Traded to the Desert Sheikh

“What’s wrong with my wardrobe as is?” She blinked down at herself, wearing nothing but a silk wrapper and the desert breeze in her wet hair. “I don’t mean this.”

“I like you like this.” That dark gray gaze. That responsive flip inside her chest that boded only ill. “But I would kill anyone else who saw you dressed in so little.”

And she felt it again. That deep flush of pleasure, as if his liking her was the only thing that mattered to her—and as if he was being romantic when he said such things. It almost diverted her attention from the fact that he had favorite dressmakers in the first place.

“How many dresses have you had made, exactly?” she asked him, raising her gaze to his slowly. Very slowly. “Seventeen, by any chance?”

Kavian sat there in his favorite chair with the golden morning light cascading all around him, and his slate-gray gaze seemed deeply and darkly amused the way it often did these days, though his mouth had lost that curve she craved.

“Do you truly wish me to answer that?”

“My wardrobe is perfectly adequate as it is, thank you,” Amaya said quickly, as much because she really didn’t want him to answer her question as because that was true. Her brother had shipped over all her things months ago, long before Kavian had caught up to her in Canada and brought her here. She’d woken up that first morning in Daar Talaas to find a separate, equally vast second closet off Kavian’s sitting room stocked with everything she’d left behind in Bakri, from the gowns she’d worn to formal affairs at her brother’s palace to her favorite pair of ripped black jeans from the university that she doubted Kavian would find at all appropriate. “What fault can you possibly find in it?”

“None whatsoever, were you still slinging pints in a pub in Scotland. Alas, you are not. I can assure you that while your duties will inevitably vary here, according to the needs of the people, they will never include tending a bar.”

“It was a perfectly decent pub. And what do you care where I worked?”

“You were a royal princess of the House of Bakri.” He had never looked like more of a king than he did then, royal and arrogant, that gaze of his a dark fire as he regarded her with some kind of astonishment. “Aside from the fact that it involved parading yourself before crowds of drunken Scotsmen every night, which your father must have been insane to allow, such a job was quite literally beneath you.”

Which had been the appeal of the job, not that she was foolish enough to admit that now. Or that both Rihad and her father had read her the riot act about it, the latter almost until the day he’d died. As rebellions went, hers had been a tiny one, but it had still been hers. She couldn’t regret it. She didn’t.

But she’d also been relieved, somehow, when Rihad had called her to Bakri after her father died and told her it was time she took on a more formal role. She’d never had much defiance inside her. Only Kavian seemed to bring that out in her. Even now.

“You and Rihad rant on and on about my being a princess,” she said then, not quite rolling her eyes at him. “It’s embarrassing at best. It’s nothing but a silly title from a life that was only mine for a few years when I was a child, and then again recently for my brother’s political gain.” Amaya shrugged. “I’m no princess. Not really. I never have been.”

She couldn’t read the look on his face then, and ignored the small trickle of sensation that worked its way down her spine. She didn’t want to read him anyway, she assured herself as she poured out a steaming mug of coffee from the carafe at her elbow and stirred in a healthy dollop of cream. He would do as he liked either way.

It was unfortunate that she found that appealing rather than appalling.

“It is a silly title that you will no longer suffer to bear, you will be happy to learn.” It was amazing that he could sound so scathing when he was still so irritatingly calm, she thought, and not for the first time. She stirred her coffee harder than necessary. “You are now a queen, Amaya. My queen, should that require clarification.”

“Officially, I am only your betrothed.” She shouldn’t have said that, of course. That level, considering stare of his made everything inside her go still, as if she’d roused the predator in him again and was fixed in its sights. “I’ve been learning a great deal about the traditional Daar Talaas palace hierarchy in the classes you’ve made me take.”

“They are not classes.” His voice was as dangerously soft as his gaze was severe. “You are not a fractious adolescent who has been dispatched to some kind of summer school in place of the detention she clearly deserves.”