Chosen for His Desert Throne

by Caitlin Crews

  Tarek could see the truth in that. His sense of insult faded. “And can you explain to me, as her father could not, why it is that the girl would be granted political asylum in the first place? She was allowed to leave the kingdom to pursue her studies. Supported entirely by me and my government. She would face no reprisals of any kind were she to return. How does she qualify?”

  Ahmed straightened, which was not a good sign. “I believe that there are some factions in the West who feel that you have...violated certain laws.”

  Tarek arched a brow. “I make the laws and therefore, by definition, cannot violate them.”

  “Not your laws, Sire.” Ahmed bowed slightly, another warning. “There are allegations of human rights abuses.”

  “Against me?” Tarek was genuinely surprised. “They must mean my brother, surely.”

  He did try not to speak his brother’s name. Not thinking it was more difficult.

  “No, the complaint is against you. Your government, not his attempt at one.”

  “I had the option for capital punishment,” Tarek argued. “I chose instead to demonstrate benevolence. Was this not clear?”

  “It does not concern your brother or his treatment.” Ahmed met Tarek’s gaze, and held it. “It is about the doctors.”

  He might as well have said, the unicorns.

  Tarek blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

  “The doctors, Sire. They were picked up eight months ago after an illegal border crossing in the north.”

  “What sort of doctors?” But even as Tarek asked, a vague memory reasserted itself. “Wait. I remember now. It is that aid organization, isn’t it? Traveling doctors, moving about from one war zone to another.”

  “They are viewed as heroes.”

  Tarek sighed. “Release these heroes, then. Why is this an issue?”

  “The male doctors were released once you reclaimed your throne,” Ahmed said without inflection, another one of his strengths. “As were all the political prisoners, according to your orders at the time. But there was one female doctor in the group. And because she was a Western woman, and because there are no facilities for female prisoners in the capital city, she was placed in the dungeon.”

  Tarek found himself sitting forward. “The dungeon. My dungeon? Here in the palace?”

  “Yes, sire.” Ahmed inclined his head. “And as you are aware, I am sure, prisoners cannot be released from the palace dungeons except by your personal decree.”

  Tarek slowly climbed to his feet, his blood pumping through him as if he found himself in another battle. Much like the ones he had fought in his own halls on that bloody night Rafiq and his men had come. The ones he wore still on his body and always would.

  “Ahmed.” The lash of his voice would have felled a lesser man, but Ahmed stood tall. “Am I to understand that after the lengths I went to, to show the world that I am a merciful and just ruler of this kingdom...this whole time, there has been not merely a Western woman locked beneath my feet, but a doctor? A do-gooder who roams the planet, healing others as she goes?”

  Ahmed nodded. “I am afraid so.”

  “I might as well have locked up a saint. No wonder an otherwise pointless girl, who should have considered herself lucky to be chosen as my bride, has instead thrown herself on the tender mercies of the Canadians. I am tempted to do the same.”

  “It was an oversight, Sire. Nothing more. There was so much upheaval. And then the trial. And then, I think, it was assumed that you were pleased to keep things as they were.”

  The worst part was that Tarek could blame no one but himself, much as he might have liked to. This was his kingdom. His palace, his prisoners. He might not have ordered the woman jailed, but he hadn’t asked after the status of any state prisoners, had he?

  He would not make that mistake again. He could feel the scars on his body, throbbing as if they were new. This was on him.

  Tarek did not waste any more time talking. He set off through the palace again, grimly this time. He bypassed graceful halls of marble and delicate, filigreed details enhancing each and every archway. He crossed the main courtyard and then the smaller, more private one. This one a pageant of flowers, the next symphony of fountains.

  He marched through to the oldest part of the palace, the medieval keep. And the ancient dungeons that had been built beneath it by men long dead and gone.

  The guards standing at the huge main door did double takes that would have been comical had Tarek been in a lighter mood. They leaped aside, flinging open the iron doors, and Tarek strode within. He was aware that not only Ahmed, but a parade of staff scurried behind him, as if clinging to the hem of his robes that towed them all along with the force of his displeasure.

  He had played in these dungeons as a child, though it had been expressly forbidden by his various tutors. But there had never been any actual prisoners here in his lifetime. The dungeons were a threat, nothing more. The bogeyman the adults in his life had trotted out to convince a headstrong child to behave.

  Tarek expected to find them dark and grim, like something out of an old movie.

  But it turned out there were lights. An upgrade from torches set in the thick walls, but it was still a place of grim stone and despair. His temper pounded through him as he walked ancient halls he hadn’t visited since he was a child. He tried to look at this from all angles, determined to figure out a way to play this public relations disaster to his advantage.

  Before he worried about that, however, he would have to tend to the prisoner herself. See her pampered, cared for, made well again. And he had no idea what he would find.

  It occurred to him to wonder, for the first time, what it was his guards did in his name.

  “Where is she?” he growled at the man in uniform who rushed to bow before him, clearly the head of this dungeon guard he hadn’t known he possessed.

  “She is in the Queen’s Cell,” the man replied.

  The Queen’s Cell. So named for the treacherous wife of an ancient king who had been too prominent to execute. The King she had betrayed had built her a cell of her very own down here in these cold, dark stones. Tarek’s memory of it was the same stone walls and iron bars as any other cell, but fitted with a great many tightly barred windows, too.

  So she could look out and mourn the world she would never be a part of again.

  This was where he—for it was his responsibility and no matter that he hadn’t known—had locked away a Western doctor, God help him.

  But Tarek had been fighting more dangerous battles for a year. He did not waste time girding his loins. He dove in. He rounded the last corner and marched himself up to the mouth of the cell.

  And then stopped dead.

  Because the human misery he had been expecting...wasn’t on display.

  The cell was no longer bare and imposing, the way it was in Tarek’s memory. There was a rug on the floor. Books on shelves that newly-lined the walls. And the bed—a cot in place of a pallet on the stone floor—was piled high with linens. Perhaps not the finest linens he’d ever beheld, but clearly there with an eye toward comfort.

  And curled up on the bed—neither in chains nor in a broken heap on the floor—was a woman.

  She wore a long tunic and pants, a typical outfit for a local woman, and the garments did not look ragged or torn. They were loose, but clean. Her dark hair was long and fell about her shoulders, but it too looked perfectly clean and even brushed. She was lean, but not the sort of skinny that would indicate she’d been in any way malnourished. And try as he might, Tarek could not see a single bruise or injury.

  He assessed the whole of her, twice, then found her eyes.

  They were dark and clever. A bit astonished, he thought, but the longer she stared back at him, the less he was tempted to imagine it was the awe he usually inspired. And the longer he gazed at her, the more he noticed more things a
bout her than simply the welfare of her body.

  Like the fact she was young. Much younger than he’d imagined, he realized. He’d expected to find an older woman who suited the image of a doctor in his head. Gray-haired, lined cheeks... But this doctor not only showed no obvious signs of mistreatment, she was...

  Pretty.

  “You look important,” the woman said, shocking Tarek by using his native tongue.

  “I expected you to speak English,” he replied, in the same language, though Ahmed had only said she was Western, not English speaking. She could have been French. German. Spanish.

  “We can do that,” she replied. And she was still lounging there on the bed, whatever book she’d been reading still open before her as if he was an annoyance, nothing more. It took Tarek a moment, once he got past the insolent tone, to realize she’d switched languages. And was American. “You don’t really look like a prison guard. Too shiny.”

  Tarek knew that his staff had filed in behind him at the shocked sounds they all made. He lifted a finger, and there was silence.

  And he watched as the woman tracked that, smirked, and then raised her gaze to his again. As if they were equals.

  “Important and you have a magic finger,” she said.

  Tarek was not accustomed to insolence. From anyone—and certainly not from women, who spent the better part of any time in his presence attempting to curry his favor, by whatever means available to them.

  He waited, but this woman only gazed back at him, expectantly.

  As if he was here to wait upon her.

  He reminded himself, grudgingly, that he was. That he had not fought a war, against his own brother, so that the world could sit back and judge him harshly.

  At least not for things he had not done deliberately.

  “I am Tarek bin Alzalam,” he informed her, as behind him, all the men bowed their heads in appropriate deference. The woman did not. He continued, then. “I am the ruler of this kingdom.”

  The doctor blinked, but if that was deference, it was insufficient. And gone in a flash. “You’re the Sheikh?”

  “I am.”

  She sat up then, pushing her hair back from her face, though she did not rise fully from her bed. Nor fall to her knees before him, her mouth alive with songs of praise.

  In point of fact, she smirked again. And her eyes flashed.

  “I’ve been waiting to meet you for eight long months,” she said, the slap of her voice so disrespectful it made Tarek’s eyes widen.

  Around him, his men made audible noises of dismay.

  Once again, he quieted them. Once again, she tracked the movement of his finger and looked upon him with insolence.

  “And so you have,” Tarek gritted out.

  There was still no sign of deference. No hint that she might wish to plead for her freedom.

  “I’m Dr. Anya Turner, emergency medicine.” Again, her dark eyes flashed. “I’m a doctor. I help people. While you’re nothing but a tiny little man who thinks his dungeon and his armed guards make him something other than a pig.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  ANYA HAD EXPECTED this moment to be sweet and satisfying, if it ever came, but it went off better than she’d imagined.

  And she’d done very little else but imagine it.

  For months.

  The Sheikh of Alzalam himself stood before her. The man who every guard she’d encountered had spoken of in terms of such overwrought awe and glory that they’d made it a certainty that Anya would have loathed him on sight.

  Even if she wasn’t incarcerated in his personal prison.

  She didn’t much care for arrogant men at the best of times, which this obviously was not. Between her own father and every male doctor she’d ever met—not to mention the surgeons, who could teach arrogance to kings like this one and would not need an invitation to do so—Anya was full up on condescending males. An eight-month holiday in the company of these prison guards had not helped any.

  And the way the Sheikh stared back at her, as if dumbstruck that she wasn’t even now weeping at his feet, did not exactly inspire her to change her mind about the male ego.

  The stunned silence went on.

  Anya found herself sitting a little straighter, a little taller, as if that would protect her if the Sheikh had finally turned up only to go medieval on her. It occurred to her that, perhaps, she should have tried to get herself out of the dungeon before shooting off her mouth.

  A lesson she never seemed to learn, did she?

  After all these months, she’d figured she already knew how bad things could get here. She’d decided that sharing her unbridled feelings couldn’t make things worse. What was worse than finding herself locked away in a literal dungeon in a country she wasn’t even supposed to be in—separated from her colleagues who were very possibly dead and being kept alive for reasons no one had seen fit to share with her?

  But as she stared back at the tall, ferocious, and obviously powerful man on the other side of her cell door, she was terribly afraid he might have a few answers to that question she wouldn’t like.

  Anya held her breath, but he didn’t move. He only stared her down, inviting her to do the same.

  There was a wall of other men behind him, staring at her in shock and disapproval, but he looked like he was attempting to crawl inside her head.

  Anya didn’t know what was wrong with her that she wanted to let him. Just because staring at him made her feel alive again. Just because it was different.

  It had been eight months. Some two hundred and forty days, give or take. At first she’d intended to scratch each day into the walls, because wasn’t that what people did? But she’d quickly discovered that someone—quite a few someones, or so she hoped, given the number of slash marks she’d found—had beaten her to it. She’d found that depressing. So depressing that she’d covered up the marks once the guards started permitting her furniture.

  She had already cycled through fear. Despair. Over and over again, in those early days, until the panic faded.

  Because that was the funny thing about time. It had a flattening effect. The human body couldn’t maintain adrenaline that long. Sooner or later, routine took over. And with routine, a tacit acceptance.

  She’d become friendly with her guards, though never too friendly. She’d learned the language, because that meant she was less in the dark. They’d made her comfortable, and over time, it became more and more clear that they had no intention of hurting her. Or no immediate plans to try, anyway.

  Anya would have said she didn’t have much fear left. She would have meant it.

  Though the longer she stared at the man before her, stern and forbidding and focused intently on her, the more it reintroduced itself to the back of her neck. Then began tracing its way down her spine.

  Maybe that’s not entirely fear, something inside her suggested.

  But she dismissed that. Because it was crazy.

  And she had no intention of losing her mind in here, no matter how tempting it was. No matter how much she thought she might like a little touch of oblivion to make the time pass.

  Okay, yes, she told herself impatiently. He is remarkably attractive for a pig.

  Though attractive was an understatement.

  He was dressed all in white, and in a contrast to the variously colored robes all the men wore around him, his fit him more closely. And more, were edged in gold. She probably should have known from that alone that he was the man in charge.

  Sheikh. Ruler. King. Whatever they called him, he looked like the love child of the desert sun and some sort of bird of prey. A falcon, maybe, cast in bronze and inhabiting the big, brawny body of an extraordinarily fit man.

  She was holding her breath again, but it was different. It was—

  Stop it, Anya ordered herself.

  This was no tim
e to pay attention to something as altogether pointless as how physically fit the man was. So what if he had wide shoulders and narrow hips, all of it made of muscle. So what if he made gilt-edged robes look better than three-piece suits.

  What mattered was that he’d thrown her into his dungeon and, as far she could tell, had thrown away the key, too. Anya had done a lot of dumb things in her lifetime—from allowing her father to bully her into medical school to focusing on emergency medicine because he’d told she was unsuited for it, to accepting the job that had brought her here, mostly to escape the job she’d left behind in Houston—but surely sudden-onset Stockholm syndrome would catapult her straight past dumb into unpardonably stupid.

  She was sure she saw temper glitter in his dark, dark eyes. She would have sworn that same temper made that muscle in his jaw flex.

  She did not feel an echo of those things inside. She refused to feel a thing.

  “Please accept my humblest apologies,” he said, and now that she wasn’t gearing up to tell him what she thought of him, there was no escaping the richness of his voice. He spoke English with a British intonation, and she told herself it was adrenaline that raced through her, then. She’d forgotten what it felt like, that was all. “There has been great unrest in the kingdom. It is unfortunate that your presence here was not made known to me until now.”

  That was not at all what Anya had been expecting.

  It felt a lot as if she’d flung herself against the walls—something she had, in fact, done repeatedly in the early days—only to find instead of the expected stone and pitiless bars, there was nothing but paper. She suddenly felt as if she was teetering on the edge of a sharp, steep cliff, arms pinwheeling as she fought to find her balance.

  Something knotted up in her solar plexus.

  It was a familiar knot, to her dismay. That same knot had been her constant companion and her greatest enemy over the last few years. It had grown bigger and thornier as she’d grown increasingly less capable of managing her own stress.