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

far too aware.

      Of him. His strength. His heat. The hardness of his chest, the granite bands of his arms around her. And of herself, too. The way the silk moved over her skin. The lick of flame that followed every soft, sleek shift of the fabric against her belly, her hips, her breasts.

      “It tells me a great many things,” he agreed, in what did not sound like a particularly sympathetic tone of voice.

      He shifted her, which had the cascading effect she most wanted to avoid, a spinning sort of caress that sank deep into her core and was nothing short of a full-body betrayal. She sucked in a breath audibly. He glanced down at her as he moved through the door, out of his dressing room and into the larger sitting area that lay between it and the actual bedroom she hadn’t wanted to investigate too closely earlier.

      She could see sunlight on the far side of the sitting room, drowning the terrace that ran the length of it in all that golden desert light, and she couldn’t have said why that made her breath catch. As if she’d imagined he could only come after her in the dark? But she’d known better, surely. Kavian didn’t play by any rules. Ever.

      But she kept trying to make him. What other choice did she have?

      “Does it tell you that you are a monster?” She knew it was dangerous to poke at him when he was holding her like this, when there was no possibility of escape. But she couldn’t seem to stop herself. “That you are so overwhelming and so unreasonable that I was forced to hide in a closet to try to get through to you?”

      “That,” Kavian said. “And the fact that you are desperate. I suspect you think that if you act like a child, I might be tempted to treat you like one instead of the woman we both know you are.”

      There was no reason that should have stung. “I’ve never claimed I was a child.”

      “That is wise, Amaya, as the definition of a child is markedly different in my country. We, for example, do not coddle our young well into their twenties, then welcome them into our homes again until such a time as they feel sufficiently inspired to begin an adult life. We expect them to assume their duties far younger, and then take responsibility for the choices they’ve made. I myself was a soldier at thirteen and something far less palatable when I was barely twenty. I was never treated like a boy.”

      “If you think either one of my parents coddled me in any way, at any point in my life, you’re insane.”

      She hadn’t meant to say that, certainly, and could have bitten her tongue once she did. Kavian only gazed down at her for a brief, electric instant—but that glimmering moment of contact seared through her.

      “I know exactly who and what you are,” he said as he strode through the far door into his bedchamber, a stately affair in dark woods and richly masculine shades of red and gold. “Whether you stage melodramatic displays in my closet or race across the planet in a bid to humiliate me in front of the world, it is all the same to me. It will all end right here.”

      And then he set her down on his bed.

      As punctuation.

      Amaya expected him to leap on her, but of course he didn’t do that. He simply stood there before her, a part of the magnificence of the room, the palace—and at the same time its intensely masculine focal point. He’d donned a pair of very loose white trousers that flowed around him and somehow made him look even more like the desert king he was than anything else she’d ever seen him in. And that was it. He folded his arms over the golden expanse of that carved and battered chest of his that shouldn’t have been half so appealing, and watched her.

      And she wanted to run. In her head, she threw herself to the side, she scrambled across the slippery gold coverlet and leaped from the mattress, she threw herself off the side of the terrace into thin air to escape him—

      But in reality, she did none of those things. She was frozen into place. She was too tense and she couldn’t quite breathe and she hurt... Except she realized, one shuddering, shallow breath after the next, that it was a very specific kind of ache, located in a very particular place.

      And worse, that the knowing expression on his hard face and that silvery awareness in his gaze meant he knew it.

      How could he know it? But he did.

      “You didn’t have to chase me.” Amaya hardly knew what she was saying. “You could have let me go.”

      His hard mouth flirted with the possibility of a curve. But then didn’t give in to it.

      “Are you wet?” he asked.

      For a moment, Amaya didn’t understand. The baths had been hours ago and she’d dried off with the towel—

      Then she got his meaning, and she simply ignited.

      The flush lit her up, inside and out. She was certain she was bright red, searing and glowing, neon, and she could neither pull a full breath into her lungs nor look away from him. Much less control the surge of desire that pooled between her legs.

      “I will take that as a yes,” he said, sounding darkly amused and something far more dangerous besides. “You already came apart in my hands today, Amaya. Do you doubt that you are mine? I wasn’t even inside you.”

      She should have leaped to her feet then. Slapped him. Screamed at him. Made it clear to him that this kind of behavior was completely unacceptable—that he couldn’t treat her like this. That she wouldn’t let him.

      But Amaya did none of those things. She only stared back at him, that ache in her growing hotter and more desperate by the moment.

      “I want you naked,” he said, and there was a certain gruffness to his voice then. A certain edge that told her that perhaps he wasn’t as unaffected by this as he was pretending he was.

      “I don’t want—”

      “Now, Amaya.” That gruffness turned to granite and pounded through her veins. “I already stripped you once today. Don’t make me do it again.” His gaze moved over her face, and she was sure there was something wrong with her, that she should feel it like a caress. That she should long for more. “Show me, azizty. Show me you are as proud of your beauty as I am.”

      Something shifted deep inside her, then turned over. It was like a dream, she told herself. And the truth was, she’d had this dream. Again and again. This, or something like this, all across the long months since she’d fled the Bakrian Royal Palace on the night of their betrothal. It always starred Kavian in some or other state of undress, so that part was familiar, though he was far more magnificent in reality. And it always involved this same roller-coaster sensation inside her, hot and then cold, high and then low, a longing and an ache and a need.

      This is just another dream, she assured herself.

      And in a dream nothing she did mattered, so she could do as she liked in the moment. It had no meaning. It held no greater significance. She could lose herself in that calm, ruthlessly patient gray gaze of his as if it was a way home. She could let that become what mattered instead.

      So that was what she did.

      Amaya pulled the wrapper off her, letting it slide over the skin it bared, in an almost unconscious sensual show. Then, before she could question her motives, she pulled the silken little scrap she wore beneath it up and over her head, tossing it with the wrapper so they sat there in a slippery heap of deep blue against the gold coverlet.

      Then she swallowed, hard, and simply sat there.

      Completely naked, as he’d commanded.

      And she knew that it didn’t mean anything. That it was nothing more than a psychological trick to imagine it was the crossing of a very serious line. She’d lost her virginity to this man in a shocking rush six months ago. He’d had his mouth and his hands on her in the palace pools only today. But both of those times, she’d had clothes on.

      It was amazing how different it was to sit before him, utterly naked,