Modern Romance September 2015 Books 5-8. Chantelle Shaw
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Название: Modern Romance September 2015 Books 5-8
Автор: Chantelle Shaw
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Короткие любовные романы
Серия: Mills & Boon Series Collections
isbn: 9781474036559
isbn:
It was an agony.
“It will not be pretty if you fail to go through with this wedding,” Rihad said in a gruff sort of voice. “I can’t deny that. But I won’t force you to the altar. I do not care what claim he thinks he has.”
Amaya looked across the great courtyard to find Kavian again, and again his dark gaze met hers, so gray. So knowing. So fierce and hard at once, searing straight into her like a touch of his warrior’s hands.
And she understood then.
It was the night before the wedding she’d been trying to avoid for more than six months. And Amaya was deeply and madly and incontrovertibly in love with the man she was meant to marry in the morning. She thought she had been since the moment they met, when those slate-gray eyes of his, so dark and so patient, had met hers and held.
Shifting everything else.
Changing the whole world.
She loved him. She understood with a certain fatalism, a shuddering slide that seemed to have no end inside her, that she always would.
And if she married him, she would become her mother. It was a one-way ticket to Elizaveta’s sad life, no matter what Amaya might have told her earlier. If Amaya had Kavian’s children, would she treat them the same way Elizaveta had treated her? Once he tired of her and cast her aside, would she spend the rest of her days wandering from lover to lover, playing out the same sort of vicious games and making everyone who came near her as unhappy and bitter as she was?
There were fates worse than death, Amaya thought then, her head thick and dizzy with this knowledge she didn’t want. And that was one of them.
“Are you all right?” Rihad asked, the beginnings of a frown between his brows. “Amaya?”
She would never know how she managed to smile at her brother then, when inside her, everything was a great storm. There were no foundations left. She loved Kavian and she couldn’t have him and all was ash. Ash and grief and a terrible darkness that scarred her even as it burrowed deep. Because he’d showed her who he was. How he was made. He’d showed her how much he could bend already—and it was so little. Too little.
What would happen when he no longer bothered to try?
“Don’t be silly,” she said to her brother, the king of Bakri like their father before him. The ruler who had traded her to this man she’d never escape, not really, not intact. She was already in pieces. She understood she would never really be anything else.
When she betrayed Rihad, Rihad and Kavian and two kingdoms between them, she imagined she would shatter even more. Turn to dust out there somewhere on that same lonely circuit, making history repeat itself in her mother’s bitter wake.
And that was still better than staying with Kavian and loving him until it killed something in her. Better to love a brick wall, she thought miserably. It was far more likely to love her back.
But here, now, she widened her smile and tried to look as if she meant it. She thought from Rihad’s expression that she almost pulled it off. Almost. “I’ve never been better in my life.”
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