Royal Protector

She’d meant her many lovers, the men who she’d never stayed with for too long, because they had always required such careful handling to put up with a woman with a sulky daughter in tow. Or so Elizaveta had always claimed.

“I don’t expect you to be as grateful as you should—that’s your father’s influence in you, I’m sure—but you must comprehend what there is to lose if you don’t do as I say.” Elizaveta had glared at Amaya as if she’d expected her daughter to argue, when Amaya had long since learned the folly of that kind of thing. Even then, even as a child, she’d known it was better to bend to those who could not. “We’ll lose everything. The roof above your head and the clothes on your back. Is that what you want?”

That had not been what eleven-year-old Amaya had wanted. The very idea had given her nightmares. And Elizaveta had never been a perfect parent, certainly. Life with her had always been complicated, but Amaya had been sympathetic because she’d understood that her mother hadn’t said those things to be cruel. Amaya’s father had broken something inside her, and sometimes it came out as poison. Amaya had learned not to take it personally... Or anyway, she’d tried her best not to take it personally.

“You are mistaken,” Amaya said to Kavian now when she could speak without that rough-edged thing inside her taking over and revealing too much. “I don’t know where you heard such a thing.”

“Had she married any of the men she found, she would have had to return you to your father and worse, to her way of thinking, give up her access to your money.” Another shrug, which made her want to throw her plate at him. A flicker in that gray gaze made her think he knew it, too. “This is not an attack, Amaya. This is simply a fact. I did not hear this through some grapevine or other—I’ve seen the paperwork.”

Amaya shook her head, so hard it almost hurt, and noticed her heart had started to kick at her, almost as if she was panicked.

“My mother was a self-made woman. She had nothing when she left Ukraine. She talked her way from minor dance halls into the fashion houses of Milan. She had nothing but her wit, her charm and her looks. That was how she entered her marriage to my father, and that was how she left it. If anything, I was a complication.”

It was only when she was finished speaking that Amaya realized her voice had risen, as if every sentence were a plate thrown, a blow landed on his wholly impervious form.

“She also had ambition,” Kavian said softly. He was so much more dangerous the quieter he got, she knew. She sucked in a breath against it. “Never forget that. She left Bakri because she was losing the sheikh’s favor. Better to leave and tell a sad tale across the years to a thousand receptive audiences. Better by far to hold the king’s daughter as ransom than to remain in Bakri as a neglected, forgotten wife. The sheikh would have banished her to one of the outlying residences, far away from the palace where she would wither away into irrelevance, and she knew it. That, azizty, did not suit your mother’s ambitions at all.”

Amaya stared at him, willing herself not to react in the way she suspected he wanted her to do. Her lips felt bloodless. Her stomach twisted—hard. “You don’t know anything about my mother. She was not ambitious. She was in love.”

She shouldn’t have said that. She shouldn’t have uttered those words. Not to him, not here. Not out loud—and she didn’t dare ask herself why that was. But Amaya couldn’t take them back, no matter how much she wished she could. She couldn’t make that taut, near-painful silence between them disappear, or do anything about that sudden arrested look on Kavian’s austere face. She straightened in her seat instead, and forced herself to meet that edgy gray gaze of his straight on as if she felt nothing at all.

“My father was a convincing man when it suited him.” She heard that catch in her throat and she knew Kavian did, too, but she pushed on. “He convinced a woman who had been born with nothing and raised to expect little else that he adored her. That he worshipped her. That he would remake his world in her honor.”

She didn’t point out how familiar that sounded. Just as she didn’t give that searing blast of temper in Kavian’s dark gaze a chance to form into harsh words on his lips.

“He lied. Maybe he meant it when he said it—what do I know? But my mother believed him. That was why she thought there was something she could do to regain his favor, to win back his attention once it drifted. Anything to make him love her again. But what my father truly loved was collecting, Kavian. He was always looking for his next acquisition. He didn’t lose much sleep over the things he’d already collected and shunted aside.”

He didn’t speak for a long, cool moment that careened around inside Amaya’s chest, leaving jagged marks. She tilted up her chin and told herself she could handle it. Him. Or survive it, anyway.

“Is that what you’re afraid 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.”

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