“You are not made of rubber,” Elizaveta had told her not long after her father’s funeral, which Elizaveta had expected Amaya to boycott. She’d been furious that Amaya had defied her and gone to pay her respects anyway. “What happens when you cannot bend? When instead you break?”
Amaya had so desperately wanted to say, You didn’t break me, Mother. If you didn’t, who could? But she hadn’t. Because it had been easier not to fight. Easier by far to simply bend.
Amaya al Bakri didn’t break. She bent and she bent, and then, when she could bend no more, she ran away. There was another word to describe that kind of behavior, she often thought as she plotted escapes from Kavian’s palace she knew she didn’t dare attempt. Coward.
But she didn’t feel like a coward. She felt as courageous as she felt overwhelmed every time she surrendered herself to Kavian’s sensual, demanding possession, the days blending into the nights and all of it focused on his masterful touch. Was that bending? Or was she simply allowing herself to sink deep into a dizzying world of hunger and want she hadn’t known existed? Where need and desire were all that mattered—despite how deeply each terrified her?
Surely the ease with which she’d given herself over to this man who’d claimed her and brought her here against her will should worry her, she thought then. She nodded along with the vizier as he gestured wildly and made points in rapid-fire Arabic that she understood more and more of by the day. Surely Kavian himself should trip every last one of her alarms.
She’d been opposed to men like him her whole life. Autocratic, overbearing, dangerous and very, very sure of themselves in all things. From what they wished to have for breakfast to what they thought Amaya should do with her life. From ponytails to polygamy.
That was why her mother had left her father, she knew—because he’d had no intention of curtailing his extramarital activity both in and out of his harem. He’d been offended when Elizaveta expressed her dismay. And that was why Amaya had spent the better part of her time on the run, furious with her brother Rihad for ordering her to marry Kavian in the first place. He had never once indicated that he understood how difficult it was for her to marry a complete stranger when he should have, having done so twice himself.
It was why she’d been certain she had to escape Kavian within moments of meeting him. Because he was that much worse than all the rest of them put together. That eternal, relentless imperiousness he wielded so offhandedly. That dictatorial need of his to issue commands at will and his arrogant astonishment when said commands were not immediately obeyed. That intense focus on every last, seemingly insignificant detail of everything. She should have been horrified by him after spending these weeks with him—as overwhelmed and trapped as she’d felt the night of their betrothal.
The trouble was that when it came to Kavian, every time he put those hard hands of his on her it was pure magic.
Maybe all men were equally magical, she reasoned. Maybe all sex was exactly the same, exactly like this. She told herself that what happened between them was probably run-of-the-mill and boring—she simply had no context by which to judge it. Because Kavian was the only man Amaya had ever known this way, ever touched this way, ever surrendered to in this way. Or at all.
And the truth was that she didn’t find his bossiness and sheer male certainty as upsetting in the bedroom as some part of her, deep inside, insisted she should. Quite the contrary, in fact, no matter how her heart pounded at her or her head swam at the thought of him. Then again when he touched her. No matter that sheer, stunning drop into pure sensation that terrified her in retrospect and yet seemed to disappear when he hauled her against him and—
“Are you following, my lady?” The vizier’s voice was an unpleasant slap back into the here and now and Amaya had to force a polite smile to cover it. “I cannot stress to you the importance of official palace protocol. It is—”
“All we have left when the world crumbles around us,” Amaya finished for him, trying to sit up straighter and focus, glad she’d paid enough attention earlier to parrot that back at him. “Please, continue. I assure you I’m hanging on your every word.”
* * *
The following morning Kavian rose before the sun, which Amaya had learned he did religiously. A man in his kind of peak physical condition did not happen into it by chance—he subjected himself to a rigorous fitness regime every day without fail. For hours, with what appeared to be half of his army and all their hardcore military drills.
And then, also without fail, he came back to their bed and woke her in his typically inventive, wicked style.
Sometimes with his hands. Sometimes with his mouth.
Sometimes in other imaginative ways altogether.
Today he took her as she lay sprawled on her belly, one of his big hands beneath her to prop her up and hold her hips at the precise angle he wanted them, the other flat against the mattress beside her and his mouth hot on the nape of her neck.
It was blisteringly hot, wild and fast, and almost too much to bear.
“Come,” he ordered her in that dark voice of his when he’d held her there on the brink for what seemed like a lifetime. When she’d lost herself completely in that desperate world of intense sensation he built so effortlessly around them, where she didn’t care who was surrendering or what that might mean. “Now.”
And he’d taught her so well in the weeks they’d been together. It took only that rasped command and she was gone. She wept out some kind of plea or prayer as she shattered into too many pieces to count, her face in the pillows and her hands curled into fists beside her. Then Kavian shouted out his own release and nearly threw her over once more.
He kissed her again, right there on the nape of her neck until she shuddered from the sweet kick of it all over again, and then he murmured something she didn’t quite hear before he left her lying there to begin his day in earnest. It didn’t matter, she thought then, dreamily suspended in that delicious in-between state where there was nothing but that sweet heat thrumming in her body. Whatever he did, however he did it, it felt like another caress.
It took her a while to rise from the bed. It took her longer to find her way into the walk-in shower that could have comfortably fit the whole of the harem he’d discarded—though that wasn’t a topic she cared to think about too closely, as it led nowhere good. She stood under the hot spray and let it work its way beneath her skin.
When she was finished she wrapped herself in a silken robe so she could join him at breakfast in the sunny room directly adjoining the bedroom suite. It was the finest of his private salons, all wide-open doors to his secluded terrace and vast, sweeping views of the mountains and the desert beyond, and it struck her as she hurried into it that she was something very much like...eager.
That was a jarring thought. She told herself they’d fallen into a routine, that was all—or more accurately, he’d set one for them. He’d insisted they share these mornings from the start.
“I never know where my day will lead me,” he’d said that first morning in the palace, when Amaya woke with a start to find herself draped over his chest as if she’d always shared his bed. His voice had been gruffly possessive, and he’d held her gaze to his with her hair wrapped tight around his fist, holding her head where he wanted it. “I want to know exactly where it will start, and who with.”
At first she’d acquiesced because she’d been so swept away by him, by everything that had happened since she looked up to see him standing over her in that faraway café. Or that was what she’d told herself—that it was far better to lose a battle than the war. That it had nothing to do with the softness that had washed through her when he said something that might have been very nearly romantic, had he been another man. Had they been other people.
Today she recognized another truth wrapped