And she told herself, as she melted against him all over again, that Tarek might be a king. That the King might have his practical reasons for this most bizarre of marriages. That the man who had fought his own family and wore their marks on his skin might have all kinds of reasons for the things he did, and he might not have told her half of them.
But that she was the one claiming him, even so.
CHAPTER SEVEN
LIFEINTHEDUNGEONwas slow. One day crawled by, then the next, on and into eternity, every one of them the same. The world outside the windows turned. Changed. Seasons came and went, but the dungeon stayed the same.
But after Anya agreed to marry Tarek, everything sped up.
“First,” said Ahmed, the King’s dignified, intimidating aide and personal assistant in one, a few days after she and Tarek had come to terms, “I believe there is the issue of press releases to local and international outlets alike.”
“Oh,” Anya said after a moment, staring back at the man. “You mean real ones.”
“Indeed, madam. They would otherwise be somewhat ineffective, would they not?”
She was seated in the King’s vast office, trying to look appropriately queenly. Trying also not to second-guess herself and the choices she’d made. But she’d snuck a look at Tarek then. “We wouldn’t want that.”
And she’d taken it as a personal victory when the stern, uncompromising King of Alzalam, sitting like a forbidding statue behind his appropriately commanding desk, had visibly bit back a smile.
If Anya was fully honest she didn’t really want to face the outside world. Every time she thought of her overly full mobile, she shuddered. But she also knew that as much as she might have liked to do absolutely nothing but lose herself in the passion she had never felt before in her life, that slick and sweet glory only Tarek seemed to provide, that wasn’t the bargain they’d made.
She was going to have to face the real world sooner or later, she reasoned. That might as well be under the aegis of the palace, so they could control the message. And help shelter her from the response.
“Timing is an issue,” Tarek said after a moment, no trace of laughter in his voice. “We would not wish to suggest that there was any romance conducted while you were more or less in chains.”
“A king romancing a captive can really only occur within a certain window,” Anya agreed merrily. “Lest we all forget ourselves and start fretting about upsetting power dynamics.”
“No one who has met you, Doctor,” Tarek murmured then, “would have the slightest doubt where the power lay.”
And though Ahmed looked at her as if that was meant to be an insult, Anya knew it wasn’t.
Because when they weren’t discussing media campaigns, wedding arrangements, or thorny issues of which family members to invite—what with her father being her father, and a number of Tarek’s relatives being in jail for attempting to kill him—they were exploring that fire that only seemed to blaze hotter between them.
Tarek, it turned out, hid a sensualist of the highest order beneath his stern exterior.
“You are always hungry,” he mused one night as Anya happily polished off yet another feast. They’d taken to eating in one of the private rooms in her apartments, the two of them sitting cross-legged on the floor where it was far easier to reach for each other when a different sort of hunger took control.
She paused in the act of pressing her linen napkin to her lips, waiting for a comment like that to turn dark. For Tarek to make her feel bad the way her father always had, with snide little remarks like knives.
But instead, he smiled. “I take pleasure in sating each and every one of your hunger pangs.”
And he made good on that at once, tugging the napkin from her fingers and laying her out flat before him on the scattered pillows. He drew the hem of the long, lustrous skirt she wore up the length of her legs. Then he lifted her hips and settled his mouth at her core, licking his way into her molten heat.
Only when he had her bucking against him, shattering and sobbing out his name, did Tarek sit back again. Then sedately returned to his dinner, merely lifting an arrogant brow when she cursed him weakly, lying there amongst the pillows in complete disarray.
“I do not wait for my dessert,” he told her, as if he was discussing matters of state. “If I wish to indulge myself, I do so immediately.”
“As you wish, Your Majesty,” she panted.
It took Anya a full week to face up to the reality of what awaited her on her mobile, much less the repeated requests for appointments with the American embassy. Not to mention the press releases—more a press junket, Ahmed informed her solemnly—that she’d promised Tarek.
A week to face her new reality and another week to decide that she was well enough prepared to handle it. Or if not prepared, not likely to suffer irreparable harm when subjecting herself to reporters and their intrusive questions.
She did the biggest interviews first, sitting in a room of the palace that seemed like an anachronism. It was tucked away next to an ancient courtyard that a small plaque announced had existed in one form or another even before the palace had been fully built. Truly medieval, yet it invited any who entered to breathe deep and forget about the passage of time.
But inside the media room, it was very clear what century Anya was in. It was all monitors and lights, cameras and green screens. The palace’s senior press secretary ushered her through the roster of engagements, where all Anya had to do was tell her story.
And more critically, her reasons for remaining in Alzalam now she’d been freed.