Royal Protector. Dana Marton

next time I take you, Amaya, two things will happen,” he said softly. So very softly. It was a whisper that rolled through like a battle cry. “First, it will be in a proper bed. I may not be civilized, precisely, but I do have my moments. And I wish to take my time. All the time in the world, if necessary.” He waited for her to shudder at that, as if he’d expected it. Then he nearly smiled again, which was its own devastation. “And second, you will use my name.”

      “Your name?”

      “You have yet to utter it,” he pointed out, and she could see that though he still lounged there, though his voice was almost as languid as he looked, there was absolutely nothing mild about him at all. That mildness was an illusion he used to do his bidding, nothing more, like everything else. “I assume this is yet another attempt on your part to maintain distance between us. Is it not?”

      “I have no idea what you’re talking about. I say your name all the time, usually as a curse word.”

      “You will use my name.” He didn’t rise. He didn’t have to. It was as if he held her tight between those hands of his even as he reclined in his chair. She was sure she felt the press of his palms, like all those New Zealand stars when she’d been thirteen, crushing her deep into the earth. “You will sleep in my bed. You will give yourself to me. There will be no distance between us, Amaya. There will be nothing but my will and your surrender.”

      “Followed by my suicide, as quickly as possible, to escape you,” she threw back at him to hide the pounding of her heart that told her truths she didn’t want to face.

      But Kavian only laughed at her, as if he could hear it.

      As if he knew.

       CHAPTER FIVE

      AMAYA HADN’T MEANT to fall asleep.

      The smiling, almost too deferential attendants had been waiting for her when she’d pushed her way out of the baths, still reeling from all that had happened with Kavian. They’d surrounded her as they’d led her through the gleaming labyrinth of a palace, and Amaya hadn’t been able to tell if they were deliberately taking her on a confusing route to her rooms or if the palace really was that difficult to navigate.

      Either way, they’d deposited her in a rambling suite of rooms that clearly belonged to the king himself. And had pretended they didn’t understand her when she demanded to be taken elsewhere.

      “I don’t want to stay here,” she’d told them, again and again, until she’d finally had to take it up with the two intimidatingly ferocious guards who stood at the doors.

      They’d only stared back at her, without any of the sweet smiles or pleasing laughter of her attendants.

      “I need my own rooms,” she’d said stubbornly. “This is a mistake. I’m not staying here.”

      The guards had only stared back at her, for what had seemed like an inordinate amount of time, especially when Amaya realized she was wearing nothing but the robe the attendants had wrapped her in.

      “You may take that up with the king if you feel it is your place to question him,” the larger of the two guards replied eventually, in a tone that suggested this conversation was itself scandalous and inappropriate—or perhaps, Amaya had realized belatedly, it was simply that she was. After all, from this man’s perspective, she wasn’t the unfairly trapped woman who deserved to make her own choices in life no matter whose blood ran in her veins—she was the princess who had been exalted by his beloved king’s notice only to throw her good fortune in the sheikh’s face by running away.

      She’d been certain she could see that very sentence run through the man’s expression like a tabloid ticker at the bottom of a television screen. That—and the fact that he and his compatriot looked as if they’d have relished the opportunity to chase her down in the corridor like an errant fox—made her retreat into the suite and shut the door.

      Amaya had stood there for a long moment, breathing much harder than she should have been, her back against the door that represented her only path out of Kavian’s rooms, her bare feet cold against the chilly marble floor of the sheikh’s grand foyer.

      That was when she’d decided that her best bet wasn’t to run. That should have been obvious. He’d already caught her once, in the most remote place she’d known. Her only option now was to hide.

      Surely Kavian couldn’t be that much a barbarian, she’d told herself stoutly as she wandered from room to room in the rambling collection of gorgeous chambers on two floors that composed His Majesty’s royal suite. There were two or three elegant salons, making clever use of the many stacked terraces and the sweeping views down into the hidden, protected valley. The marble foyer opened into a private courtyard with a graceful fountain claiming its center. Several sitting rooms were scattered here and there along with a media center, a well-stocked library, even a formal dining room dressed in silk tapestries and golds.

      She’d kept looking for a hiding place. Kavian might have talked a big game there by the bathing pools, but the reality was that he’d never forced her to do anything, as shameful as that might have been to admit. The truth was that she’d agreed to marry him in some pathetic attempt to please her brother and possibly her dead father, and then she’d melted all over Kavian every time he touched her.

      Amaya didn’t fear him physically. She feared herself. She feared the depth of her own surrender and how much a part of her wanted nothing more than to sink to her knees and exult in Kavian’s claim over her. To let him keep every one of those dark, delicious promises he’d made to her. To learn precisely what he meant when he told her she would learn obedience...

      Stop it, she’d snapped at herself as she moved from room to room. She was a liberated woman, damn it. She might have been born into a society like this one, she might even have been briefly nostalgic enough to let her brother talk her into returning to it after their father’s death a few years back, but her heart wasn’t here. Her heart had never been here.

      It can’t be here, she’d assured herself. Because she’d seen what leaving a heart behind in a harsh place like this could do to a woman, hadn’t she? She’d spent her entire childhood handling the aftermath of her ever more brittle mother’s broken heart.

      But that particular organ was all too traitorous, she’d realized then, when she walked into a gilt-edged room that Kavian clearly used as a private office and saw the portrait of the man himself hanging there on the wall, in thick oils and bold shades that made him seem a part of the very desert he commanded. And her heart had thumped at her. Hard.

      Too hard, as if it had its own agenda.

      She’d rubbed at her chest, annoyed that the attendants had taken her clothes from her and given her nothing to wear but a silky thing she refused to acknowledge was some kind of negligee and a raw-silk wrapper to ward off the complete lack of chill in the air. She might as well have been laid out on a silver platter, trussed and bound for Kavian’s pleasure—

      That was not a calming image. She’d shoved it out of her head, but not before her entire body had broken out in goose bumps. Damn him.

      She’d finally settled on Kavian’s dressing room. It was a vast space, much larger than the dormitory rooms she’d lived in while in halls at university and probably bigger than the whole of the flat she’d shared with three other postgraduates during her brief time in Edinburgh. She’d ignored the rows of exquisitely cut suits that had clearly been made in the finest couture houses for Kavian alone, the traditional robes in the softest and most gorgeous of fabrics that she couldn’t help touching as she passed, all the trappings of a great man who could dress to kill in any scenario he chose.

      She’d ignored the somersaults her heart and belly did at the sight of all that sartorial splendor that summoned him to her mind as if he’d stood there before her, those slate-gray eyes gleaming silvery and lethal.

      And