But then, as her gaze moved over his body, roped with muscle and impossibly powerful, she found the red, raised scars. One crossed the flat slab of his left pectoral muscle. Another cut deep across his torso, all along one half of the V that marked where his ridged wonder of an abdomen gave way to all the relentless masculinity beneath. Those were the biggest, most shocking scars—but there were more. Smaller ones, crisscrossing here and there.
Anya realized she was holding her breath.
And she thought he realized it too, because with no more than a simmering look, he turned so she could see the ones on his back.
“Your scars,” she whispered.
“They came in the night like the cowards they were,” Tarek told her, slowly turning back to face her. “But let me assure you, their wounds were far greater than mine.”
“Wounds are wounds,” Anya said. And she wondered what lay beneath his. What it must have felt like for him, with his own brother involved in the plot against him. “And the marks we carry on our skin is the least of it, I think.”
“Perhaps.” He inclined his head in that way of his. So arrogant, every inch of him the absolute ruler he was, that she didn’t know whether to scream or launch herself at him. “But what matters is that I won.”
Anya had spent hours with this man by now. And had thought only of herself. Rightly so, maybe, given what had happened to her.
But she thought of his words from earlier.Tell me your secrets, and I will show you my scars.She thought of the fact that he hid them in the first place.
That he clearly had no intention of discussing hisfeelings,God forbid.
And it occurred to her, in a flash that felt a lot like need, that though he stood before her, the very picture of male arrogance, what he was showing her was vulnerability.
This was how this man, this King who had fought off his enemies and protected his throne and his people with his own hands, showed anything like vulnerability.
Anya understood, then. If she showed him softness, it would insult him. If she cried for the insult done to his beautiful body, she would do nothing but court his temper.
Tarek was not a soft man. And he did not require her tears.
So she responded the only way she could.
She flowed forward, moving from the edge of the cushion where she sat to her knees before him. She tipped her head back to look up at him, catching the harshness of his gaze. Matching it with her own.
Bracing her hands on either side of his hips, Anya took the hard, proud length of him deep into her mouth.
He tasted like rain. A hint of salt, that driving heat, and beneath it, something fresh and bright and male.
She had never tasted anything so good in her life.
Anya sucked him in as far as she could, then wrapped her hand around the base of him to make up for what she couldn’t fit in her mouth.
And then, using her mouth and her hands together and his hard length like steel, she taught herself what it was to live again.
His hands fisted in her hair. Anya thrilled at the twin pullsthis closeto pain that arrowed straight to where she ached the most. Sensations stormed through her as she took him deep, then played with the thick, wide head, using her tongue. And then suction. And anything else that felt good.
He groaned, and that sent bolt after bolt of that wildfire sensation streaking through her body to lodge itself in her soft heat, where it pulsed.
Tarek was muttering, dirty words in several languages, and Anya loved that, too.
She wanted all of him. She wanted, desperately, for him to flood her mouth so she could swallow him whole. So she could take some part of him—of this—inside her and hold on to it, forever.
And this time, she was the one who groaned when he pulled her away from him. It took her a few jagged breaths to recognize that the man who looked down at her then was not the King. Not the indulgent monarch.
He looked like a man.
A man at the end of his rope. And he was somehow more beautiful for that wildness.
Tarek hauled her up to her feet.
“You will be the death of me,” he growled at her.