Traded to the Desert Sheikh

“But you said you grew up here, not there.”

He moved farther into the tent and she watched as he unwrapped his traditional headdress, then shrugged out of his robes, stripping down until he wore nothing but a pair of boxer briefs low on his narrow hips. He should have looked like a normal, regular, everyday man, she thought with something like despair. He was in his underwear in a tent in the middle of nowhere. Surely that should...reduce him, somehow.

But this was Kavian. And today, she’d wanted to please him. To be the queen he wanted. Looking at him here, she understood that suicidal urge.

He better resembled a god than any mere man. It was as if he’d been hewn from the finest marble and then breathed into life. His skin gleamed like old gold in the lantern light and she couldn’t read a thing on his face as he came toward her. Nor when he reached for her.

He unwound her scarves from her as if he was unwrapping a precious gift. Slowly. Reverently. He combed his fingers through her hair when it tumbled down, then helped her out of the long, traditional dress she’d been given yesterday by his dressmakers. When she wore nothing but her slip, a basic thing that wasn’t meant to be at all alluring, his gaze heated, but still he did nothing but gently rake his fingers through her hair.

It was almost as if it calmed him as much as it did her.

“My uncle was the king of Daar Talaas when I was born,” he told her, so softly she thought at first he hadn’t meant to speak at all. “He was a good ruler and the people loved him, but despite the wives he took and the many concubines he kept, he had no sons. So when he died, the throne passed to his younger brother. My father.”

He wasn’t looking at her. His attention was on the thick fall of her dark hair that he wrapped around and around his hand instead, then let unravel again. Yet Amaya found she could hardly breathe.

“My father was a young man with two wives, one renowned for her fertility, the other for her beauty.” His gaze was dark when it met hers. Something like tortured, she’d have said. “His first wife had given him four sons already, my half brothers. The people were pleased, for my father and his wealth of sons ensured that the throne would remain in the hands of our family, come what may. That meant stability.”

“What about you?” she asked. “Were you considered part of that wealth?”

He did not smile. If anything, his gaze darkened.

“My mother was a fragile woman who had nothing but her beauty and, perhaps because of it, a great envy for all the things she felt she was owed,” he said, in the cool tones of someone who was telling a distant myth, a legend. Not his own family’s story. His story. That shook through Amaya, but she didn’t move. She didn’t speak. “She was far more pleasing to my father in bed than his first wife had ever been, but even when she had me, she could not compete with the simple fact of her rival’s four healthy heirs. My father’s first wife was a simple woman, without my mother’s looks or cleverness, but none of this mattered. She was the queen. She was revered. My mother came second, and I, her only child, fifth.”

Amaya might have realized only today that there were a great many things she didn’t know about this man, but she did know that he didn’t have any family. Everyone knew that. Which made her heart stutter in her chest, because this story could be headed only one horrible way.

She reached over and pressed her hand against the hard plane of the muscle that covered his heart, and her breath began to shake when he slid his hand over hers and held it there.

“You don’t have to tell me this story,” she said, and her voice was barely a whisper. “I didn’t mean to dredge up bad memories.”

“My mother took a lover,” Kavian said by way of reply. His voice was so dark, leading them inexorably toward a terrible end. She could see that much on his face. She could feel it in the air around them, crushing her in a tense fist, but she made herself stand tall. If he could tell it, she could take it. She promised herself she could. “He was one of my father’s ministers, ambitious and amoral. But he was not content to simply defile my father’s wife. He wanted the throne.”

“How could he take it? Was he related to you?”

“The throne of Daar Talaas is held by the man who can hold it.” Kavian did not so much say that as intone it. “So it is written in the stones on which the throne itself sits. So it has always been.”

Amaya had to press her palm that much harder against him, to remind herself he was real. Flesh and blood, not a statue in a palace hewn from rock. Not etched stones beneath an old throne. Far more than the story he was telling her. Far more than the darkness that was pouring from him now, his eyes and his voice alike.