Читать книгу Modern Romance September 2015 Books 5-8 - Шантель Шоу, Chantelle Shaw - Страница 18
ОглавлениеWHEN THE WEEK of their wedding dawned, Kavian insisted upon greeting all of their guests in the most formal manner possible, and he didn’t much care that the idea of such pomp and circumstance made Amaya balk.
“We’re not really going to sit in thrones and wave scepters about, are we?” she asked, her voice as baleful as her gaze as she stared at him from across the length of her dressing room. He’d instructed her attendants to prepare her for court, and the scowl on her face did nothing to take away from the breathtaking new gown she wore or the hair she wore up in a marvelous sweep of combs and braids, exactly as he’d wanted it. She looked exquisite. Deeply, irrevocably regal. The perfect queen.
But Kavian thought he knew this woman well enough by now to know better than to point that out to her. She might have stepped into her role in the desert. But he wasn’t fool enough to think she’d accepted it entirely. He needed to marry her, tie her up in legal knots, make sure she understood what he’d known since their betrothal: this was for life. There was no escaping it, for either one of them.
“There is only one throne,” he told her mildly. He remained where he was in the doorway as the women fussed over her skirts, his gaze trained on her lovely face and the hint of emotion he could see on her cheeks. “I sit in it. But if you wish to wield a royal scepter, I am certain we can have one made for you.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Kavian knew the exact moment she realized that was, perhaps, not the best way to address him in the presence of others. She straightened. Her dark chocolate eyes gleamed with more of that hectic emotion he’d seen more and more of the closer they got to their wedding date. “I don’t need a scepter. I have no desire whatsoever to play queen of the castle.”
“That is the problem, azizty. No one is playing, save you. Because you are, in fact, the queen not only of this particular castle but of all the land.”
Her scowl deepened as she dismissed her attendants and walked to him, and he took a moment longer than he should have to admire her. To soak her in. It wasn’t merely that she was so beautiful, or how she looked every inch a queen today. It was how perfectly she fit here. In this life. On his arm. At his side.
Did she truly fail to see that? Or was this merely another one of the games she liked to play—her way of teasing him to a distraction? He reached over when she drew near and wrapped his hand around her upper arm, enjoying the way she swallowed. Hard. Because she could deny a thousand things, but never that fire that raged between them. Never that.
“And if you look at me like that in the throne room, in public, in the presence of our guests,” he said softly, “you will regret it. I am only as civilized as it suits me to be. That can change in an instant.”
She was warm beneath his hand, her skin supple, and he was tempted to ignore the people waiting for them and simply back her up against the nearest wall and—
“You say that as if I do not regret everything already,” she murmured, but he heard a teasing note in her voice. He could see the sheen of it in her gaze. “Whether you threaten me with it or not.”
“I don’t make threats, Amaya. I make promises.”
She smiled. “And it should worry you, shouldn’t it, that one is indistinguishable from the other?”
He dragged his thumb up, then down, enjoying the friction almost as much as the way her lips parted slightly at the sensation. She was his, he thought then, on every possible level. She was surely running out of ways to deny that—and their wedding would put an end to it, once and for all.
But there were miles to go first. Kavian had the suspicion they might be the hardest yet, like any long siege in its final hours. Better to concentrate on the details and assume the rest would fall into place. He reminded himself of the reason he’d come into her dressing room.
“Your mother arrived at the international airport in Ras Kalaat and is en route to the palace,” he said, watching her face.
Amaya flinched slightly, so very slightly that had he not been studying her, he might have missed it entirely. She swallowed again, and he saw the pulse in her neck leap, though her face went blank. Panic? Fear? He couldn’t tell.
He hated that he still couldn’t tell.
“Now?” she asked.
“She will be here in the palace within the hour.” He released her arm, straightening in the doorway, frowning down at her. “Were you expecting her? You have gone pale.”
“I expected she would attend my wedding, yes,” Amaya said. Carefully, he thought. Much too carefully. He was reminded of the mask she’d worn when he’d first met her and it was like a howling thing in him, the urge to tear it off. “I’m her only child, after all, and she is my only remaining parent.”
She blinked too hard, then looked around as if she was casting about for an escape route, and it hit him. He’d seen that look on her face before, heard that exact same note in her voice. It had been the night of their betrothal ceremony.
And in the morning, she’d been gone.
“What you did not expect, if I am to read between the lines, was that this wedding would ever come to pass,” Kavian finished for her. He wanted to touch her again, but didn’t, and it hurt like a body blow. “Someday, Amaya, I hope you will come to understand that I keep the promises I make. Always.”
She stepped back from him and he felt it like the deepest cut. It took everything he had not to haul her back where she belonged. He watched her pull in a deep breath, as if readying herself for battle.
“It should matter to you that this is not what I want,” she said.
It was laughable—and yet Kavian did not feel the least bit like laughing. “You don’t know what you want.”
“That’s astonishingly patronizing. Even for you.”
He shrugged, never shifting his gaze from her face. “You ran, I caught you. I will always catch you. That is the end of it.”
“It should make a difference that I didn’t want to be caught,” she bit out, as if sobs lurked just there behind her eyes.
“Did you not? It seems to me that if that were the case, you would not have returned to Canada at all, and certainly not to Mont-Tremblant.”
Amaya jerked her gaze away from his then, but he didn’t stop.
“And, of course, you could have fought me. Showed me how opposed you were to this union instead of merely making announcements.”
“I’ve done nothing but fight you from the start.”
“Yes,” he said, and she shivered at his tone. He almost smiled at that. “That is precisely how I would categorize the way you melted in my hands at our betrothal ceremony. And then all over me in that alcove. And then again, how you walked straight into the pools here to join me, wearing almost nothing. What fighting tactics were those, exactly? And to what end?”
She couldn’t seem to make herself look at him, but he could see the impact of every word he said. They moved over her, making her tremble, and he’d already confessed his sins. She already knew he was a terrible man. He could not regret this. He did not try.
“You seek my touch and respond to it, always.” His voice brooked no argument. It was a statement of flat, inconvertible fact. “Meanwhile, you have not been held here under lock and key or even under special guard. You were left to your own devices out in the desert. You could have made an attempt to leave at any time, yet you have not.”
“You would have caught me.”
“That is an inevitability, I grant you, but it is a question of where. After all, it took me six months the first time. Yet you have not tried.”
“Do you want me to make an escape attempt, Kavian?” She turned to glare at him. “Because I thought the point of this was that you wanted a biddable little wife to live out her life at your beck and call.”
He felt himself go still.
“That is the first time you have used my name when I have not been touching you, Amaya,” he pointed out, and she shuddered. “Who knows? Someday you may even address me as if I am a man with a name, not a strategy to be employed toward your own increasingly convoluted ends.”
“Isn’t that the point of this?” she asked, and he hardly recognized her voice. “We are nothing but strategies for each other. Cold and calculated. Surely that’s the point of an arranged, political marriage.”
“You did not have to prove yourself to the villagers out in the northern territory. Where was the calculation there?”
“It was politically savvy on my part, nothing more.”
“You could have complained about your treatment here to your brother at any point over these last weeks and caused a major diplomatic incident.”
“He is newly married with a small child.” She tipped that chin of hers up into the air, because this was what she did. She fought. She never simply surrendered. He admired that most of all, he thought. That indomitable will of hers, like the desert he loved. “He is somewhat busy, I imagine.”
“You could have called me a monster when I showed you who I am,” he said quietly. She jerked at that, as if he’d hit her. “Others have before you. Will you call the fact that you did not political, too?” He did not let himself think about what he might do if she did. But her eyes were slick with misery and she didn’t say a word. “Do you know what it is you want, Amaya? Or do you fear that you already know?”
“None of that means I want to marry you,” she whispered.
“Perhaps it does not,” he agreed. “But it does suggest that the chances are very good that you will anyway.”
“If you remove all the threats from this relationship,” she replied now, her voice revealingly thick, “we don’t actually have one.”
“I will keep that foremost in my thoughts, azizty, the next time I am deep inside you and you are begging me for your release.” Kavian kept his voice low, because it was the only thing keeping his hands from her, and his court waited for them even now. “I will hold you on that edge until you scream and then I will remind you that we have no relationship. No relationship, no release. Is that what you had in mind?”
He could hear her breathing, too loud and too fast. And her gaze was wild as it met his. But when she spoke, her voice was flat. Almost matter-of-fact.
“They are waiting for us in the throne room,” she said.
He didn’t believe her apparent calm for a moment. But once again, he admired her courage. The way she stood up to him, the way she gathered herself when he could see the storms in her. The more she kept trying to prove they did not suit, the more perfect he found her.
“They can wait a little while longer.” He raised his brows. “Until we arrive, it is only a very large room with a dramatic chair no one is permitted to touch. By law.”
“That I get to stand behind, yes,” she bit out. She moved then, sweeping past him toward the door, her spine rigid and her head high. “What a joyous experience that will be, I am sure. I can hardly wait.”
He let her go, following behind her as she made her way from their suite and into the grand corridor that led toward the public wing of the palace and the ancient throne room that sat at its center. His aides converged upon him as they walked, and it was not until they’d entered the room and taken their places on the raised dais that dominated one end of the ornate hall that he focused on her once more.
“You stand beside me, not behind me,” he told her. He could not have said what moved him to do so. That she was still pale. That her sweet mouth was set in a hard line no matter that defiant angle to her fine jaw. That she still seemed to imagine that this was something other than foregone conclusion. “A strong king holds the throne, Amaya, but a strong queen beside him holds the kingdom. So say the poets.”
He saw something flicker in her gaze then. “And do you rule with poetry? That doesn’t sound like the man who dragged me out of that café in Canada.”
“You walked out of that café in Canada of your own volition,” he reminded her. “Just as you walked into that encampment in the desert and just as you will walk down that aisle in a few days. My queen obeys me because she chooses it. That is her gift. It is my job to earn it.”
An expression he couldn’t define moved over her face then, as the guards stood at attention down the length of the long hall and announced the series of guests who awaited their notice, and her mother’s arrival. Kavian eyed her as her mother’s name rang out, taking in Amaya’s too-stiff posture. The way she gripped her hands before her, so hard her knuckles hinted at white.
“You are afraid of your own mother,” he murmured. “Why is that?”
But the great doors were opening at the other end of the hall, and she didn’t answer him. Because her mother was walking in and Amaya sucked in an audible breath at the sight, as if she couldn’t help herself. As if she truly was afraid.
Kavian turned slowly to gaze upon the person who could bring out this reaction in the only woman he’d ever met who had never seemed particularly intimidated by him.
Elizaveta al Bakri looked like every photograph Kavian had ever seen of her. She appeared almost supernaturally ageless. She was an icy blonde, her hair swept back into a ruthless chignon and her objectively beautiful face flawless, with only the faintest touch of cosmetics to enhance the high, etched cheekbones she’d passed on to her daughter. Her blue eyes were frigid despite the placid expression on her face, her carriage that of a prima ballerina. She looked tall and willowy and effortless as she strode down the long hall toward the throne, quite as if she hadn’t flown halfway across the world today, and yet as far as Kavian was concerned she was little more than a reptile.
Much like his own, long-dead mother.
“Breathe,” Kavian ordered Amaya in a dark undertone.
He felt more than saw her stiffen beside him, then he heard her exhale.
He kept his attention on the snake.
Elizaveta made a beautiful, studied obeisance when she came before the throne, sweeping deep into a curtsey and then rising in a single, elegant motion that called attention to her lovely figure. But then, most snakes were mesmerizingly sinuous. That didn’t make them any less venomous.
“Your Majesty,” Elizaveta murmured, her voice threaded through with the faintest hint of an accent that Kavian suspected she maintained simply to appear slightly exotic wherever she went. Then she shifted her attention to her daughter. “Amaya. Darling. It’s been too long.”
“You may go to her,” Kavian said in an indulgent tone. It was over-the-top even for him and Amaya glanced at him, startled—but he trusted that the look in his eyes was savage enough to keep her from saying anything. Hers widened in response.
Challenge me, he suggested with his gaze alone. I dare you.
But Amaya merely moved toward Elizaveta, and Kavian was aware of too many things at once as she went. It was the same overly focused attention to detail that he experienced before an attack, whether while practicing the martial arts he’d trained in all his life or in an actual physical skirmish. The vastness of the great room as it echoed around his betrothed. The rustle of her long skirts as she descended the wide stairs. And the way this woman who was meant to be her mother looked at her as she waited, her expression still something like serene yet with nothing but calculation in her chilly gaze as far as he could tell.
The hug was perfunctory, the highly European double-cheek kiss a performance, and Kavian wanted to throw the older woman across the room. He wanted her hands off Amaya, that surge of protectiveness coming from deep, deep inside him, and it took all of his considerable self-control to keep himself from heeding it.
“I’m so glad you came,” Amaya said to her, quietly.
And Kavian reminded himself that this was still her mother. Amaya actually meant that. It was the only reason he did not throw this creature from his palace.
“Of course I came,” Elizaveta replied, bright and smooth and still. It wedged beneath Kavian’s skin like a blade. “Where else would I be but by your side on your wedding day?”
“Your maternal instincts are legendary indeed,” Kavian interjected, like a dark fury from above, his gaze the only thing harder than his voice. “The world is a large place, is it not, and you have explored so many different corners of it with Amaya in tow. An unconventional education for a princess, I am sure.”
Elizaveta inclined her head in a show of respect that Kavian was quite certain was entirely feigned. Amaya stared back at him, stricken. And he could not hurt her. He could not.
“But I welcome you to Daar Talaas,” he said then, for the woman who would be his wife. His perfect queen. He waited for the older woman to raise her head, and then he nearly smiled. “I do so hope you will enjoy your stay in my palace. What a shame it will be so brief.”
* * *
“He is rather Sturm und Drang, isn’t he?” Elizaveta asked Amaya when they were alone hours later, after a long day of formal greetings and diplomatic speeches. She sounded arch and amused and faintly condemning besides. As if this were all a terrific joke but only she knew the punch line. “Even for a sheikh. I’d heard rumors. Is he always quite so...commanding?”
Amaya was certain commanding was not the word her mother had been about to use just then. They sat in the charming little garden that adjoined Elizaveta’s guest suite with hot tea and a selection of sweets laid out before them. Amaya shoved an entire almond pastry into her mouth with a complete lack of decorum, because it was far safer to eat her feelings than share a single one of them with her mother.
“He is the king of Daar Talaas,” Amaya replied once she’d swallowed, aware that her mother had probably counted every calorie she’d just consumed and was mentally adding them to Amaya’s hips. With prejudice. She can’t help who she became, she reminded herself sharply. This isn’t her fault. It probably took her more to come here than you can imagine. “Commanding is simply how he is.”
Elizaveta leaned back. She held her tea—black, no sugar, of course—to her lips and sipped, never shifting her cold gaze from Amaya.
“Tell me what you’ve been up to,” Amaya said quickly, because she could practically see the way her mother was coiling up, readying herself to strike the way she always did when she felt anything, and Amaya didn’t think she could take it. “We haven’t talked in a long time.”
“You’ve been so busy,” Elizaveta said, in that light way of hers that wasn’t light at all. “Traveling, was it, these last six months? One last hurrah before settling down to this marriage your brother arranged for you?” She didn’t quite frown—that would have marred the smoothness of her forehead, and Amaya knew she avoided that at all costs. “I hope you enjoyed yourself. You must know that a man in your betrothed’s position will demand you start having children immediately. As many babies as possible, as quickly as possible, to ensure the line of succession. It is your foremost duty.”
“There aren’t any lines of succession here,” Amaya replied, because concentrating on dry facts was far preferable to thinking about other things, like the total lack of birth control she and Kavian had used in all this time. Why hadn’t they thought about that? But even as she asked herself the question, she was certain that he had. Of course he had. He thought of everything. She trained her gaze on her mother, because she couldn’t fall down that rabbit hole. Not now. Not while Elizaveta watched. “Not in the classic sense.”
“Every man wants his son to rule the world, Amaya, but none so much as a man who already does.” Elizaveta smiled, which only made a chill snake its way down Amaya’s back. Had Elizaveta always been so obvious a barracuda? Or was this simply her reaction to being back in this world again—when she’d avoided it all so deliberately since leaving Amaya’s father? “You are so very, very young. Are you certain you’re ready to be a mother?”
“You were a mother when you were nineteen.”
“I was not nearly so sheltered,” Elizaveta said dismissively. She shook her head. “I cannot fathom how you could end up in a place like this, with all the advantages I provided you over the years. I had no choice but to marry your father when he appeared like some fairy story to spirit me away. You have nothing but choices and yet here you are. As if you learned nothing.”
Amaya should not have felt that like a noose around her throat. It shouldn’t have mattered what Elizaveta said. It shouldn’t have hit her so hard, right in the gut.
“You told me my father swept you off your feet. That you were in love.”
She sounded like the child she had never been, not quite. She couldn’t help herself.
“Yes, of course I told you that,” her mother replied, arch and amused again. “That sounds so much more romantic than reality, does it not?”
“Anyway,” Amaya said tightly, because she didn’t believe Elizaveta’s sudden nonchalance on this topic after years of wielding her broken heart like a sword, “there’s no point having this discussion. I’m twenty-three years old, not nineteen. I’m not even remotely sheltered. And most important, I’m not pregnant.”
You can’t possibly be pregnant, she told herself ferociously.
Her mother turned that cool blue gaze on her, washed through with something enough like malice to make Amaya’s stomach clench. Despite herself, she thought of the things Kavian had said about her. That she had lived off Amaya. That she had lied about that—and who knew what else?
“That’s clever, Amaya. Once you are you will be trapped with him forever.”
Trapped was not the word that came to mind, which was more than a little startling, but Amaya frowned at her mother instead of investigating that. “Luckily, it’s not up to him.”
But Elizaveta only smiled again.
Stop making her out to be something scary, Amaya snapped at herself. She’s not a demon. She’s nothing but an unhappy woman. This is her hurt talking, not her heart, and anyway, you don’t have to respond.
“Of course not, darling,” Elizaveta murmured. She leaned forward and put her teacup back on its saucer with a click that seemed much too loud. “I’ve never seen you in traditional attire before. Not even when we still lived in Bakri.”
Amaya had to order herself to unclench her teeth. To curve her lips in some rendition of a smile. “I am not in traditional attire. You can tell because I am not wearing a veil.”
“I wonder if this is merely a stepping stone toward a more traditional arrangement.” Elizaveta’s shrug was exquisite. It somehow conveyed worry and a kind of jaded weariness at once, while also making her look infinitely delicate. “A sleight of hand, if you will. He lures you in by pretending to be a modern sort of man and then—”
“Mother.” It was so absurd she almost laughed. “There is not one thing about Kavian that is the least bit modern. If that’s the lure, he’s already failed. Spectacularly.”
Elizaveta moved to her feet and then wandered with seeming aimlessness around the small courtyard, as if she was taking in all the green and the riot of bright flowers. As if she’d never beheld their like before. “What a charming suite. I adore all these flowers. What part of the palace is this?”
Amaya understood where she was going then. Perhaps it had been inevitable from the start, given how furious her mother had always been at her father. Given how hurt she still clearly was.
“The guest part,” she replied. Grudgingly.
Her mother smiled over her shoulder, but her gaze was hard. “Is that its formal name, then? How strange.”
She watched her mother trail her always elegant, always red-tipped, always diamond-studded fingers along the petals of the nearest bougainvillea vine.
“I think you know perfectly well that this is technically part of what was once considered the harem complex,” Amaya said quietly. “But Kavian does not keep a harem.”
Her mother glanced at her. “Not now, you mean.”
“He kept a harem before we met, if that’s what you’re trying to tell me so subtly.” Amaya was proud of how cool she sounded. How very nearly bored, as if the number seventeen were not flashing behind her eyes. “But then, he’s never claimed to be a monk.”
Her mother turned to face her, and Amaya was struck, as she always was, at how much she looked like the darker version of her mother’s precise blond beauty. Where Elizaveta was like an ice sculpture, carved to sharp perfection, Amaya was so much softer. Blurrier.
Misshapen, she’d always thought. And yet today she found she was glad they weren’t more similar.
“Did he give up his concubines for you?” Elizaveta asked, with that pointed smile that was her fiercest weapon. “That is enough to make the heart sing, I am sure.”
Amaya had not spoken to her mother much in the six months she was on the run. There had been enough speculation in the papers that Amaya assumed Elizaveta had guessed that her daughter had run away from an arranged marriage, but Amaya had never confirmed it. Now she was happy she’d played it that way. That she’d confided nothing. That Elizaveta knew nothing at all about Kavian, or Amaya’s relationship with him.
“Kavian is deeply romantic,” she told her mother, giving her all to that lie. “He might not show it to you or the world. But he is a hard man who has only one bit of softness, and that’s me.”
Her heart skipped a beat at that, as if it was true. More—as if she wanted it to be true.
But her mother’s cold eyes gleamed. “Is that what he told you?”
“I wouldn’t put much stock in it if he’d told me,” Amaya said, and even smiled. “I’ve learned one or two things from you, I hope. Actions speak louder than words, isn’t that what you always said?”
“And when you are big and fat and ugly with his child, as you will be often,” Elizaveta said, as if she was agreeing, “you must anticipate that he will see to his needs as he pleases, with as many other women as take his fancy. Men always do. That is their favorite course of action, Amaya. Always. Especially men like him, in places like this.”
Amaya rose to her feet and skimmed her hands down her skirts, angling her head high. She wasn’t eleven. She didn’t have to listen to this. She certainly didn’t have to believe it.
“I’m sorry if that was your experience, Mother,” she said quietly. “It won’t be mine.”
And she hadn’t understood until she said it out loud that she wanted that to be true. That more of her wanted to believe in Kavian than didn’t.
She had no idea what to do with that.
“Does he love you, then?” Elizaveta asked, her voice so light. So terrible. “Or has he merely claimed you?”
Whatever she saw on Amaya’s face then made her cluck in what sounded like sympathy. It washed over Amaya like something far more acidic, and wrenched at her heart besides.
“Darling.” Elizaveta shook her head, and Amaya felt everything inside turn to ice. “They’re not at all the same thing. And a woman must always know where she stands, or she will spend her life on her knees.”
