Royal Protector: Traded to the Desert Sheikh / Royal Captive / His Pregnant Princess Bride

“You can’t really care about that,” she’d said one afternoon, a bit crossly.

He’d come upon her in one of the gardens, bursting with bright pink-and-purple blossoms beneath the blue fall sky, and told her flatly that he didn’t like her hair up in a ponytail. That he preferred the braid she wore over one shoulder sometimes or it loose and flowing around her as she moved.

He’d reached over and pulled the elastic from her hair himself, then tucked it into one of his pockets, as if he couldn’t bear to so much as look upon the offending ponytail a moment longer than necessary. “Can I not?”

“You have a country to run, Kavian.” She’d scowled at him, and had wondered as she did where the courage to defy him so openly came from. When he still made her quake deep within. When it took everything she had. “What I’m doing with my hair should be the least of your concerns. Literally, the very least.”

“I find nothing about you insignificant, azizty.” That hint of a smile on that hard mouth of his, and it spilled through her like the desert sun above them, hot and bright, and made her think she’d do anything to see it again. Stand up to him, run, submit—whatever it took. The rush of that realization had stunned her. “None of it is beneath my notice. You are my queen.”

And then he’d taken her in his arms, right there in the gardens, and kissed her until she’d decided that she had no particular allegiance to wearing her hair in a ponytail after all.

But it occurred to her—as she sat with the group of advisers who were tutoring her each day on a selection of subjects Kavian felt it was important his queen know, like proper palace protocol and the intricate social hierarchies of Daar Talaas—that she always gave in. Or he caught her and then she gave in. That it wasn’t only Kavian—that her life was a series of similar surrenders that had led her straight here.

Because it had always seemed easier to bend than cause a commotion.

“You don’t have the right to make that decision for me,” she’d told her own father some years back. She’d wanted to take a few years off from her studies; he’d wanted her to get her degree—and he’d wanted her to stay in one place so that he’d be able to more closely monitor her, she’d suspected. She’d been very brave indeed on a mobile phone from Paris, far away from him. Polite, yet firm.

“I beg your pardon,” the old sheikh had replied, and his voice had boomed down the phone line as if he’d been delivering a new edict he’d expected would become law within the hour. “I am your father and your king, Amaya. More than this, I pay your bills. Who has the right if I do not?”

And she’d acquiesced. She’d told herself that she’d simply made the practical choice. That she’d done what she had to do in the space that she’d been given. That she’d always done so as a purely rational survival tactic.

Or perhaps it’s that you are a weakling, she’d snapped at herself back then, more than once, and again now as the dry and surpassingly dull vizier in front of her launched into a lecture on the importance of learning the appropriate address for visiting ambassadors. Or you’d stand up for yourself.

But the only person she’d openly defied in all her life was Kavian when she’d run from their betrothal—and she couldn’t understand how everything had gotten so twisted since then, that she could still want to defy him with every atom in her body, fear him as much as hunger for him with every breath and yet melt at his slightest touch.

And worse, feel all that as if it was no contradiction at all.

Kavian was like all the other men in her life. Worse. They expected instant obedience not only from her, but from the whole world—and usually got it, like her late father. Her older brother, Rihad, the new king of Bakri, had been crafted from the very same mold. Even her lost brother, Omar—who’d died in a car accident while Amaya was on the run but had long been the black sheep of the Al Bakri family because he’d refused to dutifully marry on command like the rest of them—had very much lived his life on his terms, no one else’s.

It was only Amaya who bent. Or was it only Amaya who had to bend? It seemed the longer she spent in Kavian’s intense, commanding, addictive presence, the less she knew the answer to that question.

“You are not made of rubber,” Elizaveta had told her not long after her father’s funeral, which Elizaveta had expected Amaya to boycott. She’d been furious that Amaya had defied her and gone to pay her respects anyway. “What happens when you cannot bend? When instead you break?”

Amaya had so desperately wanted to say, You didn’t break me, Mother. If you didn’t, who could? But she hadn’t. Because it had been easier not to fight. Easier by far to simply bend.

Amaya al Bakri didn’t break. She bent and she bent, and then, when she could bend no more, she ran away. There was another word to describe that kind of behavior, she often thought as she plotted escapes from Kavian’s palace she knew she didn’t dare attempt. Coward.

But she didn’t feel like a coward. She felt as courageous as she felt overwhelmed every time she surrendered herself to Kavian’s sensual, demanding possession, the days blending into the nights and all of it focused on his masterful touch. Was that bending? Or was she simply allowing herself to sink deep into a dizzying world of hunger and want she hadn’t known existed? Where need and desire were all that mattered—despite how deeply each terrified her?

Surely the ease with which she’d given herself over to this man who’d claimed her and brought her here against her will should worry her, she thought then. She nodded along with the vizier as he gestured wildly and made points in rapid-fire Arabic that she understood more and more of by the day. Surely Kavian himself should trip every last one of her alarms.

She’d been opposed to men like him her whole life. Autocratic, overbearing, dangerous and very, very sure of themselves in all things. From what they wished to have for breakfast to what they thought Amaya should do with her life. From ponytails to polygamy.

That was why her mother had left her father, she knew—because he’d had no intention of curtailing his extramarital activity both in and out of his harem. He’d been offended when Elizaveta expressed her dismay. And that was why Amaya had spent the better part of her time on the run, furious with her brother Rihad for ordering her to marry Kavian in the first place. He had never once indicated that he understood how difficult it was for her to marry a complete stranger when he should have, having done so twice himself.

It was why she’d been certain she had to escape Kavian within moments of meeting him. Because he was that much worse than all the rest of them put together. That eternal, relentless imperiousness he wielded so offhandedly. That dictatorial need of his to issue commands at will and his arrogant astonishment when said commands were not immediately obeyed. That intense focus on every last, seemingly insignificant detail of everything. She should have been horrified by him after spending these weeks with him—as overwhelmed and trapped as she’d felt the night of their betrothal.

The trouble was that when it came to Kavian, every time he put those hard hands of his on her it was pure magic.

Maybe all men were equally magical, she reasoned. Maybe all sex was exactly the same, exactly like this. She told herself that what happened between them was probably run-of-the-mill and boring—she simply had no context by which to judge it. Because Kavian was the only man Amaya had ever known this way, ever touched this way, ever surrendered to in this way. Or at all.

And the truth was that she didn’t find his bossiness and sheer male certainty as upsetting in the bedroom as some part of her, deep inside, insisted she should. Quite the contrary, in fact, no matter how her heart pounded at her or her head swam at the thought of him. Then again when he touched her. No matter that sheer, stunning drop into pure sensation that terrified her in retrospect and yet seemed to disappear when he hauled her against him and—

“Are you following, my lady?” The vizier’s voice was an unpleasant slap back into the here and now and Amaya had to force a polite smile to cover it. “I cannot stress to you the importance of official palace protocol. It is—”

“All we have left when the world crumbles around us,” Amaya finished for him, trying to sit up straighter and focus, glad she’d paid enough attention earlier to parrot that back at him. “Please, continue. I assure you I’m hanging on your every word.”

* * *

The following morning Kavian rose before the sun, which Amaya had learned he did religiously. A man in his kind of peak physical condition did not happen into it by chance—he subjected himself to a rigorous fitness regime every day without fail. For hours, with what appeared to be half of his army and all their hardcore military drills.

And then, also without fail, he came back to their bed and woke her in his typically inventive, wicked style.

Sometimes with his hands. Sometimes with his mouth.

Sometimes in other imaginative ways altogether.

Today he took her as she lay sprawled on her belly, one of his big hands beneath her to prop her up and hold her hips at the precise angle he wanted them, the other flat against the mattress beside her and his mouth hot on the nape of her neck.

It was blisteringly hot, wild and fast, and almost too much to bear.

“Come,” he ordered her in that dark voice of his when he’d held her there on the brink for what seemed like a lifetime. When she’d lost herself completely in that desperate world of intense sensation he built so effortlessly around them, where she didn’t care who was surrendering or what that might mean. “Now.”

And he’d taught her so well in the weeks they’d been together. It took only that rasped command and she was gone. She wept out some kind of plea or prayer as she shattered into too many pieces to count, her face in the pillows and her hands curled into fists beside her. Then Kavian shouted out his own release and nearly threw her over once more.

He kissed her again, right there on the nape of her neck until she shuddered from the sweet kick of it all over again, and then he murmured something she didn’t quite hear before he left her lying there to begin his day in earnest. It didn’t matter, she thought then, dreamily suspended in that delicious in-between state where there was nothing but that sweet heat thrumming in her body. Whatever he did, however he did it, it felt like another caress.

It took her a while to rise from the bed. It took her longer to find her way into the walk-in shower that could have comfortably fit the whole of the harem he’d discarded—though that wasn’t a topic she cared to think about too closely, as it led nowhere good. She stood under the hot spray and let it work its way beneath her skin.

When she was finished she wrapped herself in a silken robe so she could join him at breakfast in the sunny room directly adjoining the bedroom suite. It was the finest of his private salons, all wide-open doors to his secluded terrace and vast, sweeping views of the mountains and the desert beyond, and it struck her as she hurried into it that she was something very much like...eager.

That was a jarring thought. She told herself they’d fallen into a routine, that was all—or more accurately, he’d set one for them. He’d insisted they share these mornings from the start.

“I never know where my day will lead me,” he’d said that first morning in the palace, when Amaya woke with a start to find herself draped over his chest as if she’d always shared his bed. His voice had been gruffly possessive, and he’d held her gaze to his with her hair wrapped tight around his fist, holding her head where he wanted it. “I want to know exactly where it will start, and who with.”

At first she’d acquiesced because she’d been so swept away by him, by everything that had happened since she looked up to see him standing over her in that faraway café. Or that was what she’d told herself—that it was far better to lose a battle than the war. That it had nothing to do with the softness that had washed through her when he said something that might have been very nearly romantic, had he been another man. Had they been other people.

Today she recognized another truth wrapped up in that eagerness that she wanted to deny but couldn’t, quite: that there was a large part of her that wanted nothing more than to sink into this life he’d laid out for her after all her years of following her mother’s changeable whims and broken heart all over the planet. It was much too tempting to simply dissolve into this place, into this man, into the vision he had of her and into this life he obviously ran as smoothly and as ruthlessly as he did everything else.

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, and then he turned his attention back to the papers before him, which only made it worse. “Because you outrank her.”

The shrug was a weapon and the words a blow.

For a moment, Amaya simply reeled. She placed her mug back down on the glass table very, very carefully. She blinked.

“My mother doesn’t care about rank,” she said, and she couldn’t have said why her voice sounded like that, as if there were rough and terrible things simmering there beneath the surface. “She walked away from Bakri of her own volition. If she cared about rank she would have stayed in the place where she was queen, not taken off into the big, bad world where she had no means of support.”

“No means of support?” Kavian shook his head when she frowned at him in confusion. “She had a walking, talking bank account at her disposal. She had you.”

That sensation of reeling, of actual spinning, only worsened. “What are you talking about?”

“You,” he said very distinctly, his gaze a fierce shot of intense gray in the bright room, “are the daughter of a king. Your mother did not live by her wits or her charm or even her looks, Amaya. She lived off the trust your father set up in your name, for your support.”

Amaya couldn’t speak. Or move. She felt as if he’d hammered a giant nail straight into her and pinned her to her chair.

She thought of all the times Elizaveta had lectured her about her expectations, her terrible entitlement. She remembered the many, many times her mother had embarrassed her in front of others by claiming that Amaya was “her father’s daughter,” in a manner meant to suggest Amaya always selfishly wanted far more than her share, that she was greedy and ill-bred, that she was entirely, deliberately heedless of reality. She’d excused these things, one after the next, because she’d understood where her mother was coming from, what Amaya’s father had done. She’d assumed these things came from her mother’s panic at having to find ways to support them all on her own.

“I treat you like an adult because you would otherwise grow up coddled and spoiled like every other member of the Bakri line,” Elizaveta had said when Amaya was perhaps eleven. “The truth is that we have nothing. We are dependent on the kindness of friends.”

She’d meant her many lovers, the men who she’d never stayed with for too long, because they had always required such careful handling to put up with a woman with a sulky daughter in tow. Or so Elizaveta had always claimed.

“I don’t expect you to be as grateful as you should—that’s your father’s influence in you, I’m sure—but you must comprehend what there is to lose if you don’t do as I say.” Elizaveta had glared at Amaya as if she’d expected her daughter to argue, when Amaya had long since learned the folly of that kind of thing. Even then, even as a child, she’d known it was better to bend to those who could not. “We’ll lose everything. The roof above your head and the clothes on your back. Is that what you want?”

That had not been what eleven-year-old Amaya had wanted. The very idea had given her nightmares. And Elizaveta had never been a perfect parent, certainly. Life with her had always been complicated, but Amaya had been sympathetic because she’d understood that her mother hadn’t said those things to be cruel. Amaya’s father had broken something inside her, and sometimes it came out as poison. Amaya had learned not to take it personally... Or anyway, she’d tried her best not to take it personally.