But even as he asked himself the question, he knew the answer. He could imagine, all too well, that fierce, intent focus of hers on his body. On what they could do together.
He wrestled himself under control and wasn’t happy at how difficult it proved. “It was a confusing time. I regret that there were far more imprisonments than there should have been, and, indeed, your colleagues were released as soon as order was restored. But due to the vagaries of several archaic customs, you were not. I could explain why, but what matters is that the responsibility is mine.”
She broke her intense scrutiny of him then, glancing away while her throat moved. “They were released? How long ago?”
“As I said, when order was restored to the kingdom.”
She looked back at him, her eyes narrow. “Thank you. But is that a week ago? Seven months ago? Twenty-four hours after they were taken in?”
“I do not think they were incarcerated for very long.” That was no more and no less than the truth, as far as he knew it. He should not have felt that strange sense that he’d betrayed her, somehow. By telling her? Or by allowing it to happen in the first place—not that he’d known? Tarek felt the uncharacteristic shift about in his seat like a recalcitrant child. He restrained it. “No more than two months, I am given to understand.”
Across from him, Anya sat very still in her gray, faded tunic, that hair of hers tumbling all around her. She shook her head, faintly, as if she was trying to shake off a cloud. Or perhaps confusion. “I was forgotten about?”
Tarek held her gaze, surprised to discover he did not want to. He reminded himself that this was the foremost duty of any king, like it or not. Accountability.
It didn’t matter that he hadn’t known she existed, much less that she and her colleagues had been caught up in the troubles here. Just as it didn’t matter that he hadn’t known until this very afternoon that she had been languishing in his very own dungeon. He was responsible all the same.
He might as well have slammed shut the iron door and turned the key himself.
Tarek inclined his head. “I’m afraid so.”
She nodded, blinking a bit. Then she cleared her throat. “Thank you for your honesty.”
And for a moment, there was quiet. She did not reach for more food from the platters before her. She did not hold him in the intensity of her brown gaze, shot through with gold in the hectic light that filled this salon.
For a moment there was only the faint catch of her breath, hardly a sound at all. The sound of birds calling to each other outside. The lap of the fountain out on her terrace.
And the improbable beat of his own pulse, hard and heavy in his temples. His chest. His sex.
Tarek could not have said if it was longing...or shame.
He had so little experience with either.
“You should know that your presence here has created something of an international crisis,” he said when he could take the pressing noise of the silence between them no longer. “Something else I’m embarrassed to say I was unaware of until today.”
She smirked. “It’s created a crisis for me, certainly. An unwanted and forced eight-month vacation from my life.”
“I want to be clear about this,” Tarek said. “Were you harmed in any way?”
“Define harm,” she shot back. “I expected to be beaten. Abused.”
“If this happened, you need only tell me and the perpetrators will be brought to justice. Harsh justice to suit their crimes. I swear this to you, here and now.”
“None of those things happened,” Anya said, but her voice was thicker than it had been before. “And maybe your plan is to throw me right back into that cell today, so let me assure you that it’s an effective punishment. That cell is deceptively roomy, isn’t it? It’s still a cell, cut off from the world.”
He leaned forward, searching her face. “But you were not harmed?”
Her lips pressed into a line. “How do you measure the harm of being captured, shouted at in a language you don’t speak, separated from the rest of your colleagues, and then thrown into a cold stone cell? Then kept there for months, never knowing if today might be the day the real terror might begin? Or you might be trotted out for an execution? I don’t know how to measure that. Do you?”
Tarek studied her closely. Looking for scars, perhaps. Or some hint of emotional fragility or tears, because that, he would understand. But instead, this woman looked at him as if she was also a warrior. As if she too had fought, in her own way.
He felt his own scars, hacked into his flesh in this very same palace, throbbing as if they were new.
“It is all unfortunate,” he said quietly. “There are many ways to fight in a war, are there not? And so many of them are not what we would have chosen, had we been offered a choice.”
“I’m a doctor,” she replied, matching his tone. Her dark eyes tight on his. “When I go to war, it’s to heal. Never to fight.”
“We all fight, Doctor. With whatever tools we are given. Whether you choose to admit that or do not is between you and whatever it is you pray to.”