Royal Protector. Dana Marton

      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, for the very first time.

      “Why are your shoulders rounded like an ashamed teenager’s?” he asked her, so mildly that she’d have thought that he hadn’t noticed her nudity at all were it not for that near-hectic glitter in his gaze. “Why are you slumped before me as if you do not know your worth? Is this how you offer yourself to me, Amaya? In apology?”

      “I’m not apologizing.” She didn’t think she was offering herself to him, either, so much as following his orders for reasons she didn’t care to examine too closely—but somehow that part got tangled on her tongue and stayed in her mouth.

      “Are you certain? I have seen more tempting sea turtles, tucked away in their shells where no one can see them.” As if he’d said that purely to make her flush with temper, his mouth curved slightly when she did. “Sit up. Arch your back as if you are proud of your breasts.”

      “I think we both know perfectly well that they’re nothing to be proud of. Why flaunt what I don’t have?”

      “I am not interested in your opinion of them.” His eyebrows edged higher on his forehead, as if he was amazed at her temerity. “I am recalling how they felt in my mouth. More, please.”

      She hadn’t realized that she’d done as he asked until then. But she had. She’d sat up and let her back arch invitingly. That presented her breasts to him, yes, and it also made her hair move around her shoulders, and she knew, somehow, that he liked that, too.

      And for a long moment—it could have been years, for all she knew—he simply looked at her.

      It should have been boring. She should have felt awkward. Exposed. Embarrassed. Cold, even.

      But instead, Amaya burned. She ached. She wanted.

      “Look at you,” Kavian said softly. “Your breath comes faster and faster. You are flushed. If I were to reach between your thighs, what would I find?”

      She couldn’t answer him.

      “It would take so little,” he continued, his voice almost soft. “Your nipples are so hard, aren’t they? Think of all the things I could do with them. Think how it would feel.” She shifted against the bed beneath her, pressing herself against it and hardly aware of what she was doing, and he laughed. “None of that. You will come for me or not at all, Amaya. Remember that, if you please.”

      She knew, distantly, that there were a hundred things she should say. She should challenge him. She should fight him. She should refuse to act like this simply because he wanted her to do it—but she knew, of course she knew, that he wasn’t the only one who wanted it. And she wasn’t sure she could face what that said about her, what it made her.

      So perhaps it was easier to simply do as he asked instead.

      “Kneel up,” he told her in that same low, knowing voice, as if he was already inside her. As if he was in her mind, as well. As if he knew all those dark, twisted things she couldn’t admit to herself. “Right where you are.”

      “I’m not going to kneel before you and beg you for— for anything,” she threw at him. But she didn’t sound like herself and he didn’t look particularly moved by her outburst.

      “Of course not. You are so appalled by all of this, I am sure.”

      “I am.”

      “I can see that.” His head canted slightly to one side, and those slate-gray eyes gleamed silver. “Kneel up, Amaya. Do not make me ask you again.”

      This, right here, was the moment of truth. She didn’t entirely comprehend why she’d taken her clothes off when he told her to, but she couldn’t unring that bell. But this, here, now—this was where she had to draw the line.

      It was simple. All she needed to do was stand up. Climb off this bed and walk away. Kavian was many things, but she didn’t believe he was truly a brute. Hard, yes. The hardest man she’d ever met. But she understood on some deep feminine level of intuition she hadn’t known she possessed that while he might merrily shove away at her boundaries, he wouldn’t actually force her into anything. All she needed to do was get off this bed.

      She moved then, though her body hardly felt like hers. She could feel every part of her skin, as if every square inch of it was alive in a way it never had been before—a way she never had been until now. She felt so highly sensitive it was as if the air around them were a thick, padded thing, massaging her.

      Maybe that was why she didn’t really notice what she was doing until she’d already done it. And then she was kneeling there before him, precisely as he’d commanded her to do.

      That was bad enough. Worse, when he only looked at her, she arched her back again, pulling her shoulders back and presenting him with her breasts as he’d asked her to do before. Not only her breasts—her whole body. Right there before him.

      This was the silver platter, she understood then. She’d climbed up onto it and undressed for it and arranged herself on it, all for him.

      Her pulse skittered through her body, wild and erratic and much too fast.

      He waited.

      She didn’t know how she knew he was waiting, but she did. He was.

      And the air between them seemed charged. Spiked. She couldn’t see anything but that hard, oddly patient gaze of his. She couldn’t feel anything but hunger. A deep, dark, consuming hunger that made her knees feel so weak she was deeply, wildly grateful that she wasn’t trying to stand.

      She wanted him to touch her. She wanted him to take her the way he had done that night six months ago, the way he had today in that pool. She wanted him.

      “Then you must say the word, azizty, and you will have me,” he murmured, and Amaya realized to her horror that she’d said all of that out loud.

      Her throat was as dry as if she’d inhaled the whole of the desert outside. She shook, over and over, and she didn’t think she’d stop. She understood that this was a line she could never uncross. That there would be no returning to who she’d been before. That if she was honest, it had already happened six months ago and she’d simply been trying her best to deny it all this time. Running and running and ending up right back where she’d started.

      Worse, this time, because she knew not only what she was doing, but what he could do, too.

      “Please,” she whispered. But that wasn’t what he was looking for.

      “Say it,” he ordered her, his voice tight.

      She didn’t pretend it wasn’t a full and total surrender. But in that moment, she wasn’t sure she cared.

      You