reward was that crook of his hard mouth. That gleam in his dark eyes.
“You prefer the threat, I think,” he said, and ran a fingertip along the line of her jaw. There was no reason it should echo throughout the rest of her, making even the blood in her veins clamor for more. “You rise to meet it every time. You’ll make me an excellent queen, azizty.”
And when she didn’t argue that away for once, when she only met his gaze and let her mouth curve instead, Kavian smiled.
Amaya felt it deep inside her, warm and bright, like a song she told herself she’d let herself sing for a little while.
Just a little while longer.
WHEN THE WEEK of their wedding dawned, Kavian insisted upon greeting all of their guests in the most formal manner possible, and he didn’t much care that the idea of such pomp and circumstance made Amaya balk.
“We’re not really going to sit in thrones and wave scepters about, are we?” she asked, her voice as baleful as her gaze as she stared at him from across the length of her dressing room. He’d instructed her attendants to prepare her for court, and the scowl on her face did nothing to take away from the breathtaking new gown she wore or the hair she wore up in a marvelous sweep of combs and braids, exactly as he’d wanted it. She looked exquisite. Deeply, irrevocably regal. The perfect queen.
But Kavian thought he knew this woman well enough by now to know better than to point that out to her. She might have stepped into her role in the desert. But he wasn’t fool enough to think she’d accepted it entirely. He needed to marry her, tie her up in legal knots, make sure she understood what he’d known since their betrothal: this was for life. There was no escaping it, for either one of them.
“There is only one throne,” he told her mildly. He remained where he was in the doorway as the women fussed over her skirts, his gaze trained on her lovely face and the hint of emotion he could see on her cheeks. “I sit in it. But if you wish to wield a royal scepter, I am certain we can have one made for you.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.” Kavian knew the exact moment she realized that was, perhaps, not the best way to address him in the presence of others. She straightened. Her dark chocolate eyes gleamed with more of that hectic emotion he’d seen more and more of the closer they got to their wedding date. “I don’t need a scepter. I have no desire whatsoever to play queen of the castle.”
“That is the problem, azizty. No one is playing, save you. Because you are, in fact, the queen not only of this particular castle but of all the land.”
Her scowl deepened as she dismissed her attendants and walked to him, and he took a moment longer than he should have to admire her. To soak her in. It wasn’t merely that she was so beautiful, or how she looked every inch a queen today. It was how perfectly she fit here. In this life. On his arm. At his side.
Did she truly fail to see that? Or was this merely another one of the games she liked to play—her way of teasing him to a distraction? He reached over when she drew near and wrapped his hand around her upper arm, enjoying the way she swallowed. Hard. Because she could deny a thousand things, but never that fire that raged between them. Never that.
“And if you look at me like that in the throne room, in public, in the presence of our guests,” he said softly, “you will regret it. I am only as civilized as it suits me to be. That can change in an instant.”
She was warm beneath his hand, her skin supple, and he was tempted to ignore the people waiting for them and simply back her up against the nearest wall and—
“You say that as if I do not regret everything already,” she murmured, but he heard a teasing note in her voice. He could see the sheen of it in her gaze. “Whether you threaten me with it or not.”
“I don’t make threats, Amaya. I make promises.”
She smiled. “And it should worry you, shouldn’t it, that one is indistinguishable from the other?”
He dragged his thumb up, then down, enjoying the friction almost as much as the way her lips parted slightly at the sensation. She was his, he thought then, on every possible level. She was surely running out of ways to deny that—and their wedding would put an end to it, once and for all.
But there were miles to go first. Kavian had the suspicion they might be the hardest yet, like any long siege in its final hours. Better to concentrate on the details and assume the rest would fall into place. He reminded himself of the reason he’d come into her dressing room.
“Your mother arrived at the international airport in Ras Kalaat and is en route to the palace,” he said, watching her face.
Amaya flinched slightly, so very slightly that had he not been studying her, he might have missed it entirely. She swallowed again, and he saw the pulse in her neck leap, though her face went blank. Panic? Fear? He couldn’t tell.
He hated that he still couldn’t tell.
“Now?” she asked.
“She will be here in the palace within the hour.” He released her arm, straightening in the doorway, frowning down at her. “Were you expecting her? You have gone pale.”
“I expected she would attend my wedding, yes,” Amaya said. Carefully, he thought. Much too carefully. He was reminded of the mask she’d worn when he’d first met her and it was like a howling thing in him, the urge to tear it off. “I’m her only child, after all, and she is my only remaining parent.”
She blinked too hard, then looked around as if she was casting about for an escape route, and it hit him. He’d seen that look on her face before, heard that exact same note in her voice. It had been the night of their betrothal ceremony.
And in the morning, she’d been gone.
“What you did not expect, if I am to read between the lines, was that this wedding would ever come to pass,” Kavian finished for her. He wanted to touch her again, but didn’t, and it hurt like a body blow. “Someday, Amaya, I hope you will come to understand that I keep the promises I make. Always.”
She stepped back from him and he felt it like the deepest cut. It took everything he had not to haul her back where she belonged. He watched her pull in a deep breath, as if readying herself for battle.
“It should matter to you that this is not what I want,” she said.
It was laughable—and yet Kavian did not feel the least bit like laughing. “You don’t know what you want.”
“That’s astonishingly patronizing. Even for you.”
He shrugged, never shifting his gaze from her face. “You ran, I caught you. I will always catch you. That is the end of it.”
“It should make a difference that I didn’t want to be caught,” she bit out, as if sobs lurked just there behind her eyes.
“Did you not? It seems to me that if that were the case, you would not have returned to Canada at all, and certainly not to Mont-Tremblant.”
Amaya jerked her gaze away from his then, but he didn’t stop.
“And, of course, you could have fought me. Showed me how opposed you were to this union instead of merely making announcements.”
“I’ve done nothing but fight you from the start.”
“Yes,” he said, and she shivered at his tone. He almost smiled at that. “That is precisely how I would categorize the way you melted in my hands at our betrothal ceremony. And then all over me in that alcove. And then again, how you walked straight into the pools here to join me, wearing almost nothing. What fighting tactics were those, exactly? And to what end?”
She couldn’t seem to make herself look at him, but he could see the impact of every word he said. They moved over her,