Traded to the Desert Sheikh

“You do not look the part of the blushing bride to be, little sister.”

Amaya started at the familiar voice at her ear, then controlled herself, jerked her attention away from Kavian and aimed her practiced smile at her brother.

But Rihad, king of Bakri, did not smile in return. His dark eyes probed hers, and Amaya had to look away, back to where the man who had scandalously kidnapped her from a café in a Canadian lake town stood there so calmly, as if he’d had every right to do so. Quite as if there weren’t reporters everywhere, recording every moment of this night for posterity and dramatic headline potential, who wouldn’t leap at that story if she’d chosen to share it.

If you marry him, scandals like that will seem like mountains made out of molehills, a small voice within told her. If you do not, they will take over two countries and drown them both...

She knew what she had to do if she wanted to survive. She’d set everything in motion. But that didn’t make any of it easy. She cared a great deal more about what would happen in the wake of this decision than she had half a year ago.

Obviously. Or she wouldn’t still be here.

“You look something very much like happy these days, Rihad,” she said after a moment, “I don’t think I realized that was a possibility.”

For him. For her. For any of them.

He frowned. “Amaya.”

But she refused to do this. She couldn’t do this—and she’d already revealed too much. There was too much at stake.

“Not here, please.” She forced another smile. “I will no doubt burst into tears at all your brotherly concern and it will cause a war, and I’ll forever be known as that selfish, emotionally overwrought princess who caused so much trouble. There’s a reason Helen of Troy doesn’t have the greatest reputation. It’s not worth it.”

“Listen to me,” Rihad commanded her, in that voice of his that reminded her that he was not only her older brother. He was a king. Her king.

Amaya remembered his own wedding to his first wife, which had come at the end of a week of celebrations in Bakri City. That, too, had been arranged. Amaya had been a small girl, in awe. She’d thought the fact of the wedding itself meant the bride and groom had loved each other. And in truth, Rihad had always told her that he and his first wife had gotten along well.

But it was nothing next to what was between him and Sterling, his second wife. That much had been obvious at a glance when they arrived the day before. Their connection crackled from the many tabloid articles that had been written about them, which in turn paled next to the sparks they struck off each other in person. Amaya didn’t pretend to understand how that could be, when Sterling had spent a decade as their late brother, Omar’s, mistress.

She only knew that she and Kavian didn’t have the same thing. What they had was dark and physical. A terrible wanting that she was absolutely certain would destroy them both. It was not the calm affection of Rihad’s first union    . Nor was it the obvious intimacy of his second.

It was an agony.

“It will not be pretty if you fail to go through with this wedding,” Rihad said in a gruff sort of voice. “I can’t deny that. But I won’t force you to the altar. I do not care what claim he thinks he has.”

Amaya looked across the great courtyard to find Kavian again, and again his dark gaze met hers, so gray. So knowing. So fierce and hard at once, searing straight into her like a touch of his warrior’s hands.

And she understood then.

It was the night before the wedding she’d been trying to avoid for more than six months. And Amaya was deeply and madly and incontrovertibly in love with the man she was meant to marry in the morning. She thought she had been since the moment they met, when those slate-gray eyes of his, so dark and so patient, had met hers and held.

Shifting everything else.

Changing the whole world.

She loved him. She understood with a certain fatalism, a shuddering slide that seemed to have no end inside her, that she always would.

And if she married him, she would become her mother. It was a one-way ticket to Elizaveta’s sad life, no matter what Amaya might have told her earlier. If Amaya had Kavian’s children, would she treat them the same way Elizaveta had treated her? Once he tired of her and cast her aside, would she spend the rest of her days wandering from lover to lover, playing out the same sort of vicious games and making everyone who came near her as unhappy and bitter as she was?

There were fates worse than death, Amaya thought then, her head thick and dizzy with this knowledge she didn’t want. And that was one of them.