She was dressed in that gown that he had spent long hours today imagining taking off her, one centimeter at a time. Her hair was set with precious jewels, each representing a different facet of the kingdom. She was a vision, she was now his Queen, and the last thing in the world he wanted to talk about was love.
But Anya did not melt into him. She did not shake off the gathering storm. Instead, her hands found her hips.
“Forget ourselves?” she echoed.
This oasis was one of Tarek’s favorite places in all the world, and yet he never came here enough. It had been years. There always seemed far too many things he needed to do in the city, far too many responsibilities in the palace alone. He had looked forward to the time he would spend here with Anya more than he should have.
It was his own fault. He accepted that. He’d allowed his obsession with her to get the better of him.
No wonder it had come to this.
“I take responsibility,” he told her, as he had the day they’d met. When she had sat opposite him in her prison grays in a roomful of dizzy light.
When he had found himself stunned, the way he had been ever since.
His declaration did not have the effect on her that he’d been hoping it would. It was hard to say it had any effect at all. Anya only continued to stare up at him, still frowning, her hands still propped on her hips.
“I’m beginning to think that you say that as a way to deflect attention. It’s nice that you want to take responsibility, Tarek. But no responsibility needs to be taken.” She lifted her shoulders, then dropped them, a parody of a careless shrug when he could see the stubborn angle of her chin. “I’m in love with you.”
“We are married,” he ground out. “There is no need for...this.”
“We can pretend that I married you because I was suddenly seized with the need for a throne.” She actually rolled her eyes, something he would have taken exception to under any other circumstances. “But I think you and I both know that there are a great many more convenient ways to stop practicing medicine. I could have simply...stopped. People do that. Who knows? I could have moved to a quiet little town and opened a charming bookshop, if I liked. There are a thousand better solutions to a career that makes me unhappy than marrying a sheikh. A king. And everything that goes with that.”
“We discussed what this marriage is and isn’t,” he managed to say, aware that his voice was little better than a growl. “Romantic fantasies were never a part of this.”
“Oh, right.” Another eye roll, that Tarek liked no better than the first. “I should have realized. This is the part where you attempt to convince me that I don’t know my own feelings. This is where you tell me that I’ve somehow confused love with something else. A bit too much of the bubbly stuff, perhaps? I can see how a person might mistake the two.”
“I think,” Tarek said, carefully, though he was not doing a good job at keeping that seething, furious note out of his voice, “that it is easy to let the pageant of a wedding...become confusing.”
Anya aimed that smirk of hers at him. “Are you confused?”
“I warned you, did I not?” And he was less careful, then. The storm was too intense, too rough and wild. “You can’t help yourself. You’re culturally predisposed to romanticize everything.”
Any other woman of his acquaintance would have backed down in a hurry, but this was Anya.
“I wasn’t sitting in my jail cell, rhapsodizing about the possibility of being swept off into the arms of a desert king, thank you very much,” she hurled at him. “If I fantasized about you at all back then, it was to imagine your comeuppance. And I don’t think that I’ve romanticized what happened since. We had an agreement, sure. But we also had everything else.”
Tarek wanted to touch her. And knew that if he did, it would be betraying everything he stood for. Everything he was.
And still he had to draw his hands back as they moved toward her, seemingly of their own accord.
“I do not believe in love.” He said it with brutal finality, but he felt no joy in it when she flinched. “I should have made that clear from the start. I rather thought I did. Love has no place in an arrangement like this. How could it? I am a king, Anya.”
“You are,” she agreed. She shook her head as if she didn’t understand. Or as if she didn’t think he understood. “But you’re also a man. And that man—”
“There is no difference between the two,” he said gruffly. “Don’t flatter yourself, Anya. I married you because it was convenient. Marrying a Western woman, a doctor who the world decided was a prisoner of conscience, was a calculated political move. It suggests things about me that I would like the world to believe. That I am progressive. That I am capable of softer feelings and fairy tales. That my regime and my kingdom are soft and cuddly in some way, or that I have a more accessible side. When none of those things are true.”
Her hands had moved from her hips and were hanging on her sides, curled into fists now. Another gesture of disrespect he would accept from no one else in his presence. She’d gone pale, but she was still holding his gaze, no matter that her eyes were far brighter than before.
What she did not do was back down.
“I understand the nature of a press release,” she said, from between her teeth. “But that’s not the only thing that’s between us.”
Tarek roamed away from her then. The tent was expansive, this room in particular, but it was still only a tent. There was only so much distance he could put between them.
He heard her follow him, her dress rustling in a way that set fire to parts of his imagination he wished he could cut out. Or dig out with his own fingers, whatever worked, just to be...himself again.
This was not how he had imagined this evening going.
When Tarek had looked up and seen her—there at the other end of the aisle that his staff had made through the center of the crowd, laden with flower petals to mark her way—he’d worried that he might truly have died where he stood.
Right there, in full view of the world.
He felt as if the skies had opened up and rain had poured down on this stretch of ancient desert that was lucky to see water from above perhaps twice in a decade. More, he was sure he’d been struck by lightning.
Repeatedly.
If possible, she was even more beautiful than she’d been only the night before, when he’d been bound to her in the desert, the fires all around them flickering over her and making her glow.
Tarek had wondered how it could be that every time he looked at her it was as if he’d never seen her before. He felt that stunning jolt of recognition. His heart beat at him, hard. He felt the punch of it in his gut. And always, that heavy fire in his sex that was only hers.
It was not Alzalamian tradition for a father to walk a bride to her husband. It was rare that a bride’s family had even been present in weddings of old, when brides had been used to end wars and make allies of enemies. Tarek had never been gladder that he was made of this place, these sands and these proud tribes, because even the sight of her dour father would have marred the perfection he’d seen moving toward him on her own.
A vision in white. Petals at her feet and glittering jewels in her hair.
His Queen. His woman. His Anya.
Her gaze was fixed on him as if he was the sun. She was smiling, brighter than the desert sky far above them in the grand courtyard.
There was a part of him that knew news organizations from around the world, set up around the courtyard with their cameras, would capture that smile. That it would sell their story better than anything else could. Tarek was aware of it the way he was aware of the sky, the heat, the crowd. All the inevitabilities, but he didn’t care about it the way he should have. He didn’t feel as if it was a job well done, that smile of hers, or as if he ought to sit around patting himself on the back for the show.
&n
bsp; All he could think was that her smile was his.
His.
For the first time in as long as he could remember, possibly ever, Tarek had resented the fact that he was the King. That he could not enjoy Anya’s joyful smile privately. That he could not keep this perfect, exquisite vision of his Anya walking toward him to marry him to himself.
I do not wish to share her, he had thought.
And when she finally reached him, he’d gazed down at her in a kind of shock, torn between what he wanted and what was.
Duty and desire, as always.
But there was only one winner in that fight, and ever had been.
Tarek knew that. He had always known that. And yet here he stood, engaged in futile battles inside himself while she looked at him with eyes so soft it made him ache, speaking of love.
“You can’t really mean to tell me that you think there isn’t more between us than a bargain we made,” Anya said from behind him.
He turned and braced himself, but she didn’t look the way he expected her to look. Her arms were folded and she was glaring at him. She was not cringing. She was certainly not frail and fainting. If she was awash in whatever emotions he’d seen in her eyes outside, he could see no trace of it on her.
This is your American doctor, he reminded himself. In case you have forgotten.
Not the sweetly pliant woman who smiled at him like he was a sunrise and ran all over him like the heat of the day.
“You’re talking about sex,” he said, harshly. “I won’t pretend I don’t enjoy it. But it is only sex.”
Tarek meant that to hurt. To cut her in half, or at least stop this conversation. And he did not admire that he had that in him. That urge to cause pain that did not speak well of him or his ability to control himself no matter the situation. How had he imagined he’d been tested before? He clearly had not been.
But he didn’t take those words back, either.
He should have known better. This was Anya.
She laughed.
And by the time she stopped, he found his teeth were gritted. His jaw clenched so hard he was surprised he didn’t hear something break.
“Oh, Tarek.” There was still laughter in her voice, and she shook her head a little as she said his name. “You can’t really think that I’ll suddenly and magically believe that what happened between us is just sex, because you say so. It doesn’t work that way.”
“You are mistaken,” he said, though his mouth was full of glass, he was sure of it.
“I was there.” It was as if she hadn’t heard him speak. Her gaze never wavered. “I know better.”
And something inside him was shaking. Shaking, crumbling, turning to ash and that bitter glass even as he stood there. Suggesting that what he’d taken to be the solid iron foundation of who he was, who he needed to be, had only ever been wishful thinking after all.
“I understand what it is you want,” he told her, trying to sound less like broken pieces and more like a king. “But you cannot have it. Royal marriages have always been thus. Each one of us has very specific duties, Anya. I must rule the kingdom. You must support the throne. There will be heirs and they must be raised to respect the country, its people, the traditions that make us who we are, and the future we must make happen if we are to thrive.”
“That sounds like a civics lesson,” she threw at him. “I’m talking about our marriage.”
“Our marriage has even more rules,” he retorted. “How could you think otherwise? This is not one of your romances. This is a union that must produce the next King. You and I do not belong to each other, Anya. We are not lovers. I belong to the kingdom. And you must know your place.”
“My place.” Her eyes glittered with temper and something else Tarek didn’t think he wished to define. “Maybe you’d better tell me exactly what you think that is.”
“I have been telling you.” His voice was an iron bar and he wished he still was, deep within. He wished she hadn’t made him doubt he ever could be again. “What do you imagine this last month has been?”
She did not laugh at that, as he half expected she would, this woman who sobbed out her pleasure as if she might never recover and then faced him down as no man alive would dare. He saw something in that gaze of hers falter as she searched his face. He told himself he did not wish to know what she looked for. “This last month?”
“Yes, Anya.” He started toward her then, the lanterns flickering all around them. The tent was lush, done up in deep colors, soft rugs, and everything that might make the cold of a desert night more comfortable. But it might as well have been a stark, empty cell for all he noticed. “What did you think? I have been teaching you how to be the Queen I want.”
“I didn’t realize that class was in session.” There was that brightness in her eyes again, but she didn’t give in to it. She stood taller, lifted her chin the way he thought she always would, and as ever with this woman, met his gaze.
Defiantly, he thought.
But Tarek was an expert at putting down rebellions. And he knew that if he did not stop this one before it started, it would sweep them both up. He had seen it happen.
He had spent his childhood surrounded by his father’s wives. Some of them loved his father. Others loved his power. But love was always at the heart of the jealous wars that swept through the harem, pitting wife against wife and even half siblings against each other sometimes. All for love.
Practical wives, like his mother, kept themselves above the fray.
“A queen in love with the King is but a silly woman in love with an inconstant man,” his mother had told him long ago, in the dialect that marked her as a member of the fiercest of all the Alzalam tribes. He knew his father had been forced to fight for her—literally, in a bare-fisted battle against her eldest brother. Only when he won did his mother’s people, and his mother, consider his proposal. “The world is filled with such women in love with lesser men. But there is only one King of Alzalam. And I choose to be his Queen first, last, and always.”
He had to make Anya see.
“I have taught you well,” he said as he drew close, impressed as ever that she did not back down. Even when he stood over her, perfectly placed to put his hands on her in temper. In passion. In any way he liked, but she looked unmoved by his proximity. “I taught you the kinds of meals that I prefer and how I like to eat them. I taught you how to give me your surrender when I wish it. Each and every kind of release I prefer. And how to please me with your compliance.”
She shook her head. “Silly me. I thought I taught you that there’s nothing wrong with taking out your frustrations on a willing participant.”
“There’s nothing I don’t like about you, Doctor,” Tarek gritted out, because that was no more than the truth. “I like your sharp tongue. I like your temper and your brain. And I think you know I like the pleasures of your flesh. But you must never mistake the matter. Those are part of the bargain we have made. Love does not enter into it.”
“I think,” she said softly, her eyes glittering, “that His Majesty protests too much.”
“There it is again. That maudlin belief that all things end up tied in a bow while something sentimental plays in the distance. I understand that you can’t help it. You can’t change where you came from.” He sighed. “But it’s not real, Anya. It will never be real.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“You don’t have to believe me. It makes no difference. Not believing me won’t make what I’m telling you any less true or real. It will only cause you heartache. Facts are facts whether you choose to believe them, or do not.”
“Tarek,” she began, a kind of storm in her eyes. “You must know that I can see—”
But he did not wish to know what she saw. He could not know what she saw.
He had only let his guard down once, and he bore the scars of tha
t mistake.
He refused to do it again.
“Very well then,” he bit off, wrapping his hands around her upper arms and jerking her toward him, as he should have done from the start. “Let me show you.”
And he set his mouth to hers in a punishing kiss.
But as sensation stormed through him, lighting him up and making him yearn for things he knew better than to want, Tarek suspected that the real punishment was his, not hers.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
HIS KISS WAS ELECTRIC.
Anya could feel it in every single inch of her body, tearing her up. Making her wonder how a person could function when they were nothing but pieces, scattered and torn and tossed to the wind. Burned alive, yet wanting nothing more than to keep burning.
She had half a mind to pull away. Slap him, maybe, not that she wanted to cause him pain. But she wanted to wake him up.
To prove to him that he was wrong about this and she was right.
That not only did she love him, but he loved her, too.
But Tarek was kissing her, and it didn’t take much for her to forget that there was anything in the world but that.
All the things she’d been thinking all day seemed to course through her then, its own kind of power source. Until everything was something far hotter and brighter than electricity, and she could feel it inside her, twisting all around and then sinking down deep.
To where she would always run hot and soft for him. All for him.
“This is what we are,” he gritted out, in her ear. “This is what I want from you.”
She wanted to protest. She wanted to beat him away with her fists. Or her mind did, anyway.
Because her body wanted nothing more than to be close to him. To be devoured by him and to devour him in turn. To be wrapped around him, and then, gloriously, lifted up into his arms once more.
Where I belong, she couldn’t help but think.
No matter how many times he tried to tell her otherwise.
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