Traded to the Desert Sheikh

As if he saw some of that internal struggle on her face, Kavian laughed, which hardly helped anything. He moved away from her, toward the nearby seating area that dominated the central expanse in the middle of the pools, all stone benches and bright floor pillows around graceful round tables covered in trays of food she didn’t want to look at, because 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.”