Kavian wanted to wrap her in silks and drape her in jewels. He wanted her to stand tall beside him. He wanted to decorate her in nothing but delicate gold chains and build whole palaces in her name, as the ancient sultans had done for the women who’d captivated them. He wanted her strength as much as her beauty.
He wanted to explore every inch of her sweet body with his battered hands, his warrior’s body, his mouth, his tongue.
But first, and foremost, he wanted to take her home.
“Is it force, then?” he asked her, standing in the open doorway, not in the least bit concerned about being overheard by the townspeople. “Will I throw you over my shoulder like the barbarians of old? I think you know I will not hesitate to do exactly that. And enjoy it.”
She shuddered then and he would have given his kingdom, in that moment, to know whether it was desire or revulsion that swept through her at that thought. He hated that he didn’t know her well enough, yet, to tell the difference.
That, too, would change. And far quicker than it might have had she come with him as she’d been meant to do the night of their engagement party, when he’d been predisposed toward a gentler understanding of her predicament. But there was nothing gentle left in him. He had become stone.
Amaya swept her big coat up in one hand and hung the ratty bag she carried over one shoulder. But she still didn’t move toward him.
“If I come with you now,” she said, that husky voice of hers very even, very low, “you have to promise that you won’t—”
“No.”
She blinked. “You don’t know what I was going to say.”
“What can it matter? I made you a set of promises upon our betrothal. You should not require anything further. You made me promises, too, Amaya, which you broke that very same night. It is better, I think, that you and I do not dwell on promises.”
“But—”
“This is not a debate,” he said gently, but he could see the way the edge beneath it slapped at her.
Her lips fell open, as if she had to breathe hard to get through that slap, and he couldn’t pretend he didn’t approve of the way she did it. She even stood taller. He liked that she was beautiful, of course he did. Kavian was a man, after all. A flesh-and-blood king who knew full well the benefits of such beauty when he could display it on his arm. But his queen had to be strong or, like his own fragile and ultimately treacherous mother, she would never survive the rigors of their life together. She would dissolve at the first hint of a storm, and he couldn’t have that.
Life was storms, not sunshine. The latter was a gift. It was not reality.
Kavian was a warrior king. Amaya had to be a warrior queen, in her own way. No matter how little she liked the lessons that would make her into what he needed.
He was certain he, at least, would enjoy them.
“There are no caveats, no negotiations,” he told her. Perhaps too firmly. “You have no choices here. Only an option regarding the delivery method toward the same end.”
He thought she would argue, because it seemed she always argued—and, of course, when he’d elected to quiet her in the only other way he knew, she’d bolted for six months. He could admire it now that it was over. Now that she was in his possession, where she belonged.
But today, his warrior queen lifted her head high and walked toward him instead, her dark chocolate gaze cool on his.
“That sounds ominous,” she said. Still, she walked through the door of her own volition, out into the moody light of this cold northern morning. “Will you throw a potato sack over my head? Keep my mouth shut with duct tape? Make this a good old-fashioned sort of kidnapping?”
Kavian probably shouldn’t have found that amusing. He was aware that was begging for trouble, but he couldn’t help it, especially not when she walked out in front of him and he understood, at last, the true benefit of a tight pair of jeans on a fine-figured woman.
His palms ached with the urge to test the shape of that bottom of hers, to haul her against him the way he had done but once, six months ago. It hadn’t been nearly enough, no matter how many times he’d replayed it while scouring the earth for her trail.
“It is a relatively short helicopter flight to Calgary,” he said. “Then a mere fifteen hours or so to Daar Talaas. It is entirely up to you if you wish to dress in sacks and tape. I can drug you, if that will appeal to your sense of victimization. Whatever you wish, my queen, it shall be yours.”
She stopped then, on the street in this small little Western town in the middle of so much towering wilderness. She turned slowly, as if she was still processing that dry tone of his, and when she met his gaze her own was solemn.
“I can’t be your queen,” she said quietly. “You must know that. Surely that, if nothing else, became clear to you over all these months.”
He didn’t try to keep his hands off her, then. He pulled that thick plait into his palm and let the warm silk gently abrade his skin. It wasn’t lost on him that if he wished it, he could tug her closer to him, hold her fast, use that braid to help him plunder that plump mouth of hers. The specter of that possibility danced between them and he knew, somehow, that those dark, greedy moments in her brother’s palace hung there, too. Steaming up the cold air. Making her cheeks bloom red and his blood heat.
“You promised yourself to me,” he reminded her. “You made oaths and I accepted them. You gave yourself into my hands, Amaya. You can confuse this issue with as many words as you like—forced betrothal, political engagement, arranged marriage. Whatever way you hedge a bet in this strange place and pretend a promise need not be kept. In my world, you belong to me already. You have been mine for months.”
“I don’t accept that,” Amaya whispered, but he was attuned to what she didn’t do. She didn’t weep. She didn’t pull away. She didn’t so much as avert her gaze. He felt all of those things like caresses.
“I don’t require your acceptance,” he said softly. “I only require you.”
* * *
There were no direct routes into the ancient desert city that comprised the central stronghold—and royal palace—of Daar Talaas. It had been a myth, a legend, for many centuries, whispered about by traders and defeated challengers to its throne, incorporated into battle songs and epic poems. In these modern times, satellites and spy drones and online travelogues made certain there was no possibility of truly hiding a whole city away from the rest of the world, but that didn’t mean the old royal seat of the warrior kings of Daar Talaas was any more accessible for being known.
The roads only led an hour or so into the desert from any given border, then ended abruptly, unmarked and nowhere near the city itself. There was nothing but the shifting desert sands in the interior of the country, with secret and hard-to-find tunnels beneath the formidable mountains that the natives had used to evade potential invaders for centuries. There were other, somewhat more modern places in the country that appeared on all the maps and were easily approached by anyone insane enough to consider the wide, empty desert a reasonable destination—but the ancient seat of Daar Talaas’s power remained half mystery, half mirage.
Almost impossible to attack by land.
Much