Traded to the Desert Sheikh

Elizaveta moved to her feet and then wandered with seeming aimlessness around the small courtyard, as if she was taking in all the green and the riot of bright flowers. As if she’d never beheld their like before. “What a charming suite. I adore all these flowers. What part of the palace is this?”

Amaya understood where she was going then. Perhaps it had been inevitable from the start, given how furious her mother had always been at her father. Given how hurt she still clearly was.

“The guest part,” she replied. Grudgingly.

Her mother smiled over her shoulder, but her gaze was hard. “Is that its formal name, then? How strange.”

She watched her mother trail her always elegant, always red-tipped, always diamond-studded fingers along the petals of the nearest bougainvillea vine.

“I think you know perfectly well that this is technically part of what was once considered the harem complex,” Amaya said quietly. “But Kavian does not keep a harem.”

Her mother glanced at her. “Not now, you mean.”

“He kept a harem before we met, if that’s what you’re trying to tell me so subtly.” Amaya was proud of how cool she sounded. How very nearly bored, as if the number seventeen were not flashing behind her eyes. “But then, he’s never claimed to be a monk.”

Her mother turned to face her, and Amaya was struck, as she always was, at how much she looked like the darker version of her mother’s precise blond beauty. Where Elizaveta was like an ice sculpture, carved to sharp perfection, Amaya was so much softer. Blurrier.

Misshapen, she’d always thought. And yet today she found she was glad they weren’t more similar.

“Did he give up his concubines for you?” Elizaveta asked, with that pointed smile that was her fiercest weapon. “That is enough to make the heart sing, I am sure.”

Amaya had not spoken to her mother much in the six months she was on the run. There had been enough speculation in the papers that Amaya assumed Elizaveta had guessed that her daughter had run away from an arranged marriage, but Amaya had never confirmed it. Now she was happy she’d played it that way. That she’d confided nothing. That Elizaveta knew nothing at all about Kavian, or Amaya’s relationship with him.

“Kavian is deeply romantic,” she told her mother, giving her all to that lie. “He might not show it to you or the world. But he is a hard man who has only one bit of softness, and that’s me.”

Her heart skipped a beat at that, as if it was true. More—as if she wanted it to be true.

But her mother’s cold eyes gleamed. “Is that what he told you?”

“I wouldn’t put much stock in it if he’d told me,” Amaya said, and even smiled. “I’ve learned one or two things from you, I hope. Actions speak louder than words, isn’t that what you always said?”

“And when you are big and fat and ugly with his child, as you will be often,” Elizaveta said, as if she was agreeing, “you must anticipate that he will see to his needs as he pleases, with as many other women as take his fancy. Men always do. That is their favorite course of action, Amaya. Always. Especially men like him, in places like this.”

Amaya rose to her feet and skimmed her hands down her skirts, angling her head high. She wasn’t eleven. She didn’t have to listen to this. She certainly didn’t have to believe it.

“I’m sorry if that was your experience, Mother,” she said quietly. “It won’t be mine.”

And she hadn’t understood until she said it out loud that she wanted that to be true. That more of her wanted to believe in Kavian than didn’t.

She had no idea what to do with that.

“Does he love you, then?” Elizaveta asked, her voice so light. So terrible. “Or has he merely claimed you?”

Whatever she saw on Amaya’s face then made her cluck in what sounded like sympathy. It washed over Amaya like something far more acidic, and wrenched at her heart besides.

“Darling.” Elizaveta shook her head, and Amaya felt everything inside turn to ice. “They’re not at all the same thing. And a woman must always know where she stands, or she will spend her life on her knees.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

KAVIAN KNEW THE MOMENT Amaya walked into their rooms as the afternoon edged toward evening that her mother had gotten to her. He could hear it in the heaviness in her step out in the foyer. The particular weight of her silence.