Читать книгу Modern Romance September 2015 Books 5-8 - Шантель Шоу, Chantelle Shaw - Страница 16
ОглавлениеIF HE WAS a good man, Kavian reflected the following day, he would not have set up his betrothed for this particular day of tests. He would not have tested her at all. Had it been about what he wanted, he simply would have kept her in his bed forever. He would have lost himself there in the sweet madness of her scent, the addiction of her smooth skin. The glory he’d found in her arms that shook him far more than he cared to admit.
But this was Daar Talaas and Kavian had never been good. He’d never had the chance to try. He was the king, and thus he did what was necessary for his people. If that happened to align with what was good, so be it. But he would not lose sleep over it if it did not.
He would sleep like an innocent, he assured himself, whatever happened in the desert that had forged him. It would be the making of Amaya, too, he knew. There was no other way.
After all, she had already taken the news of her mother’s true treatment of her in stride. Kavian dared to allow himself a shred of optimism that she would rise to whatever occasion presented itself.
They’d left the palace in the morning, taking a helicopter out to the stable complex on the far side of the treacherous northern mountains. They’d stood together in the center of the courtyard while his men, a sea of servants and stable hands, and a selection of his finest Arabian horses hurried all around them.
“Do you ride?” he’d asked, almost as an afterthought.
She’d been dressed like a Daar Talaasian noblewoman, in an exquisite dress that adhered to desert custom with her arms and legs covered and her head demurely veiled. It only made her every graceful movement that much more intoxicating, to Kavian’s mind, because he had the pleasure of knowing what was beneath. All her soft skin, the temptation of her hair, the sweet taste of her, woman and cream. But there’d been no veiling that cool gaze of hers, dark chocolate mixed with ice as it met his.
“I’ve ridden a horse before, if that’s what you mean. I’m sure you already know that my mother and I spent several summers on a ranch in Argentina.”
What he knew was far less interesting to him than what she chose to tell him. “Did you fall off a great deal?”
She stiffened almost imperceptibly, and those marvelous bittersweet eyes of hers narrowed. “Are you asking me if I’ve suffered a head injury?”
He’d kept himself from smiling by sheer force of will, and it was much harder than it should have been. Much harder than he could recall it ever having been before. “I am asking if I can expect you to topple off the side of a horse while you are meant to be riding it.”
“Not on purpose,” she’d retorted, and it had only occurred to him then that they weren’t in private any longer. That his men stood around him, closely watching this exchange with the scandalous woman who had evaded him for months—whom he had clearly not yet subdued. “Do you plan to ride me out into the desert, throw me to the sand dunes and then claim I fell off?”
They had been speaking in English, which was lucky as very few of his men understood a word of it. The fact that he’d been nearly smiling at her in obvious indulgence, however, was less lucky. Any softness, any hint of a crack in his armor, would be exploited as a weakness by his enemies. Kavian knew that all too well.
He couldn’t have said why he cared so much less in that moment than he should have.
He’d given the order then. It had taken only a few moments for the small party to mount up, and when he’d looked back down at Amaya she’d been standing there, doing an admirable job of keeping herself from frowning at him. He’d seen the effort she expended in the way her dark eyes crinkled in the corners.
“Did you ask me all those questions for your own amusement?”
“Yes,” he’d replied dryly. “I am a hilarious king. Ask anyone.”
And then he’d simply reached down from the back of his horse, clamped an arm around her middle and hauled her up before him.
He’d felt more than heard the tiny noise she made, somewhere between a gulp and a squeak, and he knew that had he found her pulse with his mouth, it would be going wild. Yet she only gripped the arm he’d banded around her abdomen and said nothing.
“Courage, azizty,” he’d murmured, his voice low and for her ears only. “Today you must prove you are the queen my people deserve.”
“But—”
“Whether you wish it or do not. This is about Daar Talaas, Amaya, not you or me.”
He’d felt the breath she’d sucked in and he’d thought she’d planned to argue further, but she hadn’t. She’d been quiet. Perhaps too quiet, but there’d been nothing he could do about it then—or would have done if he could, if he was honest with himself. A test could hardly matter if it was without some peril. So instead, he’d given the next order and they’d ridden out into the desert, deep into the far reaches of the desolate northern territories.
It was not an easy ride by any means, but Amaya did not complain, which pleased Kavian greatly. She did not squirm against him, nor divert his attention any more than the simple fact of her there between his legs, her pert bottom snug against the hardest part of him as they rode, distracted him.
He found it impossible not to notice that she fit him perfectly.
They reached the encampment by midafternoon, after hours spent galloping across the shifting sands, racing against the sun itself at this time of year. Fierce men on bold horses met them some distance away and led them the rest of the way in, shouting ahead in their colorful local dialect. The collection of tents that waited for them had the look of a makeshift traveling camp instead of a permanent settlement, despite the goats and children who roamed in and around the grounds and told a different tale. Kavian knew that it was all a deliberate, canny bit of sleight of hand. The truth was in the quality of the horseflesh, the presence of so many complacent and well-fed camels, the fine, sturdy fabric of the tents themselves.
It could have been a scene from any small village out here in the desert, unchanged in centuries, and there was a part of Kavian that would always long for the simplicity of this life. No palace, no intrigue. No political necessities, no alliances and no greater enemy than the harsh environment. Just the thick heat of the desert sun above, the vastness and the quiet all around and a tent to call his home.
Though he knew that was not the truth of this place, either.
“What are we doing here?” Amaya asked as they rode into camp, and he wondered what she saw. The dirt, the dust. The sand in everything. The rich, dark scent in the air that announced the presence of the tribe’s livestock, horses and camels. The suspicious frowns from the people who could see at a glance that she was not one of them. The lack of anything even resembling an amenity.
There was no oasis to cool off in here, because it was another fifteen minutes or so farther north, fiercely guarded and zealously protected for the use of this tribe alone—but Amaya couldn’t know that. The women who clustered around the fire, beginning their preparations for the evening meal, eyed them as their party approached but made no move to welcome them, and Kavian imagined how they must look to Amaya. But he knew what she could not—that their seeming poverty was as feigned as the rest.
Nothing was ever quite what it seemed. He came here as often as he could to remember that.
“I have come a very long way to have a conversation,” Kavian told his betrothed, and that, too, was only a part of it.
“To settle a dispute?” Amaya asked. She didn’t wait for him to confirm or deny. “The king himself would hardly ride out to discuss the weather, I suppose.”
Kavian pulled on the horse’s reins, bringing the Thoroughbred to a dancing stop in front of a line of stern-faced elders, all of whom bowed deep at the sight of him. He inclined his head, then swung down from the horse’s back, leaving his hand resting possessively on Amaya’s leg as he stood beside her.
He greeted the men before him, introduced Amaya as his betrothed queen and then they all performed the usual set of formal greetings and offers of hospitality. It went back and forth for some time, as expected. Only when the finest tent belonging to the village’s leader had been offered and accepted, as was custom, did Kavian turn to Amaya again and lift her down from the horse.
“That wasn’t the Arabic I know,” she said, in soft English that sounded far sweeter than the look in her eyes. “I caught only one or two words in ten.”
He didn’t laugh, though he felt it move in him. “Let me guess which ones.”
“Did you accept the man’s kind offer of a girl for your use?” she asked, and though her voice was cool, her eyes glittered. “They must have heard you’d gone from seventeen concubines to one. A tremendous national tragedy indeed.”
He could have put her mind at ease. He could have told her that the girl, like so many of the girls he was offered in these far-off places that never advanced much with the times, was little more than a child. He had taken many of them back to the palace, installed them in his harem and given them a much better life—one that had never included his having sex with them. He could have told Amaya that such girls accounted for most—though not all, it was true; he had never been a saint by any measure—of the harem he’d kept. He could have told her that there had never been any possibility that he would take a young girl as his due tonight and more, that the elders had known that, hence the extravagant effusiveness of their offers.
But he did not.
“They approve my choice of bride and have offered us a place to stay,” he replied instead, his voice even. “More or less. It will not be a palace, but it will have to do.”
She blinked as if he’d insulted her. Perhaps he had.
“I’m not the one accustomed to palaces,” she reminded him, her voice still calm, though he could feel the edge in it as if it were a knife she dragged over his skin. “I keep telling you, I was only ever a princess in name. Perhaps you should be worried about how you’ll manage a night somewhere that isn’t drenched in gold and busy with servants to cater to your every need. I have slept under bushes while hiking across Europe, when it was necessary. I’ve camped almost everywhere. I will be fine.”
He wanted to crush her in his arms. He wanted to take that mouth of hers with his, and who cared what was appropriate or who was watching or what he had to prove? He wanted to lose himself inside her forever. But he could do none of those things. Not here.
Not yet.
“I will also be fine, azizty,” he said, his voice blunt with all these things he wanted that he couldn’t have. Not now. “I grew up here.”
* * *
Kavian strode off and left Amaya standing there, all by herself in what was truly the middle of nowhere, as if he hadn’t dropped that bomb on her at all. He didn’t look back as he disappeared into a three-sided tent structure with a group of stern-faced men. He didn’t so much as pause.
And for a wild moment, Amaya’s pulse leaped and she thought about running again now that she was finally out of his sight—but then she remembered where she was. There had been nothing, all afternoon. Nothing but the great desert in every direction, which she’d found she hadn’t hated as she’d expected she would. But that didn’t mean she wanted to lose herself in it.
She had no idea how Kavian had located this place without a map today, just as she had no idea what he’d meant. How could he have grown up here? So far away from the world and his own palace? Her brothers had been raised in royal splendor, waited on by battalions of servants, educated by fleets of the best tutors from all over the world before being sent off to the finest schools. Amaya supposed she’d thought that all kings were created in the same way.
It occurred to her, standing there all alone in the middle of the vast desert that Kavian was clearly bound to in ways she didn’t understand, that she didn’t know much about this man who had claimed her—even as he seemed to know her far too well. And better every day whether she liked it or not.
You do like it, a small voice whispered. You like that he notices everything. You like that he sees you. But she dismissed it.
Kavian had marched off with those men as if he was a rather more hands-on sort of king than her brother or father had ever been. Amaya assumed, when she shifted to see the women watching her from their place by the central fire, that she was meant to be the same sort of queen. No lounging about beneath palm trees eating cakes and honey, or adhering to the stiffly formal royal protocols in place at her brother’s palace. No disappearing into the tent that had been set aside for them and collapsing on the nearest fainting couch. All of those options were appealing, and were certainly what her own mother would have done in her place, but she understood that none of them would win her any admirers here.
You run, she reminded herself. That’s who you are. Why not do that here? Or do the next best thing—hide?
But she hated the notion that that was precisely what Kavian expected her to do. That he believed she really was some kind of fluttery princess who couldn’t handle herself. It was so infuriating that Amaya ignored the waiting tent, ignored what her own body was telling her to do. Instead, she made her way over to the group of women and set about making herself useful.
When Kavian finally returned to the center of camp with that same cluster of men hours later, Amaya found she was proud of the fact that the evening meal was ready and waiting for him, as the encampment’s honored guest. It wasn’t the sort of feast he’d find served in his well-appointed salons, but she’d helped make it with her own hands. There was grilled lamb, a special treat because the king had come, and hot, fresh flatbread the women had made in round pans they’d settled directly in the coals. There was a kind of fragrant rice with vegetables mixed in. There were dates and homemade cheeses wrapped in soft cloths. It was far more humble than anything in the palace, perhaps, and there was no gold or silver to adorn it, but Amaya rather thought that added to the simple meal’s appeal.
The men settled down around the serving platters and ate while the women waited and watched from a distance, as was the apparent custom. It was not until the two old men who sat with Kavian drank their coffee together that the village seemed to relax, because, one of the women Amaya had come to know over the long afternoon told her in the half Arabic, half hand gestures language they’d cobbled together as they’d gone along, that meant the king had settled the dispute.
Amaya ate when the women did, all of them sitting on a common mat near one of the tents, in a kind of easy camaraderie she couldn’t remember ever feeling before. Out here in the desert, they didn’t have to understand every word spoken to understand each other. It didn’t take a common language to puzzle out group dynamics.
Amaya knew that the older woman with the wise eyes whom the others treated with a certain deference watched her more closely than the others did. She knew exactly when she’d gotten that woman to smile in the course of their shared labors, and she hadn’t been entirely sure why she’d felt that like such a grand personal triumph. Or why she’d laughed more with these women she’d only met this afternoon and only half understood than she had in years.
The night wore on, pressing down from all sides—the stars so bright they seemed to be right there within reach, dancing on the other side of the fire. It reminded her of that winter in New Zealand, but even there the nearby houses had cast some light to relieve the sprawl of the Milky Way and its astonishing weight up above. Not so here. There was no light but the fire and the pipes the men smoked as they talked. There was nothing but the immensity of the heavens above, the great twisting fire of the galaxy. It pressed its way deep into Amaya’s heart, until it ached as if it were broken wide-open or smashed into pieces. Both, perhaps.
“You did well,” Kavian said when he came to fetch her at last. He reached down and pulled her to her feet, making the other women cluck and sigh, in a manner that required no translation.
“They think you’re very romantic,” she said, and she didn’t know why she felt something like bashful, as if she thought so, too. Or worse—wistful.
“They think we are newly wed,” he corrected her. “And still foolish with it.”
“It’s the same thing, really.” She tilted her head up to look him in the eye as best she could in all the tumultuous dark. “Either way, it’s not expected to last.”
She thought he meant to say something then, but he didn’t, and she didn’t know why it felt like a rebuke. She had to repress a shiver at the sudden drop in heat as he led her away from the group, the flames, the laughter. She felt a sharp pang as she went, as if she was losing something. As if she would never get it back—as if it was so much smoke on a Bedouin fire, curling its way into the messy night sky above them. Lost in the night, never to return.
Amaya made herself breathe. Told herself it was the thick night, that was all, making everything seem that much more raw and poignant than it was.
There were lanterns guiding their way through the cluster of tents, and Kavian’s strong body against the impenetrable darkness that pressed in like ink on all sides, but that didn’t change the way she felt. It didn’t help that ache inside.
If anything, it intensified it.
“I am told you impressed the women,” Kavian said as he pulled back the flap and ushered her into the unpretentious tent that was theirs for the night. She felt as nervous as she had in the baths that first day in Daar Talaas, Amaya realized. She walked ahead of him, running her gaze over the bed flat on the floor but plumped up high and piled with linens, the serviceable rug that looked handwoven, the fine pillows scattered on the floor to mark a cozy seating area and a collection of lanterns that made it all seem deeply romantic. And she was astonished at how much she wanted it to be. “That is no easy task.”
“Did you imagine I would cower in the tent?”
“I accepted that was a possibility. You did once secrete yourself amongst my shoes.”
“One of the gifts of having moved somewhere new every time my mother felt like it, is that I’m good with groups of strangers,” Amaya said. She made herself turn and face him, and she was surprised at how hard that was with so much tumult inside her. “It’s that or no one speaks to you for months on end.”
“There is being friendly and then there is helping cook a meal for the whole camp.” Kavian still stood near the entrance, his gray eyes searching hers. “They are not the same thing.”
“You told me I was to act as your queen.”
“And you take direction, do you? How novel.” He eyed her, but she couldn’t let herself respond. Not when she had no idea what it was that held her in its grip. “Does a queen normally tend a cooking fire and sit in the dirt with strangers?”
“This one did,” she retorted, not sure why she was trembling. Why she couldn’t stop. His hard mouth crooked slightly. Very slightly. It didn’t help at all.
“I am a man of war, Amaya,” Kavian said softly. “I need a queen who can get her hands dirty. Who is not troubled by palace protocol when the palace is nowhere in sight. You please me, my queen. You please me deeply.”
Something turned over, deep inside her. “I’m not your queen.”
“Now you contradict yourself.”
“I think you’re confused because I cooked for you. Like a real person.”
That gleam in his eyes turned them a polished silver in the soft light. And she couldn’t tell him that what had really happened was first that she’d wanted to defy his low expectations—and then that she’d wanted to make him proud.
Here, today, she’d wanted to be his queen. She couldn’t say that. She couldn’t admit it to him when she could hardly accept it herself.
“Are we not real?” he asked. Almost gently.
Her throat felt too tight. “Things aren’t the same in the palace, are they? It’s a palace.”
“A palace is a building made of carefully chosen stone and the concentrated artisanship of hundreds of loyal subjects across decades,” Kavian said quietly. Intently. “It is a monument to the hopes of my people, their desire for unity and strength against all that might come at them. As am I. As are you, too. It could not be any more real than that.”
“But you said you grew up here, not there.”
He moved farther into the tent and she watched as he unwrapped his traditional headdress, then shrugged out of his robes, stripping down until he wore nothing but a pair of boxer briefs low on his narrow hips. He should have looked like a normal, regular, everyday man, she thought with something like despair. He was in his underwear in a tent in the middle of nowhere. Surely that should...reduce him, somehow.
But this was Kavian. And today, she’d wanted to please him. To be the queen he wanted. Looking at him here, she understood that suicidal urge.
He better resembled a god than any mere man. It was as if he’d been hewn from the finest marble and then breathed into life. His skin gleamed like old gold in the lantern light and she couldn’t read a thing on his face as he came toward her. Nor when he reached for her.
He unwound her scarves from her as if he was unwrapping a precious gift. Slowly. Reverently. He combed his fingers through her hair when it tumbled down, then helped her out of the long, traditional dress she’d been given yesterday by his dressmakers. When she wore nothing but her slip, a basic thing that wasn’t meant to be at all alluring, his gaze heated, but still he did nothing but gently rake his fingers through her hair.
It was almost as if it calmed him as much as it did her.
“My uncle was the king of Daar Talaas when I was born,” he told her, so softly she thought at first he hadn’t meant to speak at all. “He was a good ruler and the people loved him, but despite the wives he took and the many concubines he kept, he had no sons. So when he died, the throne passed to his younger brother. My father.”
He wasn’t looking at her. His attention was on the thick fall of her dark hair that he wrapped around and around his hand instead, then let unravel again. Yet Amaya found she could hardly breathe.
“My father was a young man with two wives, one renowned for her fertility, the other for her beauty.” His gaze was dark when it met hers. Something like tortured, she’d have said. “His first wife had given him four sons already, my half brothers. The people were pleased, for my father and his wealth of sons ensured that the throne would remain in the hands of our family, come what may. That meant stability.”
“What about you?” she asked. “Were you considered part of that wealth?”
He did not smile. If anything, his gaze darkened.
“My mother was a fragile woman who had nothing but her beauty and, perhaps because of it, a great envy for all the things she felt she was owed,” he said, in the cool tones of someone who was telling a distant myth, a legend. Not his own family’s story. His story. That shook through Amaya, but she didn’t move. She didn’t speak. “She was far more pleasing to my father in bed than his first wife had ever been, but even when she had me, she could not compete with the simple fact of her rival’s four healthy heirs. My father’s first wife was a simple woman, without my mother’s looks or cleverness, but none of this mattered. She was the queen. She was revered. My mother came second, and I, her only child, fifth.”
Amaya might have realized only today that there were a great many things she didn’t know about this man, but she did know that he didn’t have any family. Everyone knew that. Which made her heart stutter in her chest, because this story could be headed only one horrible way.
She reached over and pressed her hand against the hard plane of the muscle that covered his heart, and her breath began to shake when he slid his hand over hers and held it there.
“You don’t have to tell me this story,” she said, and her voice was barely a whisper. “I didn’t mean to dredge up bad memories.”
“My mother took a lover,” Kavian said by way of reply. His voice was so dark, leading them inexorably toward a terrible end. She could see that much on his face. She could feel it in the air around them, crushing her in a tense fist, but she made herself stand tall. If he could tell it, she could take it. She promised herself she could. “He was one of my father’s ministers, ambitious and amoral. But he was not content to simply defile my father’s wife. He wanted the throne.”
“How could he take it? Was he related to you?”
“The throne of Daar Talaas is held by the man who can hold it.” Kavian did not so much say that as intone it. “So it is written in the stones on which the throne itself sits. So it has always been.”
Amaya had to press her palm that much harder against him, to remind herself he was real. Flesh and blood, not a statue in a palace hewn from rock. Not etched stones beneath an old throne. Far more than the story he was telling her. Far more than the darkness that was pouring from him now, his eyes and his voice alike.
“I don’t know what that means.” It was more that she didn’t want to know. But she didn’t look away.
“It means that while families often hold on to the throne for some generations, this is because they tend to consolidate their power, not because there is a blood requirement.” He shifted, which made his previous stillness seem that much more extreme by comparison. “My mother’s lover was no fool. He knew he could not take the throne by force. The Daar Talaas army cannot be manipulated. They serve the throne, not the man.”
He had never looked as distant as he did then. Bleak and uncompromising. He stepped back, Amaya’s hand fell to her side, and she thought she’d never felt so empty.
Yet Kavian kept going. “He slit my father’s throat as he sat at the dinner table, in a place where there is meant to be only peace, even between enemies. Then he killed my brothers, one by one. Then both of my father’s wives, including my mother. Especially my mother, I should say. Because even the man she colluded with hated that she was traitorous enough to betray her own husband. Her own king.”
“Why did he spare you?” She hardly recognized her voice.
That wasn’t a smile he aimed at her then. It was far too painful. It cut too deep.
“My mother had a servant girl who she did not so much trust as fail to notice. The girl knew of my mother’s lover and enough of the plans they made that when the first alarm sounded, she ran. She took me out of the palace and claimed I was her own.”
Amaya knew who he meant immediately. “The woman with the wise eyes. All the other women looked to her today.”
“She is the wife of the chief here,” Kavian said, but there was a flicker in his gaze that told her she’d impressed him, and it warmed her. It more than warmed her. “Back then, however, she took a terrible risk in bringing me to her father’s tent, alone and unwed, with a toddler she could not prove was the king’s missing son. The elders might not have believed her. She risked her life and her family’s honor to save me.”
“But they believed her.”
“They did.” He studied her face. “And they are simple people here, not aristocrats with agendas. Good people who follow the old ways. Blood begets blood, Amaya. They raised me to avenge my family, as was my right and responsibility as its only remaining member.”
Amaya couldn’t speak for a long moment. She thought of a tiny boy who’d lost everything and had been given only vengeance in return, out here in this harsh, desolate place without a single hint of softness. It made her heart hurt, as if he were the great sky pressing into her, as impossible and as far away. As beautiful and as untouchable.
He had been a lost child and they had made him into a stone. And now he thought it was a virtue.
“I’m sorry,” she said softly. “That seems like an undue burden to place on a child.”
“You misunderstand me.” His gaze was too dark. His eyes glittered. “I am not telling you this story because I regret what happened to me. What is there to regret? I was lucky.”
“You are also now the king.”
“I am.”
“Does that mean...” She searched his face, but he might truly have been made of marble then. He was that unyielding. “Blood begat blood?”
“It means that I grew up,” Kavian said quietly. With a deep ferocity that tugged at her in ways she didn’t understand, as if his story was changing things inside her as he told it. Shifting them. “It means that I dedicated myself to becoming the necessary weapon to achieve my ends. And it means that when I had the chance, I exacted my vengeance, and know this, Amaya, if you know nothing else about me. My single regret is that the man who murdered my family could die but once.”
