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“Relax,” he told her, wrapping an arm around her waist and pulling her against him. “We have a long day’s ride. If you continue to sit so stiffly, you’ll spend much of the time in pain. I promise not to ravish you while we’re upon my horse.”
“Remind me to never dismount then,” she muttered, half under her breath, but she did let herself sag against him.
Sabrina was more trouble than any other three women Kardal had ever known, but he found he didn’t dislike her as much as he would have thought. Unfortunately he also found her body appealing as it pressed against his own. During the night he’d managed to ignore the sweet scent of her, but not while they rode pressed so closely together. When he’d first placed her in the saddle, he’d only thought to keep her from running off. By tying her hands, he’d attempted to both restrain and punish her willfulness. Now he was the one being punished.
With each step of the horse, her body swayed against his. Her rear nestled against his groin, arousing him so that he could think of little else. It was a kind of trouble he did not need.
She was not the traditional desert woman he would have chosen. She was neither deferential nor accommodating. Her quick mind allowed her to use wit and words as a weapon and there was no telling how her time in the west had corrupted her. She was disrespectful, opinionated and spoiled. And even if he found her slightly intriguing, she was not whom he would have chosen. But then the choice hadn’t been his at all. It had all been proclaimed at the time of his birth.
He wondered why she didn’t know who he was. Had her father not told her the specifics or had she simply not listened? He would guess the latter. Kardal smiled. He doubted Sabrina listened to anything she didn’t want to hear. It was a habit he would break her of.
He could almost anticipate the challenge she would be to him. In the end he would be the victor, of course. He was the man—strength to her yielding softness. Eventually she would learn to appreciate that. In the meantime, what would the ill-tempered beauty say if she knew he was the man to whom she had been betrothed?
Chapter 3
Eventually Sabrina found the rhythm of the horse hypnotic, even with the chronic sensation of falling. Despite her desire to, if not prove herself then at least be somewhat independent, she found herself relaxing into Kardal’s arms. He was strong enough to support her and if she continued to hold herself stiffly, she would be aching by the end of the day.
So instead she allowed herself to lean into him, feeling the muscled hardness of his chest pressing against her. He shifted his arms so that he held the reins in front of her instead of behind her. Her forearms rested on his.
The sensation of touching him was oddly intimate. Perhaps it was their close proximity, or perhaps it was the darkness caused by her blindfold. She’d never been in a situation like this, but that shouldn’t be a surprise. Not much of her life had been spent with her being kidnapped.
“Do you do this often?” she asked. “Kidnap innocent women?”
Instead of being insulted by the question, he chuckled. “You are many things, princess, but you are not innocent.”
Actually he was wrong about that, but this was hardly the time or the place to have that conversation. She could—
The horse stumbled on a loose rock. There was no warning. For Sabrina, the blackness of her world shifted and the sensation of falling nearly became a reality. She gasped and tried to grab on to something, but there was only openness in front of her.
“It’s all right,” Kardal soothed from behind her. He moved his arm so that it clasped her around the waist, pulling her more tightly against him. “I won’t let anything happen to you.”
She wanted to take comfort in his words, but she knew the real purpose behind them. “Your concern isn’t about me,” she grumbled. “You don’t want anything to happen to your prize.”
He laughed softly. “Exactly, my desert bird. I refuse to let you fly away, nor will I allow you to be injured. You are to stay just as you are until I can claim my rightful reward.”
She didn’t like the sound of that. No doubt he believed everything he read in the papers about her, so he thought he knew her.
“You’re wrong about me,” she said a few minutes later, when the horse was once again steady and her heartbeat had returned to normal.
“I am rarely wrong.”
That comment made her roll her eyes, although with her wearing a blindfold he couldn’t tell.
“I know you are not a dutiful daughter,” he murmured in her ear. “You live a wild life in the west. But that is no surprise. You are your mother’s daughter, not a woman of Bahania.”
