“You will be a natural.”
“Because you say so?” She had been slumped in a delicious sort of ruin where he’d left her, bonelessly draped over an ottoman in her bedchamber.
“Yes, because I say so,” he’d replied. “Am I not the King?”
Anya had smiled at him, the way he liked best. Dreamy and sweet. Private.
The Anya who appeared in public never looked that soft. That was for him alone.
And as he stood in the middle of the grand party in one of the palace’s ballrooms that night, Tarek found himself thinking about that smile more than he should.
Just as he thought about her more than he should, when he knew better.
Because while it turned out that the former prisoner he was marrying for purely practical reasons was remarkably good at distracting him from the things he brooded about, that didn’t change the truth of them.
Like the fact he was obsessed with this woman.
Tarek knew better than that. The history of his kingdom was filled with examples of why romantic obsession was a scourge. Nothing but a curse. Many of his ancestors had been endlessly derailed by theatrics in the harem. Favorite wives seemed to lead inevitably to catastrophes—witness his former betrothed and the shame she had brought to her family. Tarek had always vowed he would never succumb to such pettiness.
He had already paid dearly for the affection he’d held for his younger brother. He could not afford a far worse blindness. He would never forgive himself.
“Imagine my surprise,”Anya had said at dinner one day after she’d finally got a comprehensive tour of the Royal Palace.“I thought the dungeon was the scariest place in this building. But you actually have a harem.”
Tarek had been feeling expansive and relaxed. He had eaten, then spread his woman out on the table. He had eaten his dessert from her skin—sweets from the sweet—before burying himself inside her to the hilt. Then they’d gone out to the tiled tub on her balcony and sunk into the hot water. He had smiled at Anya’s wide eyes and scandalized tone.
“I was raised in the harem,”he told her.“My mother was only the first of my father’s many wives.”
And he was not a nice man, and nothing like a good one, because he had greatly enjoyed Anya’s look of horror.
“The only words we’ve discussed were wife and queen,”she’d said then. Her shoulders had straightened with a sharp jerk, enough to make the water slosh around them.“Wife was never plural. And neither wasqueen.”
“I enjoyed my childhood,”Tarek had told her, reaching over to pull her to him, settling her before him, her back to his front.“My brother and I were doted upon and when our half siblings arrived, they were, too. We all grew up together. We had maternal attention from all sides, and therefore felt that any attention we received from our father was a gift.”
He had not wanted to think about those years. When he and Rafiq had been so close. When it would have seemed laughable to him that anything could ever change that.
Even now, he sometimes forgot what had happened and thought to call his brother. Only to remember it all over again, with a sickening sort of lurch.
Anya’s shoulders were no longer braced for an attack. She’d softened against him, and he liked that better.
“It’s so hard to imagine that he could grow up and...do what he did,”she said quietly.
Tarek tensed, and hated that she could feel it.“When it comes to my brother, I do not imagine anything but his prison sentence.”
And his voice was so forbidding he could actually watch her respond to it. Her shoulders had risen all over again. Her breath went shallow.
He told himself he did not, could not mind it. His brother had no place here. Childhood memories were one thing, but he would have no...imagining.
“I think you would love the harem,”he had continued after a moment. He’d tried to sound relaxed again, looking over her head toward the city before them. The sky above, the lights below. And Anya between. It made something in him...settle.“It would certainly be one way to make friends in the kingdom.”
He’d wondered if she would nurse her upset. If she would act as if he’d bruised her—
But this was Anya.
All she did was twist around to glare at him as if his brother had never been mentioned.
“That, right there, is why I have no intention of filling my harem with all the wives I can support, though I certainly could. It is not worth all the fighting. The jealousy, the petty attacks, the attempts at power grabs.”He’d shaken his head, thinking of those years. Thinking of his father’s wives, not Rafiq.“My father always acted as if he was unaware of such things, but I’ve never seen greater personal viciousness than I did then. It was never directed at me, but that didn’t mean I didn’t see it.”
“Thank you for this lesson on the historical use of harems here,”Anya had said darkly.“I have no desire to be in one, thank you. I would rather become a neurosurgeon.”