”

  “Followed by my suicide, as quickly as possible, to escape you,” she threw back at him to hide the pounding of her heart that told her truths she didn’t want to face.

  But Kavian only laughed at her, as if he could hear it.

  As if he knew.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  AMAYA HADN’T MEANT to fall asleep.

  The smiling, almost too deferential attendants had been waiting for her when she’d pushed her way out of the baths, still reeling from all that had happened with Kavian. They’d surrounded her as they’d led her through the gleaming labyrinth of a palace, and Amaya hadn’t been able to tell if they were deliberately taking her on a confusing route to her rooms or if the palace really was that difficult to navigate.

  Either way, they’d deposited her in a rambling suite of rooms that cl
early belonged to the king himself. And had pretended they didn’t understand her when she demanded to be taken elsewhere.

  “I don’t want to stay here,” she’d told them, again and again, until she’d finally had to take it up with the two intimidatingly ferocious guards who stood at the doors.

  They’d only stared back at her, without any of the sweet smiles or pleasing laughter of her attendants.

  “I need my own rooms,” she’d said stubbornly. “This is a mistake. I’m not staying here.”

  The guards had only stared back at her, for what had seemed like an inordinate amount of time, especially when Amaya realized she was wearing nothing but the robe the attendants had wrapped her in.

  “You may take that up with the king if you feel it is your place to question him,” the larger of the two guards replied eventually, in a tone that suggested this conversation was itself scandalous and inappropriate—or perhaps, Amaya had realized belatedly, it was simply that she was. After all, from this man’s perspective, she wasn’t the unfairly trapped woman who deserved to make her own choices in life no matter whose blood ran in her veins—she was the princess who had been exalted by his beloved king’s notice only to throw her good fortune in the sheikh’s face by running away.

  She’d been certain she could see that very sentence run through the man’s expression like a tabloid ticker at the bottom of a television screen. That—and the fact that he and his compatriot looked as if they’d have relished the opportunity to chase her down in the corridor like an errant fox—made her retreat into the suite and shut the door.

  Amaya had stood there for a long moment, breathing much harder than she should have been, her back against the door that represented her only path out of Kavian’s rooms, her bare feet cold against the chilly marble floor of the sheikh’s grand foyer.

  That was when she’d decided that her best bet wasn’t to run. That should have been obvious. He’d already caught her once, in the most remote place she’d known. Her only option now was to hide.

  Surely Kavian couldn’t be that much a barbarian, she’d told herself stoutly as she wandered from room to room in the rambling collection of gorgeous chambers on two floors that composed His Majesty’s royal suite. There were two or three elegant salons, making clever use of the many stacked terraces and the sweeping views down into the hidden, protected valley. The marble foyer opened into a private courtyard with a graceful fountain claiming its center. Several sitting rooms were scattered here and there along with a media center, a well-stocked library, even a formal dining room dressed in silk tapestries and golds.

  She’d kept looking for a hiding place. Kavian might have talked a big game there by the bathing pools, but the reality was that he’d never forced her to do anything, as shameful as that might have been to admit. The truth was that she’d agreed to marry him in some pathetic attempt to please her brother and possibly her dead father, and then she’d melted all over Kavian every time he touched her.

  Amaya didn’t fear him physically. She feared herself. She feared the depth of her own surrender and how much a part of her wanted nothing more than to sink to her knees and exult in Kavian’s claim over her. To let him keep every one of those dark, delicious promises he’d made to her. To learn precisely what he meant when he told her she would learn obedience...

  Stop it, she’d snapped at herself as she moved from room to room. She was a liberated woman, damn it. She might have been born into a society like this one, she might even have been briefly nostalgic enough to let her brother talk her into returning to it after their father’s death a few years back, but her heart wasn’t here. Her heart had never been here.

  It can’t be here, she’d assured herself. 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 to
o 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.”