It was more than tempting. It was something very much like comforting.
It feels like safety, something inside her whispered. Like home.
Like a note of music, played loud and long.
But she couldn’t let herself think those things.
Amaya slipped into place at the glass-topped table where Kavian sat, his newspapers spread around him and his laptop open before him. Nothing about this man was safe. She knew that. Not when his gray eyes sparked silver as he gazed at her. Or when he showed her that small, dangerously compelling crook in the corner of his mouth that had become everything to her.
Though she was careful not to think of it in those terms.
“Today you will tend to your wardrobe at last,” he told her, by way of greeting. “I’ve flown my favorite dressmakers in from Italy and they await you in the yellow parlor even now. They’ve brought some ready-to-wear pieces, I imagine, but will also be taking your measurements.”
It took a moment for all that to sink in. Amaya jerked her attention away from his temptation of a mouth and back across the hearty breakfast Kavian preferred after his intense morning workout, set pleasingly on an array of gold and silver platters as befit a king.
“What’s wrong with my wardrobe as is?” She blinked down at herself, wearing nothing but a silk wrapper and the desert breeze in her wet hair. “I don’t mean this.”
“I like you like this.” That dark gray gaze. That responsive flip inside her chest that boded only ill. “But I would kill anyone else who saw you dressed in so little.”
And she felt it again. That deep flush of pleasure, as if his liking her was the only thing that mattered to her—and as if he was being romantic when he said such things. It almost diverted her attention from the fact that he had favorite dressmakers in the first place.
“How many dresses have you had made, exactly?” she asked him, raising her gaze to his slowly. Very slowly. “Seventeen, by any chance?”
Kavian sat there in his favorite chair with the golden morning light cascading all around him, and his slate-gray gaze seemed deeply and darkly amused the way it often did these days, though his mouth had lost that curve she craved.
“Do you truly wish me to answer that?”
“My wardrobe is perfectly adequate as it is, thank you,” Amaya said quickly, as much because she really didn’t want him to answer her question as because that was true. Her brother had shipped over all her things months ago, long before Kavian had caught up to her in Canada and brought her here. She’d woken up that first morning in Daar Talaas to find a separate, equally vast second closet off Kavian’s sitting room stocked with everything she’d left behind in Bakri, from the gowns she’d worn to formal affairs at her brother’s palace to her favorite pair of ripped black jeans from the university that she doubted Kavian would find at all appropriate. “What fault can you possibly find in it?”
“None whatsoever, were you still slinging pints in a pub in Scotland. Alas, you are not. I can assure you that while your duties will inevitably vary here, according to the needs of the people, they will never include tending a bar.”
“It was a perfectly decent pub. And what do you care where I worked?”
“You were a royal princess of the House of Bakri.” He had never looked like more of a king than he did then, royal and arrogant, that gaze of his a dark fire as he regarded her with some kind of astonishment. “Aside from the fact that it involved parading yourself before crowds of drunken Scotsmen every night, which your father must have been insane to allow, such a job was quite literally beneath you.”
Which had been the appeal of the job, not that she was foolish enough to admit that now. Or that both Rihad and her father had read her the riot act about it, the latter almost until the day he’d died. As rebellions went, hers had been a tiny one, but it had still been hers. She couldn’t regret it. She didn’t.
But she’d also been relieved, somehow, when Rihad had called her to Bakri after her father died and told her it was time she took on a more formal role. She’d never had much defiance inside her. Only Kavian seemed to bring that out in her. Even now.
“You and Rihad rant on and on about my being a princess,” she said then, not quite rolling her eyes at him. “It’s embarrassing at best. It’s nothing but a silly title from a life that was only mine for a few years when I was a child, and then again recently for my brother’s political gain.” Amaya shrugged. “I’m no princess. Not really. I never have been.”
She couldn’t read the look on his face then, and ignored the small trickle of sensation that worked its way down her spine. She didn’t want to read him anyway, she assured herself as she poured out a steaming mug of coffee from the carafe at her elbow and stirred in a healthy dollop of cream. He would do as he liked either way.
It was unfortunate that she found that appealing rather than appalling.
“It is a silly title that you will no longer suffer to bear, you will be happy to learn.” It was amazing that he could sound so scathing when he was still so irritatingly calm, she thought, and not for the first time. She stirred her coffee harder than necessary. “You are now a queen, Amaya. My queen, should that require clarification.”
“Officially, I am only your betrothed.” She shouldn’t have said that, of course. That level, considering stare of his made everything inside her go still, as if she’d roused the predator in him again and was fixed in its sights. “I’ve been learning a great deal about the traditional Daar Talaas palace hierarchy in the classes you’ve made me take.”
“They are not classes.” His voice was as dangerously soft as his gaze was severe. “You are not a fractious adolescent who has been dispatched to some kind of summer school in place of the detention she clearly deserves.”
She really did roll her eyes then. “Lectures, then. Is that a better term?”
“You are meeting with your aides and advisers to better understand and shape your role as queen of this great land.” The way he arched those dark brows at her dared her to contradict him. “Just as you are practicing your Arabic so you may converse with the subjects under your rule whenever appropriate.”
He meant when fully vetted by my men. When it came to any issue that could be construed as pertaining to her physical safety, Amaya had found that Kavian was utterly inflexible. Unlike the rest of the time, when he was only almost utterly inflexible. Which should not have amused her, surely. Where was her panic?
What happens when you cannot bend? her mother had demanded, and what did it matter what Elizaveta’s motivations for asking had been? When instead you break?
“The point is that the role of ‘princess,’ whatever that means, was never one I learned to play,” she said instead, because she couldn’t sort out was happening inside her. Because she was afraid this was what broken looked like, this absurd idea that she could be safe with a man this elemental, this raw and powerful. “I was never treated as a princess of anything anywhere we went after my mother and I left Bakri.”
Quite the opposite, she thought then as the memories she usually kept locked away rushed back at her, thick and fast. There had been a long stretch of years when Elizaveta would fly into one of her cold furies at the very sound of the word princess and punish Amaya for it whether or not she’d been the one to say it out loud.
She took a sip of the thick coffee and tried to swallow the unpleasant past down with the dark Arabian brew. “If anything, my mother downplayed it as much as possible.”
That shrug of his was still a cool, harsh weapon,