And for another long, impossibly fraught moment, they only stared at each other. Here where the desert sun made the walls shimmer and dance. A fitting antidote to the dungeon, he thought. Abundant, unavoidable sunshine made into a thousand different colors, until the sheer volume of it all made breath itself feel new.
But as the silence wore on, he found the glare she leveled on him with those sharp, clever eyes of hers far more intriguing.
Another thing he did not plan to look at too closely.
“Do you have more questions?” she asked. Eventually. “I find the longer I’m out of that cell, the harder it is not to want to scrub myself clean of the experience. Assuming, that is, that this isn’t all a great ruse.”
Tarek understood, then, how easy it would be if this was the trick she thought it was. His brother, for example, would have thought nothing of fabricating some explanation for keeping this woman locked up—a law she’d broken that no one could prove she hadn’t—and then tossing her back down in the dungeon to rot. His treatment of his own staff had been the despair of the palace. Rafiq would not have cared about international opinion. If things grew tense, he would have closed the American embassy, shut the Alzalam borders, and continued to do as he pleased.
But Tarek was not his grasping, morally vacant younger brother. His vision of the kingdom did not involve petty tyrannies, no matter the inconvenience to him, personally.
“I am not the kind of man who plays games,” he told her, which should have gone without saying. He accepted that she was unlikely to know this about him. “Ruses of any kind do not impress me nor appeal to me. You will not be returning to that cell, or any other cell in my kingdom.”
“Because you say so?”
“Because I am the King and so decree it.”
“That sounds impressive.” She did not sound impressed.
He shoved that aside. “But should you choose to reach out to the outside world, I would have you recognize that the moment I knew of your imprisonment, you were released.”
She blinked again. Tarek wondered if he was watching herthink.And sure enough, her gaze sharpened even further in the next moment. “Wait. My imprisonment is your crisis? Not mypresence.But the actual fact that I’ve been locked away for eight months.”
There were so many things he could have said to that. He entertained them all, then dismissed them, one by one.
“Yes.”
Anya’s lips quirked. “What level of crisis are we talking about here?”
“I have not had time to study it in any detail, I am afraid. As I was more focused on removing you from the dungeon as quickly as possible.”
“Your mercy knows no bounds, I’m sure.”
These were extraordinary circumstances and she was the victim in this, so Tarek ignored the insolent tone. Though it caused him physical pain to do so.
Or perhaps you only wish for an excuse to touch her,something insidious and too warm within him whispered.
“My understanding is that your imprisonment is considered a humanitarian crisis in many Western countries. And as our papers have only recently begun discussing the outside world again, after this long year of unrest, it has gone on far longer than it should have.”
Anya nodded. “And I’m not a thoughtless tourist smuggling in drugs in a stranger’s teddy bear, am I? That can’t look good for you.”
Tarek unclenched his jaw. “As a token of my embarrassment and a gesture of goodwill, I will throw a dinner this very night. We will invite your ambassador. You can assure him, in your own words, that you are safe and well.”
That little smirk of hers deepened. “And what if I’m neither safe nor well?”
Tarek wanted to argue. She had eaten, she was sparring with him—him—and a glance at her cell had told him that she had not been suffering unduly while in custody. There were far greater ills. As a doctor, she should know that.
But he thought better of saying such things. What did he know about Americans? Perhaps the harm she’d spoken of was real enough. She could not possibly have been raised as hardy as the local women. Equal to sandstorms and blazing heat alike, all while keeping themselves looking soft and yielding.
It was only kind to make allowances for her upbringing.
“Then you may tell the ambassador of your suffering,” he said instead of what he wanted to say. Magnanimously, he thought. “You may tell him whatever you wish.”
“You will have to forgive me,” Anya said, sounding almost careful. It was a marked contrast to how she’d spoken to him before, with such familiarity. “But I can’t quite wrap my head around this. I expect to be seized again at any moment and dragged back to the dungeon. I certainly can’t quite believe that the King of Alzalam is perfectly happy to give me carte blanche to tell any story I like to an ambassador. Or to anyone else.”
Tarek made his decision then and there. The plan that was forming in his head was outrageous. Absurd on too many levels to count. But the more it settled in him, the more he liked it.
It was simple, really. Elegant.