Royal Protector. Dana Marton

you know, you mean.” She glared at him, trying to be as furious with him as she should have been. Furious with herself that she was not. “People lie, especially to terrifying kings of the desert who threaten the very air they breathe.”

      “Ask yourself why I am so sure,” he encouraged her, in a tone that made her stomach swoop toward the ground, though he could not have seemed more relaxed as he said it. No matter that glittering silver thing in his gaze. “Ask yourself how I can know this.”

      Amaya had absolutely no desire to do anything of the kind. Because she could think of several ways a man could be that certain, and he’d already demonstrated it to her twice. Six months ago in an alcove of the Bakrian Royal Palace and right here in the large pool today.

      And she had no idea what must have showed on her face then, but Kavian only smiled, an edgy and dangerous crook of that hard, hard mouth of his she could still feel, as if he were still touching her when he was not.

      That didn’t help.

      “You do not have to wonder about my expectations,” he said, the way other men might comment on the weather. Their favorite sports team. Unlike with other men, whole armies he could command with a wave of his hand lurked beneath his words and settled around her neck like a heavy choke collar. “I do not traffic in subterfuge. I will tell you what I want. I will tell you how I want it and when. You will provide it, one way or another. It is simple.”

      “Nothing about that is simple.” But he only gazed back at her, implacable and resolute, and she felt a searing kind of restlessness wash through her. Hectic. Almost an itch from deep within. She couldn’t name it. But she couldn’t sit still, either, and so she let it take her up and onto her feet. “I don’t want to be here. I want to go home.”

      “If you wish it,” he said amiably enough, and everything stopped. Her breath. Her heart. Had he truly agreed—and so easily? But that smile of his was not the least bit encouraging. It made her feel...edgy. Edgier. “Which home do you mean?”

      Amaya thought in that moment that she might hate him. That she might never recover from it. That it was stamped deep into her bones, like a different kind of marrow, as much a part of her as her own.

      It had to be hatred. It couldn’t be anything else.

      “You can return me to Canada,” she bit out. “Right where you found me. I’ll take it from there.”

      “Canada is not your home.” Still he lounged there, as if this were a casual conversation. As if he weren’t holding her between his hands like a giant, malicious cat, and toying with her because he could. Because he felt like it. Because he enjoyed using his damn claws. “You were born in Bakri. You lived there until you were eight years old. Then you and your mother wandered for the next decade. Here, there. Wherever the wind blew her, that is where you went. The longest you stayed anywhere in that time was fifteen months at a family-owned vineyard in the Marlborough wine region of New Zealand’s South Island. Is that the home you mean? It pains me to tell you that the gentleman you stayed with then moved on from your mother’s much-vaunted charms some time ago and now has a new family all his own.”

      Amaya remembered crisp mornings in a late New Zealand winter then, walking through the corridors of rich dirt and gnarled vines with the friendly man she’d imagined might make Elizaveta better. Happier, anyway—and he’d seemed to manage it, for a time. She remembered the long white-capped mountain range that stretched out lazily alongside her wherever she went, reaching from the vineyard she’d called home that year toward Blenheim and the sea in the east. The skittish sheep and curious lambs who marked her every move and bounded away from any signs of movement in their direction, real or imagined. The stout and orderly vineyards, set in their efficient lines all the way north to the foothills of the Richmond range.

      Most of all she remembered the thick black, velvety nights, when the skies were so filled with stars they seemed messy, chaotic. Magic. Weighted down, as if, were she to blink, all that fanciful light might crush her straight down into the rich, fertile earth like nothing but another seedling. And yet somehow they’d made it impossible for Amaya to believe that she could really be as terribly alone as she’d sometimes felt.

      She hadn’t thought about that period of her life in a very long time. Elizaveta had moved on the way Elizaveta always did and Amaya had stopped imagining anyone could fix what her father had broken. She felt something crack inside her now, as if Kavian had knocked down a critical foundation with that unexpected swipe—but he was still talking. Still wrecking her with every lazily destructive word.

      “Or perhaps you are referring to your years at university in Montreal?” He didn’t wait for her to answer. “While it appeared to be a city you enjoyed, in many respects, you left it as often as possible during your studies. You went to the mountains, as we have established. But also to Europe. To the Caribbean for sun in the midst of all those relentless winters. And you left Canada altogether shortly after your graduation for Edinburgh, where you took up a very unsuitable job in a local pub while you made the most feeble of gestures toward a master’s degree in some or other form of literature at the university there.”

      Amaya wanted to make a gesture toward him that was anything but feeble, but restrained herself. Barely. She felt the prick of her own nails against her palms, and wished she could sink them into him instead.

      “It’s not up to you to decide what feels like home to me. My life is not something that requires your input or critique.” She fought to keep her voice even. “You can tell because I didn’t ask you for either one.”

      “Unfortunately for you, it is indeed up to me.” Kavian shrugged, and it was not a gesture of uncertainty on a man like him. It was another weapon, and Kavian, she was beginning to understand all too well, did not hesitate to use the weapons he had at his disposal. “You do not have a home, Amaya. You never have. But that, too, has changed now. Whether you are prepared to accept that or not is immaterial.”

      She couldn’t breathe. She felt as if he’d thrown her down a staircase, as if she’d landed hard on her back and knocked all the air from her lungs, and for a moment she could do nothing but stare back at him.

      “I want to be somewhere you are not,” she managed to grate out, finally.

      “I am sure you do. But that is not among the choices available to you.”

      “This is a huge palace. There has to be a room somewhere you can stash me, far away from everything and everyone. I don’t care if it’s a dungeon, as long as it’s nowhere near you.”

      Where she could figure out how to breathe through this, recover from this. If that was even possible.

      Where she could work out what the hell she was going to do.

      “There are many such rooms, but you will be staying in mine.”

      He only watched her, utterly without mercy. And she didn’t know which was worse, the wet heat threatening to spill from her eyes, the simmering flame deep in her core that she wanted to deny, the shaking she couldn’t quite seem to control now he’d upended the whole of her life in a few short sentences or the fact that he’d trapped her here. In every possible way, and they both knew it.

      “No,” she said.

      But it was as if she hadn’t spoken. It made her wonder if she had.

      “I apologize if this distresses you, but I am not a particularly modern man,” Kavian replied. He did not sound remotely apologetic. Nor did he look it. “I do not trust what I cannot touch. I want you in my bed.”

      Bed. The word exploded inside her, ripping through her with a trail of white-hot images that centered on his mouth, his hands, that body of his above her and around her and in her—

      “I don’t want to be anywhere near your bed. You’ve already done as you like with me in an alcove, a pool—why can’t we leave it at that?” She sounded hysterical. She felt hysterical. “Why can’t we just leave it?”

      Kavian, by contrast, went very,