Did he want to give her a throne or did he simply want to take her to bed?
Tarek found he couldn’t answer the question. Normally, that would have been all the convincing he needed that he was headed down the wrong path. He had never let a woman turn his head and he would have sworn on Alzalam itself that he never would.
But then, when it came to his doctor, there were practical considerations that outweighed everything else. Trade implications, for example, and potential sanctions. He could weather those, as his ancestors had upon occasion, but if there was no need to put himself in bed with only those economies who did not fear the taint of a regime considered monstrous, why would he condemn his country to such a struggle?
That he found himself longing to taste her was a problem when his country was at stake. Tarek tried to focus. “You have yet to tell me what it is you want most, Anya.”
Had he said her name aloud before? He couldn’t recall it. But it sizzled there, on his tongue. It felt far more intimate than it should. And in case he was tempted to imagine that it was only he who felt these things, he saw her eyes widen—her pupils dilating—as she sat there within reach.
But he did not use his hands. Not yet.
“I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told anyone before,” Anya said, her voice softer than he had ever heard it. She leaned forward, the flowing scarf she wore making even the way she breathed look like a dance. She propped her elbows on the table and smiled at him over the top of the fingers she linked together. “I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because you’re a stranger. A stranger who asked me to marry him after locking me up. If I can’t tell you my secrets, who can I tell?”
“Tell me your secrets, Anya,” he found himself saying, when he shouldn’t. When he ought to have known better. “And I will show you my scars.”
He was fascinated by watching her think. He watched her blink, then her head tilted slightly to one side as her gaze moved all over him. “Are your scars secret?”
“Naturally.” Tarek kept his tone careless when he felt anything but. “Who wishes to see that their King is little more than a mortal man, frail and easily wounded?”
It seemed to take her longer than usual to swallow. “But surely the point of a king is that he is a man first.”
“A king is only a man when he fails,” Tarek bit out. He gazed at her until he saw, once more, that telltale heat stain her cheeks. “But first you must tell me your secrets. That is the bargain.”
“My father is a doctor,” she said, and he had the notion the words tumbled from her, as if she’d loosed a dam of some kind and could no more control them than if they’d been a rush of water. “Not only a doctor, mind you. He’s one of the foremost neurosurgeons in the country. Possibly the world. He would tell you that he is the foremost neurosurgeon, full stop. Even now, years past what others consider their prime, his hands are like steel. He’s deeply proud of that.”
“Is this secret you plan to tell me actually his secret? I will confess I find myself less interested in the deep, dark secrets of a man I have never met.”
Anya sighed. “Surgeons are a very particular type of doctor. A very particular type of person, really. They don’t think that they’re God. They know it.”
“My father was a king, Anya. I am familiar with the type.”
Her smile flashed, an unexpected gift. “And look at you, not only happy to be your father’s heir but apparently prepared to fight off a revolution so you can assume your throne after him, as planned.”
It was tempting to thunder at her about duty and blood, but Tarek did not. He thought instead of what it was she was implying with her words. None of it having to do with him.
He chose to simply sit and watch her. To wait.
“There was never any question that I would become a doctor as well,” Anya said, her voice something like careful. “To be honest, I don’t know if I would have been permitted to imagine a different path for myself. My mother died when I was small and I wish I could remember what my father was like with her, but I don’t. After she was gone I had a succession of stepmothers, each younger and more beautiful than the last. My father liked to praise their beauty while making a point of letting me know that the only thing he was interested in from me was my intellect. It never occurred to me to rebel. Or even to question. It was what he wanted that mattered. But then, for a long time, I wanted it as well. I wanted to show him that I could be smart like him, not merely a pretty plaything, easily ignored, like the stepmothers he replaced so easily. I wanted to make certain I was special.”
Tarek waited still, his gaze on her and the storm in her eyes.
“But when it came time to pick my specialty in medical school,” she said quietly, “I failed him.”
“I do not understand.” Tarek lifted a brow. “You are a doctor, are you not?”
“My father likes to refer to emergency medicine as fast food,” Anya said. She shook her head. “Where’s the art? Where’s the glory? It’s all triage, addicts, and Band-Aids slapped over broken limbs while bureaucrats count beds. That’s a quote.”
“But you knew his opinion and you did it anyway.”
Anya smiled again, though it was a sad curve that didn’t quite reach her eyes. “That was my form of rebellion. My father accused me of being afraid of the responsibility a surgeon must assume. He’s not wrong.”
Tarek was baffled. “Surely handling emergencies requires you to save lives. Potentially more lives than a brain surgeon, if we are to count volume alone.”
“Sometimes he would sneer that it was ego. Mine. That I was afraid to enter into the same arena as him because he was so clearly superior to me. And that might have had something to do with my choices, I can’t deny it. But mostly, I didn’t want to compete with him.” She took a breath. “It took a long while for me to recognize that it wasn’t that I didn’t want to be a surgeon. It’s that really, I never wanted to be a doctor.”
Tarek noticed her fingers were trembling, as if she’d just confessed to treason. He supposed, by her metric, she had.
“I couldn’t tell him this,” she continued, her voice shaking along with her fingers. “I couldn’t tell anybody this. After all those years of study. All that work. All that knowledge stuck in my head forever. People are called to be doctors—isn’t that what everyone wants to believe? You’re supposed to want to help others, always. Even if it means sacrificing yourself.” She paused to take another shaky breath. “My father is unpleasant in a great many ways, but day in and day out, he saves lives no one else can. How could I tell him that having already failed to live up to his example, I was actually, deep down, not even a shell of a decent person because I didn’t want to anymore?”
Tarek waited, but he no longer felt the least bit lazy. Or even indulgent. He was coiled too tight, because he could see the turmoil in Anya’s gaze. All over her face. And she was gripping her hands together, so tight that he could see her knuckles turn white.
“I couldn’t tell him any of that,” she said, answering herself. “I simply quit. I walked out of my job and refused to go back. I signed up for the charity the next day, ensuring that I couldn’t have gone back even if I’d wanted to. And I don’t know why I didn’t tell him everything then, because believe me, Dr. Preston Turner was not on board with me heading off to what he called sleep-away camp for doctors.”
“I am fascinated by this man,” Tarek drawled, sounding dangerous to his own ears. “It’s not as if you joined the circus, is it?”
“He knew that I was putting myself at risk,” Anya said softly. “He thought I was doing it because I was too foolish to see the potential consequences of my decision. By which he didn’t mean an eight-month stint in a dungeon. He assumed I would get killed.”
Tarek thought of his own father, and the expectations he had placed on his heir. “He does not have much faith in you.”
; Anya smiled again, edgily. “The responsibility of bearing his name comes with a requirement to help others. And surely the best way to do that is in controlled circumstances, like a surgical theater. Emergency rooms can be rowdy enough. But to risk myself in the middle of other people’s wars? He disdained these choices.”
“Surely the risk makes the help you give that much more critical.”
“I would love to sit here, agree with you, and puff myself up with self-righteousness.” Anya’s gaze was direct again, then. And this time it made his chest feel tight. “But it wasn’t as if I felt some glorious calling to immerse myself in dangerous places, all to help people who needed it. I know the difference, because every single one of my colleagues felt that call. But not me.”
“Then why?” Tarek asked, though he had the distinct impression he did not wish to know the answer. The twist of her lips told him so. “Why did you do it?”
Anya let out a faint sort of laugh, and looked away. She loosened her grip on her own fingers. “You have no idea what it’s like. The pressure. The endless stress. The expectation that no matter what’s happening in your own life, or to you physically, you will always operate with the total recall of everything you learned in medical school, be able to apply it, and never make a mistake. It’s a high-wire act and there is no soft landing. It’s day in, day out, brutal and grueling and all-consuming. And that’s just the emergency room.”
“As it happens,” Tarek said quietly, “I might have some idea.”
Her gaze slid back to him. “All that gets worse in a war zone. You have to do all of the same things faster and more accurately, with or without any support staff. All while knowing that any moment you could be caught up in the crossfire.”
“You say you were not called to do these things, but you did them,” Tarek pointed out. “Maybe the call you were looking for does not feel the way you imagine it will.”
He knew that well enough. Because it was one thing to spend a life preparing for duty, honoring the call from his own blood and history. And it was something else to stand beside the body of a man who had been both his King and his father, and know that no matter how he might wish to grieve, he had instead to step into his new role. At once.
Then to do it.
Even in the face of his own brother’s betrayal.
“I didn’t have a death wish, necessarily,” Anya told him, as if she was confessing her sins to him. “But I took risks the others didn’t because deep down? I wanted something to happen to me.”
He felt everything in him sharpen. “You mean you wished to be hurt?”
“Just enough.” She looked haunted, hectic. He could see how she was breathing, hard and deep, making her whole chest heave. “Just so I wouldn’t have to do it anymore.”
“Courage is not the absence of fear, Anya,” Tarek said, his gaze on hers, something hot and hard inside his chest. “It is not somehow rising above self-pity, wild imaginings, or bitter fantasies that you might be struck down into oblivion so you need not handle what is before you. I’m afraid courage is simply doing what you must, no matter how you happen to feel about it.”
She sat back in her chair, her eyes much too bright. “Thank you,” she whispered. “But I know exactly how much of a coward I am. Because I also know that there was a part of me that actually enjoyed eight months of rest. When no one could possibly expect me to pick up a stethoscope or try to make them feel better. I got to rest for the first time since I entered a premed program at Cornell.”
Tarek was riveted, despite himself. When surely, he ought to wrest control of this conversation. Of her. Instead, his blood was a roar within him. And he could not seem to make himself look away.
“So, yes,” Anya said softly. “I will marry you. But I have two conditions.”
“Conditions,” he repeated, provoked that easily. He made a show of blinking, as if he had never heard the word. “It is almost as if I am any man at all. Not the King of Alzalam. Upon whom no conditions have ever been applied.”
“If you want a press release, there are conditions.”
Tarek tamped down the sudden surge of his temper, telling himself that this was good. If she’d leaped into this, heedless and foolish, surely it would have been proof that she would be a terrible queen. He could not have that.
“Very well then,” he said, through gritted teeth. “Tell me what it is you want. I promised I would give it to you.”
“First,” Anya said, searching his face, “promise me that I will never have to be a doctor.”
“Done. And the second condition?”
He was fascinated to watch her cheeks heat up again. “Well,” she said, her voice stilted. “It’s a bit more...indelicate.”
“Was there delicacy in these discussions?” His voice was sardonic. “I must have missed it.”
“I want a night,” she blurted out. “With you. To see whether or not...”
And Tarek did not plan to ever admit, even to himself, what it cost him to simply...wait.
When everything inside him was too hot, too intent. Too hungry.
Anya cleared her throat. “To see whether or not this is real chemistry. Or if it’s because you were the first man I interacted with outside that cell. I...need to know the difference.”
A good man might have pointed out that it seemed likely this was all yet another attempt at self-immolation on her part.
But then, Tarek had no problem being her fire.
“Come,” he said, reaching out his hand as he had at the mouth of the prison cell, his gaze hot enough to burn. “Let us find out.”
CHAPTER SIX
A WISE WOMAN would have questioned her own sanity, Anya thought. Or certainly her motives.
Wise or foolish, Anya hadn’t stopped trembling for some time. Deep inside, where every part of her that shook was connected to the heat that seemed to blaze between her and Tarek, and that aching, slick fire between her legs.
She told herself that what mattered was that it all made sense in her own head.
He wanted a queen. A press release and the performance that would go with it.
And she wanted a different life. With the clarity she’d gotten in the dungeon, Anya knew she could never go back. Not to who she’d been, destroying herself with stress, locking herself away when the panic hit, terrified that she was moments away from being found out for the fraud she truly was. She couldn’t keep moving from one way of administering medicine to another, until she started hoping that mortar fire might take her out and save her from her inability to walk away from the life she’d spent so long—too long—building.
Maybe if she was the Queen of a faraway country she could do more good than she’d ever managed as a doctor riddled with her own guilt and shame.
And somehow, all of that seemed tied together with Tarek himself. Not the King, but the man.
Too beautiful. Too intense.
And unless she was mistaken, feeling all the same fire that she was.
Anya didn’t want to be mistaken. But she also wanted to feel alive.
She didn’t need a primer on all the ways it could go badly for her to marry this man on a whim. All the ways it could turn out to be a far worse prison than the one she’d just left.
She wanted one night. One night, just the two of them, to see.
“No kings, no queens,” she said, looking up at him as he rose to stand there before her, his hand extended. “Just a woman and a man, until dawn.”
“Come,” he said again, with all that power and confidence. Heat and promise.
Anya took her time getting to her feet, not sure her legs would hold her up. But they did. And as she had hours ago, she reached over and slid her hand into his.
Once more, the heat punched through her. She pulled in a swift breath, but that only made it worse. His hand was too hard. His grip was too sure.
She expected him to bear her off again, marching her through the palace with the same courtly formality he’d shown earlier.
Instead, Tarek pulled her closer to him.
With an offhanded display of strength that had her sprawling against the hard wall of his chest, and gasping a bit while she did it.
Because it had been one thing to say she wanted this. And something else to be so close to another person.
To him.
Her pulse skyrocketed as she gazed up at him. If it was possible, Tarek was even more beautiful up close. Even more compelling. He smoothed his hands over her head, sliding that scarf out of his way.
And she watched, transfixed, as he pulled a long, glossy strand of her hair between two fingers. Looking down at it, very seriously, as if it held the mysteries of the universe.
Then he shifted that look to her.
“Tarek—” she began.
His hard mouth curved. “I like my name in your mouth. But I have other priorities.”
Then he bent his head and put that stern mouth of his on hers.
Everything inside of Anya, all that fire and need, exploded.
Tarek gripped her head, he angled his jaw, and then he swept her away.
His kiss was a hard claiming. He possessed her, challenged her and dared her. Anya surged forward, pressing her palms harder against the glory that was his hard chest as if she could disappear into all his heat.
And she kissed him back, pouring everything she had into it. Into him.
Again and again.
He made a low, gloriously male sound, then tore his mouth from hers.
“No,” Anya breathed, heedless and needy. “Don’t stop.”
He laughed. Deep, dark, rich. It rolled through her, setting her alight all over again.
Chosen for His Desert Throne Page 7