Royal Protector. Dana Marton

of?” he asked.

      She would never know how she held his gaze. How she managed to keep herself from reacting to that terrible, infinitely destructive question. She only knew that she did it. That she stared back at him, stone to his stone, as if her life depended on it.

      “Are you talking about your mother, Amaya?” Kavian pushed at her in that quiet way of his that nonetheless made every bone in her body ache. She fought to restrain a shiver. “Or yourself?”

      “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.”