“That is unpardonable.”
Was she imagining the heat in his gaze? The faint trace of humor in that dark voice of his?
“How did you find your ambassador?” he asked, doing something with his chin that brought one of the waiting servants over to place more delicacies in front of her. “Appropriately outraged on your behalf, I trust?”
“Are you asking if I issued that press release?” she heard herself ask, in a tone she was terribly afraid was more flirtatious than not.
Good lord. Maybe when she’d had that panic attack, she’d hit her head on the stone floor. That was the only explanation. She dropped her gaze to her plate.
But she could still feel Tarek beside her. The burn of his attention all over her.
“I have a far more interesting question to ask you than what you did or did not tell a career diplomat,” he said, all quiet force and the dark beneath. Like the night sky she’d wanted to float away in, ripe with stars. “Who will tell his own tales to suit himself, let me assure you.”
Anya’s heart was picking up speed again, but this time, without all the other telltale signs that she was descending into a panic attack. Because she wasn’t.
She recognized the heat. And what felt an awful lot like need, curling inside her, like flame.
It had been there from the moment she’d first seen him. And now, buffed and plucked and polished to please, she understood that it had been for him as much as for her. She’d felt pretty in her mirror.
But when Tarek looked at her, she felt alive.
It was crazy. Maybeshewas crazy. At the very least, she needed to leave this country and sort out what had happened to her—and how she felt about it—far, far away from the very dungeon where she’d been held all this time. This was likely nothing more than PTSD.
But tell that to the softest part of her, that melted as she sat there.
“You appear to be filled with questions,” she said. Less flirtatiously, to her credit.
“I have spent a long year as a man of action, primarily,” he said, and she made a note to look up the coup he’d mentioned. And what he’d done to combat it when his brother had been involved. “But I have always found that intellectual rigor is the true measure of a person. For without it, what separates us from the beasts?”
Anya forgot the plates piled high before her. “Some would say a soul.”
“What would you say?”
She was dimly aware that they were not alone. That the ambassador and his aides were still at the same table, sharing the same meal. But she couldn’t have said where they were seated. Or what they were talking about. Or even what any of them looked like.
It was as if there was only Tarek.
“I think that when everything is taken from you, what’s left is the soul,” she said quietly. “And it is up to you if that sustains you or scares you, I suppose.”
There was a different, considering light in his gaze then. “What did you find, then?”
Something in her trembled, though she knew it wasn’t fear. But it was as if some kind of foreboding kept her from answering him, all the same. Instead, she made herself smile to break the sudden tension between them. She reminded herself that they were not alone in this room, no matter how it felt.
And that he might have told her that he intended to be honest, but that didn’t make it true. He was a very powerful, very canny king who had proved that he was more than capable of holding on to his throne, the ambassador had told her earlier.
“He is not to be underestimated,”the man had said.
Anya spread open her hands, shrugging. “Here I am. I suppose that means that I found a way to sustain myself, whatever it took.”
Tarek lifted the glass before him, sitting back in his chair. He looked every inch the monarch. Currently indulgent, but with that severity lurking beneath.
She should certainly not have found him remotely compelling.
She told herself that of course she didn’t.
Yet as the dinner wore on, she admitted privately that something about this man seemed to be lodged beneath her skin. She might have told herself it was simply because he was the first truly, inarguably beautiful man she’d seen since her ordeal had begun. But a glance around the table put paid to that idea.
Because the ambassador’s men were all perfectly attractive. She could see that...but she didn’tfeelit. Her body didn’t care at all about these bland men with their overly wide smiles and targeted geniality.