She hadn’t realized that she’d done as he asked until then. But she had. She’d sat up and let her back arch invitingly. That presented her breasts to him, yes, and it also made her hair move around her shoulders, and she knew, somehow, that he liked that, too.
And for a long moment—it could have been years, for all she knew—he simply looked at her.
It should have been boring. She should have felt awkward. Exposed. Embarrassed. Cold, even.
But instead, Amaya burned. She ached. She wanted.
“Look at you,” Kavian said softly. “Your breath comes faster and faster. You are flushed. If I were to reach between your thighs, what would I find?”
She couldn’t answer him.
“It would take so little,” he continued, his voice almost soft. “Your nipples are so hard, aren’t they? Think of all the things I could do with them. Think how it would feel.” She shifted against the bed beneath her, pressing herself against it and hardly aware of what she was doing, and he laughed. “None of that. You will come for me or not at all, Amaya. Remember that, if you please.”
She knew, distantly, that there were a hundred things she should say. She should challenge him. She should fight him. She should refuse to act like this simply because he wanted her to do it—but she knew, of course she knew, that he wasn’t the only one who wanted it. And she wasn’t sure she could face what that said about her, what it made her.
So perhaps it was easier to simply do as he asked instead.
“Kneel up,” he told her in that same low, knowing voice, as if he was already inside her. As if he was in her mind, as well. As if he knew all those dark, twisted things she couldn’t admit to herself. “Right where you are.”
“I’m not going to kneel before you and beg you for— for anything,” she threw at him. But she didn’t sound like herself and he didn’t look particularly moved by her outburst.
“Of course not. You are so appalled by all of this, I am sure.”
“I am.”
“I can see that.” His head canted slightly to one side, and those slate-gray eyes gleamed silver. “Kneel up, Amaya. Do not make me ask you again.”
This, right here, was the moment of truth. She didn’t entirely comprehend why she’d taken her clothes off when he told her to, but she couldn’t unring that bell. But this, here, now—this was where she had to draw the line.
It was simple. All she needed to do was stand up. Climb off this bed and walk away. Kavian was many things, but she didn’t believe he was truly a brute. Hard, yes. The hardest man she’d ever met. But she understood on some deep feminine level of intuition she hadn’t known she possessed that while he might merrily shove away at her boundaries, he wouldn’t actually force her into anything. All she needed to do was get off this bed.
She moved then, though her body hardly felt like hers. She could feel every part of her skin, as if every square inch of it was alive in a way it never had been before—a way she never had been until now. She felt so highly sensitive it was as if the air around them were a thick, padded thing, massaging her.
Maybe that was why she didn’t really notice what she was doing until she’d already done it. And then she was kneeling there before him, precisely as he’d commanded her to do.
That was bad enough. Worse, when he only looked at her, she arched her back again, pulling her shoulders back and presenting him with her breasts as he’d asked her to do before. Not only her breasts—her whole body. Right there before him.
This was the silver platter, she understood then. She’d climbed up onto it and undressed for it and arranged herself on it, all for him.
Her pulse skittered through her body, wild and erratic and much too fast.
He waited.
She didn’t know how she knew he was waiting, but she did. He was.
And the air between them seemed charged. Spiked. She couldn’t see anything but that hard, oddly patient gaze of his. She couldn’t feel anything but hunger. A deep, dark, consuming hunger that made her knees feel so weak she was deeply, wildly grateful that she wasn’t trying to stand.
She wanted him to touch her. She wanted him to take her the way he had done that night six months ago, the way he had today in that pool. She wanted him.
“Then you must say the word, azizty, and you will have me,” he murmured, and Amaya realized to her horror that she’d said all of that out loud.
Her throat was as dry as if she’d inhaled the whole of the desert outside. She shook, over and over, and she didn’t think she’d stop. She understood that this was a line she could never uncross. That there would be no returning to who she’d been before. That if she was honest, it had already happened six months ago and she’d simply been trying her best to deny it all this time. Running and running and ending up right back where she’d started.
Worse, this time, because she knew not only what she was doing, but what he could do, too.
“Please,” she whispered. But that wasn’t what he was looking for.
“Say it,” he ordered her, his voice tight.
She didn’t pretend it wasn’t a full and total surrender. But in that moment, she wasn’t sure she cared.
You will use my name, he’d told her. Perhaps the begging part had been implied, even then.
Amaya didn’t care about that, either.
“Please,” she said again. “Kavian, please.”
Kavian smiled. It was very male. Dark and satisfied. It made her whole body light up and burst into flame.
And then he reached for her and made it all that much worse.
KAVIAN WANTED TO throw her down and sink deep inside her in that instant. He wanted to slake the white-hot burn of hunger inside him, made all the worse for the uncharacteristic restraint he’d showed these past months while he scoured the planet for her.
He’d found to his great surprise that after he’d had Amaya, even in such a blind rush, no other woman would do.
She would pay for that, too.
But first he would bind her to him in a way she’d never untangle. First, he would make certain she saw nothing else in all the world but him. He would make her need him more than air and maybe then she would stop looking for exit strategies. He wanted to own her, body and soul. But first, he would worship her.
Kavian told himself they were the same thing.
And if the idea of having her completely at his command—the way she should have been since the day of their betrothal—made that tight thing in his chest feel easier, well, he told himself it was the conquest that fired his blood, nothing more. That tightness was about the injustice and sheer insult of the way she’d kept herself from him, that was all. She was his. It was time she behaved as if she knew that at last, as if she finally understood her place.
Because Kavian was king of this harsh land, not a bloodhound who could roam the earth forever in search of his runaway bride. He had won back his father’s throne with his blood, his strength. He ruled Daar Talaas with his own cunning and his commitment to defend what was his no matter the cost. He’d had no choice but to chase down the woman who had tried to shame him in the eyes of his people.
More than that, he’d wanted her. He thought he would always want her. She was his.
But it was past time he got back to the intricate business of running this ancient,