And there was that pressure in his chest. That pounding thing inside him that he thought was his heart, but it seemed too large. Too dangerous.
Too catastrophic.
“Come now, Doctor,” he said, not sure he sounded like himself—but it was hard to know what it was he heard with that storm in him. “There are far more pleasurable things to do tonight than forget ourselves.”
She was dressed in that gown that he had spent long hours today imagining taking off her, one centimeter at a time. Her hair was set with precious jewels, each representing a different facet of the kingdom. She was a vision, she was now his Queen, and the last thing in the world he wanted to talk about was love.
But Anya did not melt into him. She did not shake off the gathering storm. Instead, her hands found her hips.
“Forget ourselves?” she echoed.
This oasis was one of Tarek’s favorite places in all the world, and yet he never came here enough. It had been years. There always seemed far too many things he needed to do in the city, far too many responsibilities in the palace alone. He had looked forward to the time he would spend here with Anya more than he should have.
It was his own fault. He accepted that. He’d allowed his obsession with her to get the better of him.
No wonder it had come to this.
“I take responsibility,” he told her, as he had the day they’d met. When she had sat opposite him in her prison grays in a roomful of dizzy light.
When he had found himself stunned, the way he had been ever since.
His declaration did not have the effect on her that he’d been hoping it would. It was hard to say it had any effect at all. Anya only continued to stare up at him, still frowning, her hands still propped on her hips.
“I’m beginning to think that you say that as a way to deflect attention. It’s nice that you want to take responsibility, Tarek. But no responsibility needs to be taken.” She lifted her shoulders, then dropped them, a parody of a careless shrug when he could see the stubborn angle of her chin. “I’m in love with you.”
“We are married,” he ground out. “There is no need for...this.”
“We can pretend that I married you because I was suddenly seized with the need for a throne.” She actually rolled her eyes, something he would have taken exception to under any other circumstances. “But I think you and I both know that there are a great many more convenient ways to stop practicing medicine. I could have simply...stopped. People do that. Who knows? I could have moved to a quiet little town and opened a charming bookshop, if I liked. There are a thousand better solutions to a career that makes me unhappy than marrying a sheikh. A king. And everything that goes with that.”
“We discussed what this marriage is and isn’t,” he managed to say, aware that his voice was little better than a growl. “Romantic fantasies were never a part of this.”
“Oh, right.” Another eye roll, that Tarek liked no better than the first. “I should have realized. This is the part where you attempt to convince me that I don’t know my own feelings. This is where you tell me that I’ve somehow confused love with something else. A bit too much of the bubbly stuff, perhaps? I can see how a person might mistake the two.”
“I think,” Tarek said, carefully, though he was not doing a good job at keeping that seething, furious note out of his voice, “that it is easy to let the pageant of a wedding...become confusing.”
Anya aimed that smirk of hers at him. “Are you confused?”
“I warned you, did I not?” And he was less careful, then. The storm was too intense, too rough and wild. “You can’t help yourself. You’re culturally predisposed to romanticize everything.”
Any other woman of his acquaintance would have backed down in a hurry, but this was Anya.
“I wasn’t sitting in my jail cell, rhapsodizing about the possibility of being swept off into the arms of a desert king, thank you very much,” she hurled at him. “If I fantasized about you at all back then, it was to imagine your comeuppance. And I don’t think that I’ve romanticized what happened since. We had an agreement, sure. But we also had everything else.”
Tarek wanted to touch her. And knew that if he did, it would be betraying everything he stood for. Everything he was.
And still he had to draw his hands back as they moved toward her, seemingly of their own accord.
“I do not believe in love.” He said it with brutal finality, but he felt no joy in it when she flinched. “I should have made that clear from the start. I rather thought I did. Love has no place in an arrangement like this. How could it? I am a king, Anya.”
“You are,” she agreed. She shook her head as if she didn’t understand. Or as if she didn’t thinkheunderstood. “But you’re also a man. And that man—”
“There is no difference between the two,” he said gruffly. “Don’t flatter yourself, Anya. I married you because it was convenient. Marrying a Western woman, a doctor who the world decided was a prisoner of conscience, was a calculated political move. It suggests things about me that I would like the world to believe. That I am progressive. That I am capable of softer feelings and fairy tales. That my regime and my kingdom are soft and cuddly in some way, or that I have a more accessible side. When none of those things are true.”
Her hands had moved from her hips and were hanging on her sides, curled into fists now. Another gesture of disrespect he would accept from no one else in his presence. She’d gone pale, but she was still holding his gaze, no matter that her eyes were far brighter than before.
What she did not do was back down.
“I understand the nature of a press release,” she said, from between her teeth. “But that’s not the only thing that’s between us.”