Royal Protector. Dana Marton

couldn’t seem to breathe. She was falling, she realized—tipped off the side of the world and tumbling end over end without any hope of stopping, washed out to sea forever in that dark gray gaze of his.

      He looked at her as if he wanted to eat her alive. He looked at her as if he already had done so.

      She wanted to say a thousand things. She wanted to tell him of that mess inside her that was all his doing, that she hadn’t known could exist. She wanted, and yet she couldn’t seem to do it. Instead, she held that terrible and wonderful gaze of his, and she only reached up and slid her hand along his proud jaw, holding his lean cheek in her hand.

      His gaze burned. And then he pushed himself into her, easy yet ruthless at once, sheathing himself to the hilt.

      For a moment—or a year, a lifetime, more—they only stared at each other, stretched out to near breaking on the edge of all that impossible sensation.

      “Last time, I hurt you.” His voice was gruff. Raw. Not apologetic in any way and yet it made a wet heat prick the back of Amaya’s eyes. She pressed her hand that little bit harder against his face.

      “Only for a moment,” she whispered, as if he’d asked for her forgiveness. As if she was giving it.

      And more, it was true. It had only been an instant of pain, easily forgotten and soon forgiven in the wild tumult that had followed. Even if she still didn’t understand how any of that had happened. One moment they’d been talking while officially betrothed; the next their mouths had been fused together as if there was no other possibility, and the moment after that her skirts had been pulled up to her waist and he’d been buried deep inside her.

      Inside her.

      Amaya had understood with a vivid shock that she had no control around him—over herself. She’d managed not to have sex for twenty-three years because she’d never felt that kind of connection with anyone, and then Kavian had come along and wrecked that in a day and a half. She’d been as shocked at herself for allowing it as she had been at what had actually happened.

      He was inside her again now, and this time she was far less shocked. But no more in control of either one of them. He waited, still propped there on his elbows, an enigmatic curve to that hard mouth of his.

      “Go on,” he murmured, as if he knew that she didn’t know what to do with herself and didn’t know how to do it anyway. Any of it. Last time had been like careening over the side of a cliff into a brilliant, cataclysmic explosion. This was no less vivid, no less overwhelming. But the explosion hovered out of reach. She thought perhaps that was his doing. His iron control. Because it certainly wasn’t hers. “Find out what feels good to you, azizty. I want to know.”

      Dimly, Amaya thought that she should find this all deeply embarrassing. He seemed to read her far too well. He seemed to know too much.

      He always has, a little voice whispered. He always will.

      But Amaya ignored it, and took him at his word. She circled her hips, tentatively at first. Then, when Kavian growled in stark male approval, with more deliberation. It made a whole new fire sear its way through her as she tested out the deliriously hot sensation, the drag and the friction. She ran her hands along those delectable ridges in his torso, learning the flat, hard muscles and the carved perfection of his form, crossed here and there with scars that spoke to a life of action, lived hard. She tested the shape of his strong neck, teased his flat male nipples and licked the salt from his skin.

      She pulled back, then surged forward, testing his length deep inside her, so hard in all her quivering, melting softness. Again and again and again. Until she shivered all over with a new crop of goose bumps, and looked to him, feeling something like helpless. Vibrant and electric, and still unsure.

      “Allow me,” Kavian said then, his voice hoarse and dark, and rich with satisfaction.

      And then he dropped down closer to her, slid his hands beneath her bottom and took over.

      It was the difference between the light of a candle and the blaze of the desert sun.

      He took her the way he’d kissed her—all-encompassing, almost furious, dark and sweet and necessary. And Amaya could do nothing but wrap her arms and legs around him, hold him as tightly as she possibly could and surrender to the glory of it.

      He reached between them and pressed hard at the juncture of their bodies, right where she needed it most, and she thought she heard him laugh as she shattered all around him.

      But then he followed after her, right over the side of the world, and the only thing Amaya heard him call out then was her name.

       CHAPTER SEVEN

      IT SHOULD NOT have surprised Amaya that Kavian was a man of very definite opinions, all of which he had no trouble sharing with her as he saw fit. After all, he’d never pretended otherwise.

      What Amaya should wear, and when, and with whom. How she should spend her time in the palace when he was not with her, and certainly what she should do when he was. What she should eat, how often she should take walks in the extensive, terraced gardens, how much coffee she should drink and so on. There was no detail too small to escape his attention. Not because he was so controlling, he’d told her, but because they were making her his queen. A role that would be dissected by the masses of his people and a thousand tabloids the world over, so they could not gloss over the details.

      “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