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“Don’t tie yourself in knots looking for comparisons that don’t exist,” she managed to bite out at him, still channeling stone and steel and calm. “I’m nothing like her.”
“I am aware. If you were, you would not be here.” She hated the way he looked at her as if knew all the things she carried inside, her memories and her dreams and her darkest secrets alike. As if what Kavian enjoyed collecting was every last piece of her soul. And once he had them all, she couldn’t help wondering then in a panic, what would become of it? Or her? “And as fascinating as this conversation is, it doesn’t alter the fact that you require an entirely new wardrobe. You must look like my queen whether you feel like it or do not. Especially at our wedding ceremony, which, I hesitate to remind you, is in a matter of weeks.”
“I don’t want a ceremony.”
“I didn’t ask you what you wanted. I told you what was necessary and what I require.” His gaze glinted with amusement then, and that was much worse. It moved in her like heat. Like need. “Shall I demonstrate to you why you should begin to learn the distinction between the two? And the consequences if you do not?”
But Kavian’s consequences always ended the same way—with Amaya stretched out naked on the edge of some or other gloriously intense pleasure she worried she might not survive, begging him for mercy and forgetting her own damn name. So she only picked up her coffee again and took another sip, schooling her features into something serene enough to be vaguely regal and ignoring that wicked crook of his hard mouth as she did it.
“A new wardrobe fit for a queen?” she murmured, her voice cool and smooth. Stone and steel. Just like him. “How delightful. I can’t wait.”
“I am so pleased you think so,” Kavian said in the very same tone, though his gray eyes gleamed. “We leave for your first public appearance as queen tomorrow morning. I’m thrilled you’ll be able to dress the part at last.”
“As am I,” she said dryly. Almost as if she couldn’t help herself—couldn’t keep herself from needling him. “I have worried about little else.”
“Ah, azizty,” he murmured, sounding as close to truly amused as she’d ever heard him, “when will you understand? I am not a man who does anything by halves.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
IF HE WAS a good man, Kavian reflected the following day, he would not have set up his betrothed for this particular day of tests. He would not have tested her at all. Had it been about what he wanted, he simply would have kept her in his bed forever. He would have lost himself there in the sweet madness of her scent, the addiction of her smooth skin. The glory he’d found in her arms that shook him far more than he cared to admit.
But this was Daar Talaas and Kavian had never been good. He’d never had the chance to try. He was the king, and thus he did what was necessary for his people. If that happened to align with what was good, so be it. But he would not lose sleep over it if it did not.
He would sleep like an innocent, he assured himself, whatever happened in the desert that had forged him. It would be the making of Amaya, too, he knew. There was no other way.
After all, she had already taken the news of her mother’s true treatment of her in stride. Kavian dared to allow himself a shred of optimism that she would rise to whatever occasion presented itself.
They’d left the palace in the morning, taking a helicopter out to the stable complex on the far side of the treacherous northern mountains. They’d stood together in the center of the courtyard while his men, a sea of servants and stable hands, and a selection of his finest Arabian horses hurried all around them.
“Do you ride?” he’d asked, almost as an afterthought.
She’d been dressed like a Daar Talaasian noblewoman, in an exquisite dress that adhered to desert custom with her arms and legs covered and her head demurely veiled. It only made her every graceful movement that much more intoxicating, to Kavian’s mind, because he had the pleasure of knowing what was beneath. All her soft skin, the temptation of her hair, the sweet taste of her, woman and cream. But there’d been no veiling that cool gaze of hers, dark chocolate mixed with ice as it met his.
“I’ve ridden a horse before, if that’s what you mean. I’m sure you already know that my mother and I spent several summers on a ranch in Argentina.”
What he knew was far less interesting to him than what she chose to tell him. “Did you fall off a great deal?”
