An outrage.
For a moment, Anya froze, feeling as if he’d kicked her. That terrible knot grew teeth. But in the next moment, she breathed out. And again, as she had the night he showed her his scars, Anya understood that this was not something she could laugh away. She couldn’t show him her first reaction. Once again, it was not softness or emotion he needed.
Maybe, something in her whispered,all that medical training was not to keep your cool in an emergency room.Maybe it was so you could stare down a king no matter his mood, and be what he needs. Whether or not he knows how to ask for it.
Not because she was losing herself in him, as one article she’d read about herself tonight had suggested. But because he wasn’t simply a man, who a woman might argue with about domestic arrangements or respect or any number of things.
His people needed him to rule above all else. They had told her so themselves, out in the winding streets of this age-old city. And if she wanted to marry him, to be his Queen as well as his woman, she needed to support the King first.
Only once the ruler was handled could she tend to the man.
Because she was the only one who got both.
“You’re welcome,” Anya said, neither gently nor particularly apologetically.
He blinked at that, a slow show of arrogant disbelief that made her pulse pick up. “I beg your pardon?”
She didn’t quite shrug. “Tedious negotiations with terrible people, you say? How lucky you must feel to know that I’ll be waiting for you at the end of it.” Anya nodded regally toward the foot of her chaise. “And you are even more lucky that I find myself in the mood for a king.”
“Are you suggesting that it is possible that you might evernotbe in the mood for your King?” Tarek was gazing down at her as if thunderstruck. Far better than the look that had been in his eyes before, by any reckoning. “An impossibility, surely. Or treason. You may take your pick.”
“I am the Queen of this land,” she told him grandly, and only just kept herself from waving an imaginary scepter in the air between them.
Tarek’s dark eyes gleamed with the fire she knew best. “Not yet, Anya. Not quite yet.”
“I will be the Queen in a week, and you are trying my patience.” She sniffed haughtily. “Daring to come before me and speak to me of petty concerns when you could be pleasuring me, even now.”
She was sure she could see him waver there. He looked torn between the sort of erotic outrage she was going for or more of whatever temper had brought him here, too much like a storm cloud for her liking.
Anya held her breath. She waited. And she could see exactly when that hunger that never seemed to wane between them won.
“You may not like the way I worship you, my Queen,” Tarek told her then, his voice deep, suggestive, and a kind of dark threat that made her shiver, happily. “But I will.”
Then he fell upon her. Both of them ravenous, both of them wild.
And when he held her before him, on her hands and knees so he could take her as he liked, Anya gloried in it, in him. The impossible iron length of him was a wildfire inside her. A gorgeous catastrophe of sensation and need. She was bared entirely to his gaze and to the desert sky, vulnerable and invulnerable at once, while he surged deep inside of her and made her scream.
It was quickly becoming her favorite melody.
A song she wanted to sing out, heedless and loud, for the rest of her days.
But Tarek wasn’t done. And as he pounded them both sweet again, until they werethemagain, Anya gave herself over to the only form of wedding vow she thought she’d ever need.
Again and again and again.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THEWEDDINGGUESTSbegan to pour in the day after their announcement.
From near and far they came. Tarek welcomed in men who had fought with him, relatives and business allies, foreign heads of state and an inevitable selection of celebrities. He pretended he did not know which of his guests had spoken against him over the course of the last year and which had given him nothing but their quiet support.
But he knew. And they knew. And there was a power in the invitation to his would-be enemies, to permit them to witness how wrong they’d been about him up close. It was the logical extension of the press junket he and Anya had undertaken and Tarek could not pretend he didn’t enjoy it.
There was a grand party that night to kick off the traditional week of celebrations. It was also the first opportunity for Anya to prove to the international crowd that she was not under duress. And for the people of Alzalam, that she was worthy of the role she was to assume at the end of the week.
“No pressure, then,” she’d said earlier in the flippant manner only she dared employ in his presence.
Tarek had found he had to have her, in a slick rush of need, even if it meant that her aides would have to reapply all the beauty enhancements—to his mind, wholly unnecessary—that they’d used on her to prepare her for the evening.