Читать книгу Modern Romance September 2015 Books 5-8 - Шантель Шоу, Chantelle Shaw - Страница 19
ОглавлениеKAVIAN KNEW THE MOMENT Amaya walked into their rooms as the afternoon edged toward evening that her mother had gotten to her. He could hear it in the heaviness in her step out in the foyer. The particular weight of her silence.
The pen he’d forgotten he was holding snapped in his hand and he muttered a curse, throwing the pieces into the wastebasket that sat beside his desk in his private office, the pen fragments making an oddly satisfying sound as they hit the metal sides.
He wished it was the poisonous Elizaveta instead.
“You are not truly planning to sneak past me, are you?” he gritted out, as if to the walls around him. As if to the ghosts that the locals claimed had plagued this place for centuries. “Do you imagine that is wise?”
A moment later, Amaya appeared in the doorway. She was still wearing the gown she’d had on in the throne room earlier, which displayed her femininity so beautifully and yet with such exquisite restraint that it made his throat hurt. That hair of hers that he was beginning to view as an addiction he might well succumb to completely was still caught up in all the braids and twists that he thought made her look something like ethereal. Something so much more than merely a bartered bride, his for the taking, though she was that, too. She was everything.
She was so lovely—so very much Amaya and his—it made his chest feel hollow. Scraped raw.
But it took her too long to raise her gaze to his and when she did, those chocolate eyes of hers were much too dark. Too troubled by far. He eyed her from across the span of the room, temper beginning to pound through him as if he were running flat out across the desert sands, straight on toward the enemy.
Amaya crossed her arms over her chest and he hated it. He hated the defensive gesture itself. He hated that she felt she had to make it. Even after he’d combed the whole of the earth for her. Even after everything he’d told her. Even though she knew the truth about him and it had not made her hate him.
Apparently only her mother could do that.
He wanted to throw back his head and howl, like some kind of wild thing, all claws and fangs.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” Amaya’s voice was a scrape against the quiet and did very little to calm him.
“How am I looking at you?” he asked. Mildly. “As if I think you might be rationalizing a new way to betray me even as we stand here?” He studied her. “Are you?”
Something sparked in her dark eyes. “I can’t betray you, Kavian. By definition. First I would have to pledge myself to you in some meaningful way, of my own volition.”
“Careful, Amaya.” His voice was rougher, deeper. “Be very, very careful.”
The elegant column of her throat moved as she swallowed, but she didn’t look away.
“Did you sleep with all seventeen of the women you kept here in your harem?”
He muttered something harsh in Arabic that he was quite certain she understood, but she only tipped that sweet chin of hers higher and let that mouth of hers go mulish. “It’s a simple yes or no question.”
“Ten of my so-called concubines were under the age of fifteen,” he told her, and it was a remarkable experience for him. He had never explained himself to another living soul, as far as he could remember. He had never felt the slightest compulsion to do so. “They were gifts from each of the ten tribes who live in the great desert, as is tradition. I brought them here to educate them, to make them aristocratic women who could do as they pleased rather than chattel to be bartered and traded in the desert encampments. Most of them are currently studying abroad, or have made excellent marriages.” He tried not to grit his teeth. “And, no, I did not sleep with these teenagers, Amaya. My tastes run to grown women, as you should know better than anyone.”
She didn’t crack. “Seven women, then.”
“My predecessor kept a number of women. When I got rid of him I sent those with children to the far reaches of the desert, as I could not allow them to remain under my roof. It makes me look weak in the eyes of many of my subjects. Soft in ways that could hurt me.” He shrugged. “As long as they dedicate themselves to living quiet lives free of political intrigue, they may do so safe from my interference.”
“You mean, as long as they don’t show signs of trying to wreak the sort of vengeance you did, you’ll let them live.”
He didn’t back down. “Yes.” He let his brows rise. “Does this offend you, Amaya? I have told you. Daar Talaas is not Canada. You may cringe from our brand of justice all you like, but that doesn’t make it any less effective.”
“I didn’t cringe.” She shifted. Swallowed again, as if against a lump in her throat. “But that doesn’t mean I necessarily support it, either.”
“Two of my predecessor’s concubines remained in the palace after I took it back,” Kavian told her. “But I never touched them. I merely allowed them to stay here after he was gone, as they had no families to take them in. It was widely considered an act of mercy.”
She stared at him for a long while. Kavian felt a muscle in his jaw clench tight. His entire body tensed, as if he was moments away from launching an attack. Or perhaps warding one off.
“And of the five other women you kept here?”
He shook his head. “I am a king, Amaya. Should I have dated instead? I hear it is fashionable to do so online these days. Perhaps that would have worked. I could have put up an ad, I am sure. Single sheikh seeks companion for sex on command, no possibility of marriage, yet many financial and residential perks.” His voice was like acid. “I’m certain the tabloids would have loved that. They are so fond of me already.”
Her gaze was hot and level at once. “And of the five—”
“I am not answering any further questions about the harem I disbanded when you asked me to do so. When I promised you I would, because of the two of us, I am the one who keeps promises.” He watched her flinch at that, but he couldn’t seem to modify his tone at all. “The harem I did without for six months while you led me on a merry chase across the planet. Do you truly wish to discuss this, Amaya?”
There was a glitter in her dark eyes he didn’t particularly like. She stood tall and inescapably regal there in the door. “We haven’t used birth control of any kind.”
“No.” He didn’t avert his gaze from hers. “We have not.”
“Is that how this works, Kavian? You think if you get me pregnant I’ll be forced to stay here?”
He heard something far more ragged in her voice then, could see the echo of it in that storm in her too-dark eyes.
“Have I made my intentions unclear?” He studied her face then, wondering at that raw thing inside him. It seemed to grow larger by the moment. “Have I deceived you in some way? Is this what your mother came here to tell you?”
“Don’t blame her. She’s supposed to look out for me.”
“Can you truly claim that was her goal?” He was incredulous.
But Amaya stared at him, openly defiant. “You took advantage—”
“Of your inexperience? Are we acknowledging that now? And I had grown so accustomed to the Whore of Montreal.”
“You knew I was inexperienced. You knew I wasn’t paying attention to the things I should have been. You used that against me.” Her voice didn’t shake. Her hands weren’t in visible fists. And yet there was a certain sheen to her dark gaze that suggested both. “You want to keep me here against my will, no matter what it takes. Sex around the clock until I can’t see straight. Barefoot and pregnant for the next ten years. Whatever works.”
“Please remind me, Amaya, of any moment in all the time that you have known me when I indicated otherwise.”
Kavian heard his own voice then, so rough and dark in the quiet room, he might as well have kicked down the walls. He was certain he could see the way it slammed into her. He saw the way she gulped in a breath. He even saw the way she adjusted her stance, as if her knees had suddenly weakened beneath her.
He didn’t recognize the feeling that moved in him then. Thick, dark. A rich thread of an agony he could not name, balling in his gut and sitting there like a stone.
Shame, he realized after a stunned moment. And something like a keening hatred of himself and these battleground tactics on this woman who was no desert warrior, no matter how tough she appeared at times. He’d never felt anything like it.
He didn’t much care to experience it now. He moved toward her, aware on some level that his careful veneers were cracking as he moved, the masks he wore shattering—
But he couldn’t stop.
“And what will happen when you get what you think you want?” she threw at him, all the tears she was not crying audible in the thickness of her voice, and he hated himself more. “What happens when I give you everything I have and the thrill is gone? When you use me up and cast me aside? Will you consider that an act of mercy, too?”
“You should not listen to the rantings of a bitter old woman. I am not your father.”
Her eyes swept over him, that bittersweet shine. “Are you sure about that? Because so far, the two of you seem very much the same.”
He felt unchained then. Untamed. Wild beyond measure. And it did not occur to him to temper it at all as he moved toward her.
Kavian didn’t stop until he was upon her, right there, looming over her until she stepped back and came up hard against the doorjamb.
“Do you want me to apologize, azizty?” It was a growl from the deepest part of him. “In this fantasy of yours, do I beg your forgiveness?”
“You wouldn’t mean a word of it even if it was a fantasy.”
He stroked the tender skin of her elegant neck, trailing his fingers over her satiny flesh and the tumult of her pulse. He felt the way she trembled, and he saw arousal edge into that darkness in her gaze, whether she wanted it—him—or not.
“No,” he agreed, despite those too-dark things that still moved in him. “I would not.”
“Kavian.”
He knew what she was going to say. He could see the words form on her lips, see them scroll across her face.
“My mother—”
“I will have that snake of a woman removed from the palace within the hour. She—”
“She is my mother.” Her voice was a shocked whisper.
“Do you think I cannot tell a bad mother when I see one? Can you have forgotten mine? Your mother is a viper. I want her and her poison gone from here.”
“No.” Amaya’s voice was flat. Incredibly bold, for someone so much smaller than he was, so much more fragile, but she stared back at him as if she was unaware of those things. As if she was his equal in every way. As if she had every intention of engaging him in hand-to-hand combat if he didn’t do as she asked.
As she commanded.
“I beg your pardon?”
“You heard me.” Her chin rose fractionally. “You cannot throw my mother out because you don’t like her. I don’t care if you don’t like her.”
“You do not like her.”
She frowned at him. “I love her.”
“I cannot abide her.” He felt that stone in him, dragging down, threatening his ability to stand before her. Threatening far more than that. “She is envious of you. She whispers poison into your ears. You fear her.”
“I feel sorry for her.” Her voice was even. Her chest rose and fell too quickly, he thought, and still she smelled of honey and rain and he wanted nothing as much as he wanted her. Nothing at all. “She was hurt a very long time ago, and hurt is what she knows. She can’t help the way she lashes out.”
He shifted, feeling his mouth flatten as he traced unknowable symbols along the elegant line of her neck, feeling the way she shuddered at his touch. “She is a grown woman who has spent the bulk of her life manipulating others to do her bidding. I do not dance to the tune of fools. Why should I suffer her presence here?”
He saw too many emotions chase each other across her face then, one after the next, and he felt them all like blows.
When she spoke, her voice was quiet. “Because I asked you to.”
Kavian shook his head, a harsh negation that had more to do with the memory of Elizaveta’s cold gaze, so much like the photographs he’d seen of his weak, vain, treacherous mother.
“Then you can’t give me what I want. You can’t give at all.” She raised one shoulder, then dropped it, and he understood that she was not in the least afraid of him. Was that what roared in him, so much like desire? Like greedy admiration? “Don’t claim you want a queen to stand beside you, Kavian, when what you really want is your own way in all things.”
“I want exactly what I claimed from the start.” His voice was practically a growl. “I am exactly who I have always been. More than that, azizty, I am exactly who you need.”
“Then prove that. I’ve told you what I need.” Her dark eyes searched his face. “I don’t need you to understand, Kavian. I need to you listen to me for once.”
He didn’t recognize the thing that swelled in him then. He didn’t understand why he felt as if he’d staggered blindly into a sandstorm and was being tossed this way and that. He only saw something unbreakable in her gaze. Tempered steel, forged in flames.
“If it is what you want,” he said stiffly, because words of acquiescence were foreign to him and came slowly, thickly, “she can remain. She is your mother, as you say.”
Amaya’s eyes glittered. He felt that like another blow, and then her hand came up and slid over his jaw. He felt that touch everywhere. His toes. His sex. His throat.
“Thank you,” she whispered, as if he’d given her a kingdom. All the jewels in his possession. “Thank you, Kavian.”
That stone thing in him sank deeper. Grew harder. And he hated it all the more.
Kavian was finished talking. He hooked a hand around her neck and jerked her to him, noting with a fierce surge of satisfaction that her nipples were already stiff when they came into contact with his chest.
And then he bent his head and devoured her.
He kissed her with all the roughness within him. That wild thing that battered at him. That uncivilized creature that would have locked her away if it could have, that still thought it might. That great stone, that vast weight, that exploded into hunger the more he tasted of her. The man he could not be for her burst from him and into that kiss. He took her mouth like a storm, a great dark invasion, holding nothing back—
And she met him.
More than met him.
It was wild. Raw. Elemental.
He didn’t know if she tore his clothing or he did. He knew he ripped open the bodice of her gown to get at her breasts, to worship them. He knew he sank his hands in the concoction of her hair, the great glory of it.
And God, the taste of her. It blocked out the world.
Then they were down on the floor, right there in his office, rolling and tearing at each other and wild. A hunger unlike any other roared in him, and in her, too. He could feel it as well as his own intense passion.
He thrust into her with more need than finesse. She screamed out his name, and he dug his fists into the thick rug beneath them, holding himself still while she clenched and shook around him and rode out her pleasure, her fingers digging hard into his back.
“Thank you,” she whispered again, like the blessing he didn’t deserve.
And that was when Kavian began to move.
* * *
The banquet the night before the wedding that was being fancifully billed in all the papers as East Meets West at Last—a rather theatrical name for what was, at the end of the day, a rehearsal dinner—seemed to drag on forever, Amaya thought. Dignitaries and aristocrats, many of whom had come in days before, lined the tables in the vast ballroom. A band played. Servants outdid themselves, a brace of belly dancers performed during one of the early courses and Kavian lounged there at the head of the high table with his slate-gray eyes fixed on her as if he expected her to bolt at any moment.
As if he could read her mind, even as she smiled and laughed and played her part for the assembled throng.
The meal ended after what seemed like several excruciating lifetimes and the worst part was, Amaya thought as she stood and dispensed her thanks to the guests, this was all her fault. There was something wrong inside her. Twisted. Not right. There was no other explanation. How else could she come to terms with the fact that she simply could not resist this man? Because if she’d had any kind of backbone, as he’d pointed out to her himself, she’d have attempted to escape him. She’d have done it, come to that. And she wouldn’t have found herself standing here, poised to do the only thing worse than what she’d done to him six months back.
“Are you ready for tomorrow?” Her mother’s voice sliced into her, but Amaya only smiled harder, hoping no one was paying too close attention as the crowd moved from the tables to the great room beyond, where desserts were to be passed instead of served, the better for the politicians to wield their trade as they moved from group to group.
Was she ready? How could Amaya still not know?
“Yes,” she said, because she didn’t want to second-guess herself. She didn’t want to keep ripping herself apart.
“It’s the right thing, darling. You’ll see.” But what Amaya heard was that thread of triumph in her mother’s voice. That hint of smugness. “Men like him can only be the way they are. It never changes.”
“Mother.” She had to check her tone, remind herself where they were. “You don’t actually know him. You know his title.”
“I know men.”
“You know what you want to know, and nothing more.” Amaya glanced around, afraid someone might have overheard that tense tone in her voice, but most of the guests had moved toward the other side of the great hall and on toward the waiting courtyard. She and Elizaveta were as alone as it was possible to be in such a great crowd.
Her mother’s gaze was as cool as her smile was polished. “I don’t know what you mean, Amaya.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Amaya’s smile felt welded to her face. “This isn’t the place to discuss it.”
They would have all their lonely lives for that, she thought—and she felt hollow. Utterly empty and dark. But that was to be expected. She wouldn’t be leaving Daar Talaas unscathed. She’d be surprised if she even recognized herself.
“I don’t think I care for your tone of voice,” Elizabeta replied, her tone light. But her blue eyes were hard. “Is that the kind of disrespect you learned here? We can’t get you away from him fast enough.”
“Did we live off a trust my father set up for me when I was a child?” Amaya hadn’t known she meant to fire that at her mother until she did it. And when Elizaveta froze, she wanted to grab the words back—except instead, she continued. “Is that how we survived those years? Because I must have misunderstood. I thought you told me we had to move around so much because we were destitute.”
She saw the truth in her mother’s face, so much like her own. She saw the glitter of it in her mother’s gaze.
“Things were a good deal more complicated than you can possibly understand,” Elizaveta said, her voice chilly in the warm room.
“That’s all right, Mother.” It wasn’t until she spoke that Amaya heard the bitter edge to her words. That she felt it inside her, spiked and painful. “Lucky for you, I’m far more forgiving than you are.”
She started to move away then, her emotions blinding her and her breath much too ragged, but her mother’s hand on her arm stopped her.
“It’s not forgiveness,” Elizaveta said crisply. “It’s weakness. Haven’t I taught you the difference? Your trouble is, you make yourself a doormat for anyone who happens by and wishes to wipe their feet on you. That’s the difference between us.”
Something cracked then, so loud and so huge that Amaya was surprised she didn’t hear screams from the crowd. It took her a stunned moment to understand that the palace hadn’t crashed down around them—that something had instead toppled over inside her. She could feel the aftershocks, shaking through her.
She reached down and tugged her mother’s elegant hand from her arm.
“I choose how I bend, Mother,” she said. She might have shouted it, though she knew she hadn’t—yet she saw the dazed look in Elizaveta’s eyes as if she had. Amaya could only wonder what expression was on her face. She found she couldn’t bring herself to care. “And to whom. I only kneel when I want to kneel, and that doesn’t make me a doormat. I’ve spent my life catering to you because I love you, not because I’m weaker than you. You’ve spent your life prostrate to your feelings for a man who forgot you the moment you left him, if not long before, because you were never as strong as you pretended to be. That’s the difference between you and me. I’m not pretending.”
“You must be crazy if you think a man like Kavian thinks of you as anything but a conquest,” Elizaveta hissed.
“Don’t mention him again,” Amaya said, with a certain finality that she could see made her unflappable mother blink. “Not ever again. He is off-limits to you. As am I.”
“I am your mother!” Elizaveta huffed at her, as if Amaya had punched her.
“And I love you,” Amaya said with a certain fierce serenity that reminded her of Kavian’s desert. “I always will. But if you can’t treat me with respect, you won’t see me again. It’s that simple.”
For the first time in as long as she could recall, her mother looked old. Something like frail. But Amaya only gazed at her, and ignored the pity that made her heart clench tight.
“Amaya.”
“This isn’t a debate,” she said quietly. “It’s a fact.”
She left her mother standing there, looking lost, for the first time in her memory. It took a few steps to remember herself. To smile. To incline her head as regally as possible as she caught the eye of this or that noble personage. Amaya moved through the crowd as she reached the waiting courtyard, open to the night sky above with a series of decorative pools and fountains marking its center.
Kavian stood on the far side of the pools, that stark, harsh face of his intent as he listened to the two Daar Talaasian generals before him. As if he’d sensed her approach, or her eyes on him, his gaze snapped to hers across the night.
And for a moment there was nothing but that. Nothing but them. No crowd, no guests. No wedding in the morning.
His face was as brutally captivating as ever, and she knew it so much better now. She felt him deep inside her, as if he’d wrapped himself around her bones, taken her air. She felt him as if he was standing beside her instead of across a grand courtyard, as if they were alone instead of surrounded by so many people.
She thought she might feel him like this, as if they’d fused together somehow on some kind of molecular level, all the rest of the days of her life. Amaya told herself that what moved in her then, thick and harsh, was not grief. It couldn’t have been.
“You do not look the part of the blushing bride to be, little sister.”
Amaya started at the familiar voice at her ear, then controlled herself, jerked her attention away from Kavian and aimed her practiced smile at her brother.
But Rihad, king of Bakri, did not smile in return. His dark eyes probed hers, and Amaya had to look away, back to where the man who had scandalously kidnapped her from a café in a Canadian lake town stood there so calmly, as if he’d had every right to do so. Quite as if there weren’t reporters everywhere, recording every moment of this night for posterity and dramatic headline potential, who wouldn’t leap at that story if she’d chosen to share it.
If you marry him, scandals like that will seem like mountains made out of molehills, a small voice within told her. If you do not, they will take over two countries and drown them both...
She knew what she had to do if she wanted to survive. She’d set everything in motion. But that didn’t make any of it easy. She cared a great deal more about what would happen in the wake of this decision than she had half a year ago.
Obviously. Or she wouldn’t still be here.
“You look something very much like happy these days, Rihad,” she said after a moment, “I don’t think I realized that was a possibility.”
For him. For her. For any of them.
He frowned. “Amaya.”
But she refused to do this. She couldn’t do this—and she’d already revealed too much. There was too much at stake.
“Not here, please.” She forced another smile. “I will no doubt burst into tears at all your brotherly concern and it will cause a war, and I’ll forever be known as that selfish, emotionally overwrought princess who caused so much trouble. There’s a reason Helen of Troy doesn’t have the greatest reputation. It’s not worth it.”
“Listen to me,” Rihad commanded her, in that voice of his that reminded her that he was not only her older brother. He was a king. Her king.
Amaya remembered his own wedding to his first wife, which had come at the end of a week of celebrations in Bakri City. That, too, had been arranged. Amaya had been a small girl, in awe. She’d thought the fact of the wedding itself meant the bride and groom had loved each other. And in truth, Rihad had always told her that he and his first wife had gotten along well.
But it was nothing next to what was between him and Sterling, his second wife. That much had been obvious at a glance when they arrived the day before. Their connection crackled from the many tabloid articles that had been written about them, which in turn paled next to the sparks they struck off each other in person. Amaya didn’t pretend to understand how that could be, when Sterling had spent a decade as their late brother, Omar’s, mistress.
She only knew that she and Kavian didn’t have the same thing. What they had was dark and physical. A terrible wanting that she was absolutely certain would destroy them both. It was not the calm affection of Rihad’s first union. Nor was it the obvious intimacy of his second.
It was an agony.
“It will not be pretty if you fail to go through with this wedding,” Rihad said in a gruff sort of voice. “I can’t deny that. But I won’t force you to the altar. I do not care what claim he thinks he has.”
Amaya looked across the great courtyard to find Kavian again, and again his dark gaze met hers, so gray. So knowing. So fierce and hard at once, searing straight into her like a touch of his warrior’s hands.
And she understood then.
It was the night before the wedding she’d been trying to avoid for more than six months. And Amaya was deeply and madly and incontrovertibly in love with the man she was meant to marry in the morning. She thought she had been since the moment they met, when those slate-gray eyes of his, so dark and so patient, had met hers and held.
Shifting everything else.
Changing the whole world.
She loved him. She understood with a certain fatalism, a shuddering slide that seemed to have no end inside her, that she always would.
And if she married him, she would become her mother. It was a one-way ticket to Elizaveta’s sad life, no matter what Amaya might have told her earlier. If Amaya had Kavian’s children, would she treat them the same way Elizaveta had treated her? Once he tired of her and cast her aside, would she spend the rest of her days wandering from lover to lover, playing out the same sort of vicious games and making everyone who came near her as unhappy and bitter as she was?
There were fates worse than death, Amaya thought then, her head thick and dizzy with this knowledge she didn’t want. And that was one of them.
“Are you all right?” Rihad asked, the beginnings of a frown between his brows. “Amaya?”
She would never know how she managed to smile at her brother then, when inside her, everything was a great storm. There were no foundations left. She loved Kavian and she couldn’t have him and all was ash. Ash and grief and a terrible darkness that scarred her even as it burrowed deep. Because he’d showed her who he was. How he was made. He’d showed her how much he could bend already—and it was so little. Too little.
What would happen when he no longer bothered to try?
“Don’t be silly,” she said to her brother, the king of Bakri like their father before him. The ruler who had traded her to this man she’d never escape, not really, not intact. She was already in pieces. She understood she would never really be anything else.
When she betrayed Rihad, Rihad and Kavian and two kingdoms between them, she imagined she would shatter even more. Turn to dust out there somewhere on that same lonely circuit, making history repeat itself in her mother’s bitter wake.
And that was still better than staying with Kavian and loving him until it killed something in her. Better to love a brick wall, she thought miserably. It was far more likely to love her back.
But here, now, she widened her smile and tried to look as if she meant it. She thought from Rihad’s expression that she almost pulled it off. Almost. “I’ve never been better in my life.”
