He waited as Anya’s father turned an alarming shade of red. Tarek shot a look at Nur, who started up the conversation anew, and then Tarek sat back and stopped paying the older man the attention he did not deserve.
And it was only when the room filled with warmth and laughter again that Anya looked over at him and smiled.
Then mouthed her thanks.
Tarek had received gratitude before in the form of treaties. Surrenders. Invaluable gifts too innumerable to name, many of which were displayed with pride in this very palace.
But Anya’s simplethank youlodged inside him like a heartbeat.
Until his chest felt filled with it—with her. Until it threatened to take his breath.
Until he wondered what he was going to do with this.
How was he going handle this woman he needed to be his Queen when she made himfeel?
And not like the King he was—but like the regular man he could not permit himself to become.
Because Tarek knew well the cost of forgetting himself.
Rafiq had been the only person alive Tarek had felt he could truly be himself with. They had been so close. Tarek had depended on him. And Rafiq had used that affection to stab Tarek in the back.
Literally.
“You cannot permit yourself the failings and petty feelings of common men,”his mother had told him time and time again.“In a king these are fatal flaws, Tarek. Remember that.”
He remembered her words too well.
What was he going todo?
CHAPTER NINE
THEDAYOFthe wedding dawned at last.
Anya had been waiting for the sun to rise for hours, unable to sleep.
She had been ceremoniously escorted to her bedchamber the night before by Tarek’s sisters and aunts. It was tradition for the groom’s relatives to guard the bride and so they had, though the royal family’s version of “guarding” had included more laughter and abundant food. They had told Anya involved tales about Tarek as a child, omitting any mention of his treacherous brother. They had painted her pictures of what he’d been like as an adolescent, too aware of the weight he would one day carry.
All with a kind of easy, warm familiarity that Anya had never experienced before. She hardly knew what to call it.
It wasn’t until she’d gone and stretched out in her bed with only the moon for company that she realized it was...family. They were a family. More, they acted the way she had always imagined a family should. Teasing, laughing. Gestures of quiet support when more serious topics were addressed. The very fact they’d all gathered together to celebrate Anya when all they really knew about her was that she was Tarek’s choice of bride.
But they loved him, so that was all they needed.
Anya had stared out at the moon and accepted a hard truth. She had long told herself that she didn’t need the connections that other people took for granted. She had her chilly father, she’d told people when the subject came up, and that was more than enough family for her, thank you. She had friends, though she didn’t see them often enough.
But Tarek’s family wasn’t the Turner version of family. It was the version she realized now that she’d always imagined in her head—but had assured herself didn’t exist.
It left her something like shaken to discover that she was wrong.
More, it made her miss Tarek.
The solid weight of his stare. The sheer perfection of his body and the things he could do with it. The fire that burned so bright between them that she found she didn’t want to live without it, not even for a night.
She suspected she knew what words she could use to describe all the things she felt about the man she was marrying, and none of them werepractical.None of them were appropriate press releases.
But they were right there on her tongue. Dangerously close to spilling out at the slightest provocation.
“Until tomorrow,”Tarek had murmured much earlier that night, out in the desert where they had taken part in rituals he told her his people had considered holy since the earth was young.