Traded to the Desert Sheikh

“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.”