Royal Protector. Dana Marton

far worse—but she refused to think about that. Not here. Not now, with him watching her. “Who wouldn’t want to race off to the desert right now on such a delightful voyage of self-discovery?”

      Kavian moved then, and that was worse than his alarming stillness. Far worse. He rose to his feet with a lethal show of grace that made Amaya’s temples pound, her throat go dry. Then he reached down, took her hand without asking or even hesitating and pulled her to her feet.

      And the insane part was that she went.

      She didn’t fight. She didn’t recoil. She didn’t even try. His hand was calloused and rough against hers, hot and strong, and her stomach flipped, then dropped. Her toes arched in the boots she wore. She came up too fast and once again, found herself teetering too close to this man. This stranger she could not, would not marry.

      This man she could not think about without that answering fire so deep within.

      “Let go of me,” she whispered.

      “What will you do if I do not?”

      His voice was still calm, but she was closer to him now, and she felt the rumble of it like a deep bass line inside her. His skin was the color of cinnamon, and heat seemed to blast from him, from his hand around hers and his face bent toward her. He was bigger than she was, tall enough that her head reached only his shoulder, and the fact that he’d spent his whole life training in the art of war was like a living flame between them. It was written deep into every proud inch of him. She could see the white line of an old scar etched across the proud column of his throat, and refused to let herself think about how he might have come by it.

      He was a war machine, this man. Kavian is of the old school, in every meaning of the term, her brother had told her. She’d known that going in. She couldn’t pretend otherwise.

      What she hadn’t realized was how it would affect her. It felt as if she were standing too close to a wicked bonfire, her face on the verge of blistering from the intense heat, with no way to tell when the wind might change.

      Kavian tugged on her hand, bringing her closer against his chest, then bending his head to speak directly into her ear.

      “Will you scream?” he asked softly. Or perhaps it was a taunt. “Cry out for help from all these soft strangers? What do you think will happen if you do? I am not a civilized man, Amaya. I do not live by your rules. I do not care who gets in my way.”

      And she shook, as much from the sensation of his breath against her ear as the words he used. Or maybe it wasn’t either of those—maybe it was that he was holding her against that body of his again, and she was still haunted by what had happened the last time. What she hadn’t done a single thing to stop—but that was desert madness, nothing more, she told herself harshly.

      She had no choice but to believe that. It was the only thing that made any sense.

      “I believe you,” she hissed at him. “But I doubt that you want to end up on the evening news, uncivilized or not. That would be a bit too much scandal, I think we can agree.”

      “Is this a theory you truly wish to test?”

      She yanked herself back from him, out of his grip, and it wasn’t lost on her that he let her go. That he had been in control of her since the moment he walked into this café—or before, she realized as her stomach flipped over inside her again and then slammed down at her feet. It must have been before.

      Amaya looked around a little bit wildly and realized—belatedly—that the café was unusually empty for the early afternoon. The handful of locals who remained seemed to have studiously averted their gazes in a way that suggested someone had either told them to do so or compensated them for it. And she could see the two brawny men, also in head-to-toe, relentless black, standing at the front door like sentries and worse, the sleek black SUV idling at the curb outside. Waiting.

       For her.

      She jerked her gaze back to Kavian. “How long have you been following me?”

      His dark eyes gleamed.

      “Since we located you in Mont-Tremblant, all the way across this great, wide country in Quebec ten days ago.” Kavian was calm, of course. But then, he’d already won. Why wouldn’t he be calm? “You should not have returned there if you truly wished to remain at large.”

      “I was only there for three days.” She frowned at him. “Three days in six months.”

      He only gazed back at her as if he were made entirely of stone and could do so forever—and would, if it was required. As if he were a monolith and as movable.

      “Mont-Tremblant was your favorite of the upscale ski resorts your mother preferred whenever her winter tastes ran to cold weather and ski chalets. I assume that played a part in why you opted to go to university in Montreal, so you could better access it in your free time. I’ve long suspected that if you were likely to return to any of the places your mother dragged you over the years, it would be there.”

      “How long have you been studying me?” Amaya managed to scrape out, her heart right there in her throat. She was surprised he couldn’t see it.

      And Kavian smiled then, a quirk of his absurdly compelling mouth that made her doubt her own sanity. But there was no doubting the way it wound in her, tightening the knot in her belly, making her feel unsteady on her feet.

      She had the strangest notion that he knew it.

      “I don’t think you’re ready to hear that,” he told her, and there was something else, then, in those slate-gray eyes. Inhabiting that warrior’s face of his, stone and steel. And he was right, she thought. She didn’t want to hear it. “Not here. Not now.”

      “I think I deserve to know exactly how much of an obsessed stalker you are, in fact. So I can prepare myself accordingly.”

      He almost laughed. She saw the silver of it in his gaze, in the movement of that mouth of his, though he made no sound.

      “What you deserve is to be thrown over my shoulder and bodily removed from this establishment.” She’d never heard him sound anything but supernaturally calm and almost hypnotic in his intensity, and so that rough edge to his voice then shocked her. It made her jolt to attention, her eyes flying wide on his. “Make no mistake. If I’d caught up to you in a less stuffy place than Canada, we wouldn’t be bothering with polite conversation at all. My patience ran out six months ago, Amaya.”

      “You threaten me, and then you wonder why I ran?”

      “I don’t care why you ran,” he replied, ruthless and swift, and she’d never heard him sound quite like that, either. “You can walk outside and get in that car, or I can put you there. Your choice.”

      “I don’t understand this.” She did nothing to hide the bitterness in her voice, the anguish that she’d walked into this trap six months ago thinking her eyes were open, or the fear that she’d never get out of it again. “You could have any other woman in the world as your queen. I’m sure there are millions who lie awake at night dreaming of coronations and crowns. And you could certainly ally your country to my brother’s if that was what you wanted, whether or not your queen was related to him. You don’t need me.”

      Again, that smile, dangerous and compelling and world-altering at once. The essence of Kavian, boiled down to that small quirk of his too-hard mouth.

      “But I want you,” he said, deep and certain. So very certain, like stone. “So it amounts to the same thing.”

      * * *

      Kavian thought for a moment she would bolt, despite the obvious futility of another such attempt.

      And that wildness that was always a part of him, the desert that lived inside him, untamed and unconquerable and darker than the night, wished that she’d try. Because he was not the kind of man she’d known all her life. He was not pallid and weak, Western and accommodating. He had been forged in steel and loss, had struck