Traded to the Desert Sheikh

It was blisteringly hot, wild and fast, and almost too much to bear.

“Come,” he ordered her in that dark voice of his when he’d held her there on the brink for what seemed like a lifetime. When she’d lost herself completely in that desperate world of intense sensation he built so effortlessly around them, where she didn’t care who was surrendering or what that might mean. “Now.”

And he’d taught her so well in the weeks they’d been together. It took only that rasped command and she was gone. She wept out some kind of plea or prayer as she shattered into too many pieces to count, her face in the pillows and her hands curled into fists beside her. Then Kavian shouted out his own release and nearly threw her over once more.

He kissed her again, right there on the nape of her neck until she shuddered from the sweet kick of it all over again, and then he murmured something she didn’t quite hear before he left her lying there to begin his day in earnest. It didn’t matter, she thought then, dreamily suspended in that delicious in-between state where there was nothing but that sweet heat thrumming in her body. Whatever he did, however he did it, it felt like another caress.

It took her a while to rise from the bed. It took her longer to find her way into the walk-in shower that could have comfortably fit the whole of the harem he’d discarded—though that wasn’t a topic she cared to think about too closely, as it led nowhere good. She stood under the hot spray and let it work its way beneath her skin.

When she was finished she wrapped herself in a silken robe so she could join him at breakfast in the sunny room directly adjoining the bedroom suite. It was the finest of his private salons, all wide-open doors to his secluded terrace and vast, sweeping views of the mountains and the desert beyond, and it struck her as she hurried into it that she was something very much like...eager.

That was a jarring thought. She told herself they’d fallen into a routine, that was all—or more accurately, he’d set one for them. He’d insisted they share these mornings from the start.

“I never know where my day will lead me,” he’d said that first morning in the palace, when Amaya woke with a start to find herself draped over his chest as if she’d always shared his bed. His voice had been gruffly possessive, and he’d held her gaze to his with her hair wrapped tight around his fist, holding her head where he wanted it. “I want to know exactly where it will start, and who with.”

At first she’d acquiesced because she’d been so swept away by him, by everything that had happened since she looked up to see him standing over her in that faraway café. Or that was what she’d told herself—that it was far better to lose a battle than the war. That it had nothing to do with the softness that had washed through her when he said something that might have been very nearly romantic, had he been another man. Had they been other people.

Today she recognized another truth wrapped up in that eagerness that she wanted to deny but couldn’t, quite: that there was a large part of her that wanted nothing more than to sink into this life he’d laid out for her after all her years of following her mother’s changeable whims and broken heart all over the planet. It was much too tempting to simply dissolve into this place, into this man, into the vision he had of her and into this life he obviously ran as smoothly and as ruthlessly as he did everything else.

It was more than tempting. It was something very much like comforting.

It feels like safety, something inside her whispered. Like home.

Like a note of music, played loud and long.

But she couldn’t let herself think those things.

Amaya slipped into place at the glass-topped table where Kavian sat, his newspapers spread around him and his laptop open before him. Nothing about this man was safe. She knew that. Not when his gray eyes sparked silver as he gazed at her. Or when he showed her that small, dangerously compelling crook in the corner of his mouth that had become everything to her.

Though she was careful not to think of it in those terms.

“Today you will tend to your wardrobe at last,” he told her, by way of greeting. “I’ve flown my favorite dressmakers in from Italy and they await you in the yellow parlor even now. They’ve brought some ready-to-wear pieces, I imagine, but will also be taking your measurements.”

It took a moment for all that to sink in. Amaya jerked her attention away from his temptation of a mouth and back across the hearty breakfast Kavian preferred after his intense morning workout, set pleasingly on an array of gold and silver platters as befit a king.