Chosen for His Desert Throne

by Caitlin Crews

  Making it impossible for him to leave tonight, when he knew that’s what he should have done.

  To prove to her that what he said was true.

  That there was nothing between them but duty. Because that was all that should have been between them.

  He heard the rustle of her dress first, sounding like the desert breeze. Like the date palms that danced overhead.

  And then she was there beside him, reflecting back at him from the water’s surface. Tarek turned to look at her, expecting to find her in pieces and already kicking himself for breaking her, no matter how necessary.

  But his heart did the kicking, hard against his ribs, because this was Anya. She did not look broken in the least.

  “I did not expect you to come after me,” he said.

  When he could.

  “Why?” Her tone was arch, and she did nothing to conceal the evidence that she’d been crying from him. She stood beside him as if it was her place, her right, and made him wonder why he thought she should conceal anything. “Because women of your acquaintance are more likely to fling themselves on the mercy of foreign countries than confront you personally? I apologize. I never did learn how to cower.”

  He admired her, and that was only one of the problems. That was only one of the ways she was tearing him apart, and all she was doing was standing there, watching him calmly.

  As if she could see straight through him.

  And had every intention of doing it forever.

  Something in Tarek...broke.

  It was not the duties and responsibilities that marked his life. It had not been the losses he suffered. His mother when he was twelve. His father last year. Worse still, the brother he had loved unconditionally, until the night he’d come to kill Tarek. And had laughed while he’d tried, betraying not only Tarek in that moment, but all of Tarek’s memories of their childhood.

  As if Rafiq had died that night and killed Tarek, too. Yet both of them had to live with it.

  He had survived all of those things, if perhaps more scarred and furious than the cheerful boy he’d been once. He’d had no choice but to survive.

  But he didn’t know how he was meant to survive this.

  It was this. It was her.

  It was this woman he never should have met in the first place.

  And it was something about being here, far away from the civilization of the city, the dampening influence of the palace, where he could never forget for a moment that he was the King. And what, therefore, he owed everyone around him, all the time.

  But out here in the desert, he was only...a man.

  With her he became the things he should not whether he wished it or did not.

  With her he broke into pieces when he could not break. He tore open, when he needed to remain contained. Himself above all.

  “A broken man can rule, but only ever badly,” his mother had always told him. Well did Tarek know it. The history of the world was littered with broken men who ruled their countries straight into the dark.

  He had always intended to find the light. Always.

  “You knew the rules going in,” he heard himself say, louder than he could recall ever speaking before. As if he howled to the moon and stars above. “You knew what this was.”

  “But rules are not who we are,” Anya replied, with that impenetrable calm he found a challenge. More than a challenge—it bordered on an assault.

  “Rules are what separate us from the beasts,” he thundered at her. “And emotions are what separate kings from mere men. I have a country I must think of, Anya. Do you not understand this? I cannot have feelings.”

  Because that was what this was. He understood that now.

  He had become the thing he’d sworn he never would.

  All because of her. The woman who stood beside him, when he had never wanted that. He thought of that soft, inconsequential girl he had been betrothed to and knew full well that none of this would have happened, had she done her duty. He would have felt nothing. He would have married her, even bedded her, with courtesy and distance. He would have treated her with respect.

  He never would have felt a thing.

  And now, instead, Tarek felt everything.

  Every star in the sky above him was bright and hot and still dull compared to what shined in him now, all because of this woman.

  Anya turned to him then, looking at him straight on the way she always did. Direct, to the point.

  Honest, something in him whispered.

  Neither hiding the emotion he could see on her face nor flinging it at him.

  And a great deal as if she was daring him to do the same.

  Daring him, when no one else would brave such an endeavor.

  “I understand,” she said, so evenly he had the mad urge to force her to sound as uneven as he felt. As messy. As ruined. “If it was easy to fall in love, Tarek, we wouldn’t call it falling, would we? If it wasn’t overwhelming, we might say we stepped into it. Or slid into it, maybe. But everyone knows falling can only end one of two ways. Either you stick the landing or you don’t, and either way, it’s probably going to hurt.”

  That word echoed in his chest. In his head. It beat in him like a pulse.

  Like a drum.

  “I have spent my life in service to this country,” he threw at her. Then his hands were on her again, somehow, holding her close. The look in her eyes was killing him. She was killing him, as surely as if she wielded a sword or gun. When all she was doing was looking back at him as if she already knew all the noise and clamor inside of him. As if she heard that same drum. “My entire life, everything I have learned and everything I became, I’ve done so to better serve and rule this kingdom. And not merely rule from afar, as so many do. I put my body into the fires of war to protect my people. I always will. This is who I am.”

  “Of course it is,” she said softly. “No one doubts you are a great king, Tarek. How could they?”

  “What you’re asking me to do is—”

  But he couldn’t finish.

  And all the while the drums grew louder.

  “I’m asking you to love me,” Anya said, but she didn’t sound anguished. She sounded resolute. “I’m asking you to let me love you. I’m asking you to let us build a family, but not because it’s our duty. Not only because of that and not only because we intend to raise them in your family’s tradition, but because we want them to really understand what a family is.”

  “Anya...” he gritted out.

  “You’re right that I never mentioned protection,” she said, and to his astonishment, she smiled. How could she smile when he was being torn asunder where he stood? “I didn’t even think of it and I used to give lectures on the topic. How could I possibly have failed to think about something so important?”

  She shook her head, still smiling. Still wrecking him without even seeming to try.

  Tarek tried to gather himself, but it was no use.

  “I’ll tell you why,” Anya continued. “Despite some reports, I didn’t lose my mind in that cell. If anything, it clarified my life for me. And then there you were, with your hand outstretched, and I knew.”

  He shook his head at that as if he could ward it off—push her away—but even as he did, he held her close.

  “I couldn’t admit it to myself,” she told him. “I didn’t have the words. But I knew, Tarek. And I think that every choice I made that day was in service to this. Us. To building the family we were always meant to be.”

  “Anya. Habibti.”

  But she didn’t stop. “I don’t want a family like the one I already have, Tarek. I don’t want the coldness, the contempt. I think it’s possible that my father knew how to love a long time ago, but I don’t think it’s in him any longer. I don’t ever want a child of mine to feel the way that I have, all these years. And I don’t believe
that the man you are—the King you are—would tolerate treating his own child the way you saw my father treat me. You leaped to my defense. How could you visit that upon your own?”

  He didn’t understand what was happening in him. The earthquake that was ripping him open when he could see that the palms behind her stood tall.

  “My mother warned against this,” he managed to get out. “She was never involved in the harem’s squabbles, because she wasn’t emotional. She thought that it made her a better queen that she did not love my father and I have always agreed. The less emotion, the better. But I neglected to guard against other kinds of love. I was reckless enough to love my brother so blindly I overlooked his flaws, and nearly died for that folly. I want no more emotion in my life, Anya. None.”

  “Your brother is a coward and a snake. He’s precisely where he belongs, and you put him there. And loved him enough to let him live.”

  “It was an act of mercy, nothing more.”

  “Tarek. What is mercy if not love?”

  He wanted to shout at her. He wanted to shout down the trees. He wanted to wrestle the stars, and beat them into darkness—but all he could do was stand there as this woman tore him apart.

  “And maybe not loving her husband did make your mother a better queen.” Anya held his gaze. “Maybe that was exactly what your father needed. But Tarek. Do you think I don’t know who you are?”

  And Tarek was a man who had always known who he was. From the day of his birth, his destiny was secure. He had never had a moment’s doubt, never suffered from the trials of insecurity. How could he?

  He knew who he was. What he was. What he would do, how he would do it, and how history would record him.

  He had always known.

  Now he gazed down at this woman, his wife and his Queen, who made his heart beat. Who made him want things he’d never considered possible or even desirable before.

  And it suddenly became critical to him that he know who she thought he was.

  “You don’t need a cold queen, or a harem filled with women, none of whom love you so much as they love power,” she told him when he didn’t answer her question. Because he couldn’t. “You need me and you know it.”

  And for perhaps the first time in his life, Tarek found himself appreciating the power of pure confidence in another. Because Anya wasn’t asking him or begging him, she was telling him.

  She kept going. “You would never have chosen a prisoner and elevated her as you did otherwise. You would never have defended me against my own father, in public. Or left me with your own family the way you did, with no worries whatever that I might embarrass you or act against you in some way. You need me, Tarek. The woman who loves you. The Queen who will defend you.”

  “Anya.” And her name was that drumming thing, and that drumming was a song. He could hear it in the night all around them. In the wind and the sand. In him and between them. And, at last, Tarek stopped fighting it. “I fear...that want to though I might, I do not know how to love.”

  And her smile then was so bright it made the heavens dim.

  “Then I will love you enough that you are forced to learn,” she whispered.

  This time, when Tarek broke, he understood it was nothing to fight. It was no surrender. It was no rebellion he needed to quell.

  Unless he was very much mistaken...this was falling.

  And she was right. It hurt.

  But that hardly mattered. What was one more scar to add to his collection?

  “And if I already love you,” he managed to ask, though his heart ached. His temples were spikes of pain. He fell and he fell. “What then?”

  Anya slid her arms around his waist, and tilted her head back to look him full in the face. “We will make our own rules, here and now. You and I. We can do as we like, Tarek. This is ours.”

  And he thought, then, of possibilities instead of problems. Of hope instead of tradition.

  Of love—not instead of duty, but laced through it, making it glow.

  He thought, Have I loved her all along?

  And the thought itself seemed to fuse with that smile on her face, the stars all around them, and all the ways he fell. Until he was filled with a wild sense of wonder.

  “I think I stuck the landing, habibti,” he told her, and his reward was not only the way her smile widened and took the world with it. But the way it felt inside him, a wild rush that left him smiling, too.

  “I love your scars, that you won in defending this kingdom even though it broke your heart,” she said, moving her hands lightly over his chest, tracing one scar. Then the next. He felt it like light, though he still wore his robes. “I love your arrogance and your certainty, because it makes it so evident that you could never be anything but a king. I love my King, Tarek.”

  He wanted to speak, then, but he was filled with that wonder and a bright, almost painful thing—

  It occurred to him, at last, that it had never been obsession.

  This was so much more than that. She was.

  “And you deserve to love me back, King and man alike,” she whispered fiercely. “You deserve a place where you can hide, Tarek. Where you can be who you are. No thrones or kingdoms or worries. No people. Just you and me. Just this.”

  Tarek felt washed clean. Made new. He held her face between his hands again, but this time there was no darkness in it.

  Because there was none left in him.

  For she was a light far brighter than the desert sun, and he could feel her inside him like the brightest, hottest midday.

  “Just as you deserve a place where you can shine, Anya,” he told her gruffly. “Queen always. My Queen, always. And whatever you want of me, you will have, as long as I draw breath.”

  “Tarek,” Anya whispered. “I do love you. So much.”

  “I love you,” he whispered back, because there was no other way to describe the tumult. The longing and the light. The fury and the fear. The endless need, the sharp joy.

  Her. Anya.

  It was falling and then falling more. It was a tumble from a height so high it made his whole body seize—

  But the landing was worth the fall.

  It was the way she smiled at him. It was the ferocity in her voice when she came to find him, wherever he’d gone. It was the way she’d knelt before him on a terrace long ago, taking him deep in her mouth and absolving him of the scars he wore, the wars he’d won.

  It was the love in her eyes, then and now. Always.

  “I love you,” he said again, because it barely scratched the surface. It was too small a word, and yet it was everything.

  “Tarek,” she whispered. “I love you, too.”

  “Teach me how to love you,” he demanded, urgently. “Teach me every day. And I promise you, Anya, I will give you the world.”

  She slid her hands up the length of his chest, then looped her arms around his neck. And then they were both falling, together, and that was no less overwhelming, but it was theirs.

  This was all theirs.

  And it was good. And Tarek intended to keep on falling, forever.

  He was the King of Alzalam, and he would see to it personally.

  “Don’t you see?” Anya asked, breathlessly, still smiling as if she would never stop. “You already have.”

  And later, Tarek thought, he would think of that scene by the pools as the real moment they became husband and wife, man and woman.

  Them.

  Forever.

  But here and now, he stopped wasting time, and kissed her.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  TEN YEARS LATER, Anya waited for her husband near the pools at the oasis, on a night so like their wedding night that she found she couldn’t stop smiling.

  This time, she wore a shift dress and little else, sitting on a rock with her feet in the silky water. No bulky
wedding gown that had required both of them to remove.

  Eventually.

  They had kept their promises to each other. There had been press releases and publicity tours, but that fell under the mantle of duty. They were both deeply dedicated to doing their duty.

  But when they were alone, they were something more than a king and a queen, the embodiment of a kingdom’s hopes and dreams.

  They made their own hopes and dreams, together.

  He told her stories of Rafiq and the childhood they’d shared, learning how to grieve what was lost without letting what had happened tarnish the good that had happened first. And because he’d trusted her with that, she told him about her panic attacks and her mother, and how she was reclaiming her own memories of the happy life she’d had when her mother was alive.

  Because grief was love. And because they were together, there was no need to fear love, no matter how it presented itself.

  Loving each other was the best antidote to fear that Anya could have imagined.

  And it only grew with time.

  Anya gave birth to Crown Prince Hakim before their first anniversary. She stood beside Tarek on the balcony called the King’s Overlook where he’d taken her to announce their engagement, showing off the next generation to the crowds below.

  “You look so happy,” she’d whispered, brought nearly to tears at the sight of this tiny creature they’d made tucked up safe and sound in his father’s arms. And she didn’t think it was entirely due to her new mother hormones, either.

  It was him.

  Tarek had turned to smile at her—the smile that was only for her, no matter where they happened to be.

  “I have long dreamed of this moment,” he’d told her. “But I find that now it is here, what I care about is you, by my side. My Queen outside these walls. My wife within. But most of all, mine.”

  “Yours,” she’d agreed. “Always yours.”

  They’d made two more princes to keep Hakim company, then a brace of princesses. Each and every one of them a perfect bundle of dark eyes, dark hair, and a deep stubbornness they took pleasure in claiming came from the other.