Royal Protector. Dana Marton

       CHAPTER ONE

      SHE HAD NO WARNING.

      There had been no telltale men with grim, assessing eyes watching her from the shadows. No strange gaps in conversation when she walked into the small coffee shop in a tiny lakeside village in British Columbia. There hadn’t been any of the usual hang-ups or missed calls on her latest disposable mobile phone that signaled her little noose was drawing tight.

      She had a large mug of strong, hot coffee to ward off the late-autumn chill this far north, where snow was plastered across the Canadian Rocky Mountains and the thick clouds hung low. The pastry she chose was cloyingly sweet, but she ate all of it anyway. She checked her email, her messages. There was a new voice mail from her older brother, Rihad, which she ignored. She would call him later, when she was less exposed. When she could be certain Rihad’s men couldn’t track her.

      And then she glanced up, some disturbance in the air around her making her skin draw tight in the second before he took the seat across from her at the tiny little café table.

      “Hello, Amaya,” he said, with a kind of calm, resolute satisfaction—while everything inside her shifted into one great big scream. “You’ve been more difficult to find than anticipated.”

      As if this were a perfectly casual meeting, here in this quiet café in an off-season lakeside village in a remote part of Canada she’d been certain he couldn’t find. As if he weren’t the most dangerous man in the world to her—this man who held her life in those hands of his that looked so easy and idle on the table between them despite their scars and marks of hard use, in notable contrast to that dark slate fury in his too-gray eyes.

      As if she hadn’t left him—His Royal Highness, Kavian ibn Zayed al Talaas, ruling sheikh of the desert stronghold Daar Talaas—if not precisely at the altar, then pretty damn close six months ago.

      Amaya had been running ever since. She’d survived on the money in her wallet and her ability to leave no trail, thanks to a global network of friends and acquaintances she’d met throughout her vagabond youth at her heartbroken mother’s side. She’d crashed on the floors of perfect strangers, stayed in the forgotten rooms of friends of friends and walked miles upon miles in the pitch dark to get out of cities and even countries where she’d thought he might have tracked her. She wanted nothing more than to leap up and run now, down the streets of the near-deserted village of Kaslo and straight into the frigid waters of Lake Kootenay if necessary—but she had absolutely no doubt that if she tried that again, Kavian would catch her.

      With his own bare hands this time.

      And she couldn’t repress the shiver that swept over her at that