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“I’m shopping. People spend money when they shop. Besides, you’re not the boss of me,” she taunted, wrenching her arm away. Glaring at him with eyes that openly challenged him to stop her, she walked away with her chin held high.
That look was at once both mildly adorable and beyond aggravating, mostly because she was right. He had no business telling her what to do, but oh, did his palm itch to show her exactly what he could be the boss of if he was of the mind to be. The image of her tearful face, pleading with him to stop spanking her, that she’d be good, flashed through his mind, leaving him once more rubbing his mouth in frustration and ignoring his throbbing dick as he followed behind her.
The vast majority of merchants crowded along the catacomb of narrow streets that made up the bazaar held their shops under cloth canopies, their wares laid out on blankets and in baskets on the ground. For them, the line between poverty and feeding their kids at night lay solely in the number of sales they made each day, and they could spot a sympathetic heart every bit aseasily as the thieves could. They threw themselves into hawking their wares for her inspection, making his job that much harder. He did his best to keep an eye on everyone around them, behind them, on every stall that Aliya visited, and the incredible swell of the crowd as it pushed like a living thing, constantly trying to get between them. Everywhere he looked, someone was looking at her.
Of course, they were—she was beautiful. Whether they watched because of her looks or her money, he had no idea, but they were staring as she moved from market stall to market stall, seemingly unaware of the attention revolving around her.
The fine hairs on the back of his neck prickled. Something was off. He didn’t know what, but it felt wrong, and… shit, Aliya was too far ahead of him again. Damnit. He had to push through people to catch up, and still, small as she was, she slipped effortlessly through the dense market crowd. She didn’t even look back when he called for her to wait.
“Shit,” he muttered.
All by herself, she was like herding a clowder of uncooperative cats. For the life of him, he couldn’t seem to keep up with her. The moment he glanced away to keep a watchful eye on those around them, she was gone. He spotted her at the spice merchant, buying cinnamon sticks, but by the time he got there, she’d vanished, only to reappear several heart-pounding minutes later at a clothing stall two stalls down.
“Aliya! Goddamn it!” he bellowed. “Wait for me!”
She stopped at the towels, the toys, and he finally caught up with her when she paused to chat with a man who let her pet the monkey on his shoulder and feed it bites of fruit.
Grabbing her arm, the minute he was close enough, Christian spun her around to face him.
“Stay with me. I mean it, do not leave my side again.”
She should have been intimidated, should have obeyed, yet the very next time he looked away, off she went again. There were so many people here, and the street was so narrow, it was aggravating. Every hackle he owned kept prickling the back of his neck, his soldier’s sixth sense telling him something was up.
That’s when he saw it—the shadows of two men racing across the sunbaked clay of the two-story building almost directly across from him. The flapping canopy of another stall quickly obscured it, but in the half-second he’d glimpsed them, he recognized the shadowy form of rifles clutched in their hands, rather than sticks or shovels.
It was sheer reflex that made him want to grab the arm next to him, and true to form, it wasn’t Aliya’s.
Fuck.
The burqa-cloaked woman yanked away, startled, and the shopkeeper yelled at him, but Christian was too busy searching above the crowd, up one side of this narrow street and down the other, before finally catching sight of Aliya’s dark hair as she slipped a scarf over her head. She ducked behind the flapping shield of a hanging blanket as he ran after her, shoving past shoppers too slow to get out of his way.
By the time he got to the other side of that blanket, she was even further ahead of him. He only just caught a glimpse of her pink sundress as she ducked into another alley. He put on a burst of speed, catching up with her before she could slip away again. This time, instead of her arm, he fisted her hair and dragged her back to him, ducking into a small café.
“Let go of me!” she snapped, attracting the attention of the patrons.
Quickly, Christian explained in their native language that Aliya was his bride and was having some difficulty understanding her new role as wife versus pampered daughter. Several of them nodded appreciatively.
“If you need, I have a private room in the back…” offered the sympathetic proprietor.
“Ibn haram,” she snarled, winning arched eyebrows from those close enough to overhear her.
“You think I’m a son of a bitch now…” he growled, taking the owner up on his offer and dragging her toward the back room. “You have no idea… but you’re going to.”
“Who do you think you are?” she demanded the minute he shut the door for privacy. “When I tell my brother how you manhandled me…”
“If you think that’s manhandling, you haven’t been with the right men.”
Her slap across his face was unexpected, but not nearly as unexpected as the right cross she landed on his jaw, which snapped his head back and made him see stars.
“Oh,” he breathed, almost laughing as he looked at her again. “You nasty tempered little brat.”
He grabbed her by the arm before she could shove past him and march back into the populated café. Spinning her around, he tossed her over a nearby table and lifted the hem of her dress, surprised when he encountered a pair of white cotton shorts. She definitely hadn’t been wearing those when she’d been scaling her way down the yacht’s ladder. He stripped those down as well.
“Naughty, naughty, Princess. Where did you get those?”
“Don’t you dare!” she screeched, kicking her legs, squirming desperately to wriggle away from him.
Hand raised, Christian stopped, mesmerized at the sight of her perfect, pale, dusky buttocks. Someone needed to put her in her place or, at the very least, teach her the danger of striking a man she knew very little about, but that she was now in position, not only to be spanked but to be fucked, was difficult to ignore. That portion of his brain that still retained the instincts of acaveman took over, emotion and need rushing to the forefront of all thought… or lack thereof. His cock became painfully hard and throbbed in anticipation, barely contained by his jeans.
