Anya felt swollen and desperate straight through, and he was still laughing.
“Order me around, Doctor,” he suggested, his voice moving inside her as if it was a part of her. As if it was the sun, even now, in the dark of night. “Tell me what to do and see how that works for you.”
But before she could try, mostly to see what he would do, Tarek bent slightly to sweep her into his arms.
Anya knew that none of this made sense. That she should have left with the American ambassador when she’d had the chance. That she certainly shouldn’t have exposed herself to this man, telling him secrets she’d never breathed to another living soul.
Yet she had.
What was another vulnerability to add to the list? Maybe she was lucky she hadn’t become a psychiatrist. She doubted she would enjoy knowing the inner workings of her own mind. Not when there was a king gazing down at her, his expression stern and possessive, sending a spiral of delight all the way through her.
Maybe, finally, it was time to stop thinking altogether. And to let herself feel instead.
Because she already knew what it was like to sit frozen in the dark. Literally.
Tonight, Anya intended to shine. And live. And feel everything—every last drop of sensation she was capable of feeling. Every touch, every sigh, every searing bit of flame she could hoard and call her own.
It took her a moment to realize that Tarek was moving. His powerful body was all around her, those arms of his holding her aloft as if she weighed little more than a notion. The granite wall of his chest. The tempting hollow at the base of his throat. His scent, a faint hint of smoke and what she assumed gold might smell like, warmed through and made male.
She assumed he would carry her off to his bed, wherever that was in this sprawling place, but instead he headed out through the grand, windowed doors that led outside. Anya caught a glimpse of the lights of the old city, gleaming soft against the desert night. Then he was setting her down, and it took her a moment to get her bearings, to find herself out on one of the palace’s many balconies.
This one was made for comfort. He placed her on one of many low, bright couches, ringed all around with torches, and a canopy far above. There was a thick rug tossed across the ground at her feet and lanterns scattered across the table, making her think of long-ago stories she’d read as a child.
Tarek stood before her, gazing down at her as if she was the spoils of the war he’d fought, and he intended to fully immerse himself in the plunder.
Her entire body reacted to that thought as if she’d been doused in kerosene. She was too hot. She had too many clothes on. She was burning alive.
Looking at him was like a panic attack, except inside out. Anya’s heart pounded. She could feel herself grow far too warm. And she felt a little dizzy, a little unsure.
But what was laced through all of that wasn’t fear.
There was only him.
And how deeply, how wantonly and impossibly, she wanted him.
As she watched, Tarek began to remove those robes of his, casting them aside in a flutter of ivory and gold. He kept going until he stood before her, magnificently naked.
And when he made no move toward her, she felt a moment’s confusion—
But then, as her gaze moved over his body, roped with muscle and impossibly powerful, she found the red, raised scars. One crossed the flat slab of his left pectoral muscle. Another cut deep across his torso, all along one half of the V that marked where his ridged wonder of an abdomen gave way to all the relentless masculinity beneath. Those were the biggest, most shocking scars—but there were more. Smaller ones, crisscrossing here and there.
Anya realized she was holding her breath.
And she thought he realized it too, because with no more than a simmering look, he turned so she could see the ones on his back.
“Your scars,” she whispered.
“They came in the night like the cowards they were,” Tarek told her, slowly turning back to face her. “But let me assure you, their wounds were far greater than mine.”
“Wounds are wounds,” Anya said. And she wondered what lay beneath his. What it must have felt like for him, with his own brother involved in the plot against him. “And the marks we carry on our skin is the least of it, I think.”
“Perhaps.” He inclined his head in that way of his. So arrogant, every inch of him the absolute ruler he was, that she didn’t know whether to scream or launch herself at him. “But what matters is that I won.”
Anya had spent hours with this man by now. And had thought only of herself. Rightly so, maybe, given what had happened to her.
But she thought of his words from earlier. Tell me your secrets, and I will show you my scars. She thought of the fact that he hid them in the first place.
That he clearly had no intention of discussing his feelings, God forbid.
And it occurred to her, in a flash that felt a lot like need, that though he stood before her, the very picture of male arrogance, what he was showing her was vulnerability.
This was how this man, this King who had fought off his enemies and protected his throne and his people with his own hands, showed anything like vulnerability.
Anya understood, then. If she showed him softness, it would insult him. If she cried for the insult done to his beautiful body, she would do nothing but court his temper.
Tarek was not a soft man. And he did not require her tears.
So she responded the only way she could.
She flowed forward, moving from the edge of the cushion where she sat to her knees before him. She tipped her head back to look up at him, catching the harshness of his gaze. Matching it with her own.
Bracing her hands on either side of his hips, Anya took the hard, proud length of him deep into her mouth.
He tasted like rain. A hint of salt, that driving heat, and beneath it, something fresh and bright and male.
She had never tasted anything so good in her life.
Anya sucked him in as far as she could, then wrapped her hand around the base of him to make up for what she couldn’t fit in her mouth.
And then, using her mouth and her hands together and his hard length like steel, she taught herself what it was to live again.
His hands fisted in her hair. Anya thrilled at the twin pulls this close to pain that arrowed straight to where she ached the most. Sensations stormed through her as she took him deep, then played with the thick, wide head, using her tongue. And then suction. And anything else that felt good.
He groaned, and that sent bolt after bolt of that wildfire sensation streaking through her body to lodge itself in her soft heat, where it pulsed.
Tarek was muttering, dirty words in several languages, and Anya loved that, too.
She wanted all of him. She wanted, desperately, for him to flood her mouth so she could swallow him whole. So she could take some part of him—of this—inside her and hold on to it, forever.
And this time, she was the one who groaned when he pulled her away from him. It took her a few jagged breaths to recognize that the man who looked down at her then was not the King. Not the indulgent monarch.
He looked like a man.
A man at the end of his rope. And he was somehow more beautiful for that wildness.
Tarek hauled her up to her feet.
“You will be the death of me,” he growled at her.
“But a good death,” Anya replied, though her mouth felt like his, because he was all she could taste. “Isn’t that the point?”
“I have no intention of dying,” Tarek told her fiercely. His hands were busy, and she felt too limp, too ravaged by lust and need, to do anything but stand there as he stripped her of her tunic, her trousers, her silky underthings. “Certainly not before I had tasted every inch of you, habibti.”
And when he bore her down to the soft cushions behind h
er, they were both gloriously undressed at last.
Anya felt as if she’d been waiting a lifetime for this. For him.
At first it was almost like a fight, as they each wrestled to taste more. To consume each other whole.
She kissed his scars, one after the next, until he flipped her over and set about his own tasting. Each breast. Her nipples. The trail he made himself down the length of her abdomen, until he could take a long, deep drink from between her legs.
But even though she bucked against him, on the edge of shattering, he only laughed. That dark, rich sound that seemed to pulse in her. Then he nipped at the inside of her thigh.
“Not so fast, habibti,” he said, climbing back up her body. “I wish to watch you come apart. So deep inside you that neither one of us can breathe. So there can be no mistake that no matter what else happens in the course of my reign, no matter what we find in this practical arrangement of ours, we will always have this.”
And before she could react to that, he twisted his hips and drove himself, hard and huge, deep inside of her.
Anya simply...snapped.
She arched up, shattering all around him with that single stroke that was almost too much. Almost too deep.
She rocked herself against him, over and over, as the storm of it took her apart, shaking her again and again until she forgot who she was.
And as she came back, she was gradually aware that Tarek waited, smoke and gold and dark eyes trained on her face, as if he was drinking in every last moment.
He was still so hard. Still so deep inside her she could feel him when she breathed. He braced himself above her, that beautiful predator’s gaze trained on her. And the sight of all that barely contained ferocity above her while he was planted within her made the heat inside her flare all over again.
“This is not a hallucination brought on by a prison cell,” he told her, his voice no more than a growl.
“No,” she agreed, breathlessly. She wrapped her legs around him because she knew, somehow, that she needed to hold on tight. “This is who we are.”
And Tarek smiled at her, though it was a fierce thing, all teeth and sensual promise.
Only then did he begin to move.
It was like coming home.
He wasn’t gentle. She wasn’t sweet. It was a clashing of bodies, pleasure so intense it made her scream.
Tarek pounded into her, his mouth against her neck. They flipped over once and she found herself astride him. She braced herself against his chest as she worked her hips to get more, to ride that line between pleasure and pain when it was all part of the same glory.
To make them one, to make them this.
Then they flipped again and he was on his knees, lifting her so he could wrap his arms around her hips and let her arch back as she wished. She did, lifting her breasts to his mouth for him to feast upon while he worked her against him, over and over.
Until she couldn’t tell if he pounded into her or she surged against him. It was all one.
Finally, Tarek gathered her beneath him again. He reached down between them while still he surged into her, that same furious pace, and pinched the place where she needed him most.
Hard enough to make her scream.
And while she screamed for him, explode.
Anya sobbed as he kept pounding into her, again and again, aware that she felt like she was flying. Like she was finally free.
She felt him empty himself inside her with a shout as they both catapulted straight into the eye of the storm they’d made.
And shook together, until it was done.
For a long while, Anya knew very little.
Slowly, she became aware of herself again, but barely. And only when Tarek shifted, pulling out of the clutch of her body, but moving only far enough to stretch out beside her. He shifted her to his chest and she breathed there while the night air washed over her body, cooling her down slowly.
Anya thought she really ought to spend some time analyzing what had just happened. If it was possible to analyze...all that. She should consider what to do now. Now that she knew. Now that there was no going back from that knowing.
But that felt far too ambitious.
Instead, she rested her cheek against his chest. She could feel the ridge of his scar and beneath it, the thunder of his heart. It felt a lot like poetry. She watched the torches set at intervals around them dance and flicker. From where they lay, stretched out on the wide sofa, she could see the tallest spires of the city in the distance. Rising up above them as if they were keeping watch while the desert breeze played lazily with the canopy far above.
Anya was wrecked. Undone.
And she had never felt so alive, so fully herself, in all her days.
“Well?” came Tarek’s voice, from above and beneath her at once.
He sounded different, she thought, as she shifted so she could look at him. And though he gazed at her with all his usual arrogance, there was an indulgent quirk to his fine, sensual lips.
She hungered for him, all over again, her body heating anew.
It should have scared her, these postprison appetites. But she knew that what charged through her was nothing so simple as fear.
Fear left her sprawled out on bathroom floors, gasping for her breath. It didn’t make her feel sunlight in a desert night, or as if she’d discovered wings she’d never known were there. Fear reduced her into nothing but a set of symptoms she couldn’t think through. It created nothing, taught her nothing, and never left her anything like sated.
Anya had never considered it before, but fear was simple.
What stormed in her because of Tarek, with Tarek, was complicated. Possibly insane, yes. But there were too many layers in it for her to count. Too many contradictions and connections. Scar tissue and the stars above, and that delirious heat, too.
“And if I say that I have never been so disappointed?” she asked, though she couldn’t keep herself from smiling.
His smile did not change his face, it made him more of what he was. Like a hawk, she thought, as she had from the first. He made her shiver with a single look. But he also held her there, tight against his body, as if he would never let go.
“Then I will call you a liar,” he said, dark and sure. “Which is no way to begin a marriage, I think.”
He waited, that fierce gaze of his on her. Stark and certain. And yet Anya knew that all she needed to do was roll away from him. Thank him, perhaps, and he would let her go.
She could be back in the States before she knew it. Back to whatever her life was going to look like, on the other side of this. And by this she wasn’t sure she meant the dungeon so much as the fact she’d finally admitted all those dark, secret things in her heart. She had finally said them out loud.
How could she go back from that?
“Be my Queen, Anya,” Tarek urged her, his voice a dark, royal command. She could feel it in every part of her, particularly when he shifted so he could bend over her once more, bringing his mouth almost close enough to hers. Almost. “Marry me.”
He was holding her tight, yet she felt set free.
Whatever else happened, surely that was what mattered.
“I take it you want a real marriage,” she said as if the idea was distasteful to her, when it was nothing of the kind. “Not one of those ‘for show’ ones royals supposedly have. For the people and the press releases and what have you.”
And this time, she could feel his smile against her mouth. “I will insist.”
“All right then,” Anya muttered, trying to sound grumpy when she was smiling too. “I suppose I’ll marry you, Tarek.”
From captive to Queen, in the course of one evening.
It made her dizzy.
Then he did, when he took her mouth in a kiss so possessive she almost thought it might leave a bruise.
/> Anya wished it would.
And she told herself, as she melted against him all over again, that Tarek might be a king. That the King might have his practical reasons for this most bizarre of marriages. That the man who had fought his own family and wore their marks on his skin might have all kinds of reasons for the things he did, and he might not have told her half of them.
But that she was the one claiming him, even so.
CHAPTER SEVEN
LIFE IN THE DUNGEON was slow. One day crawled by, then the next, on and into eternity, every one of them the same. The world outside the windows turned. Changed. Seasons came and went, but the dungeon stayed the same.
But after Anya agreed to marry Tarek, everything sped up.
“First,” said Ahmed, the King’s dignified, intimidating aide and personal assistant in one, a few days after she and Tarek had come to terms, “I believe there is the issue of press releases to local and international outlets alike.”
“Oh,” Anya said after a moment, staring back at the man. “You mean real ones.”
“Indeed, madam. They would otherwise be somewhat ineffective, would they not?”
She was seated in the King’s vast office, trying to look appropriately queenly. Trying also not to second-guess herself and the choices she’d made. But she’d snuck a look at Tarek then. “We wouldn’t want that.”
And she’d taken it as a personal victory when the stern, uncompromising King of Alzalam, sitting like a forbidding statue behind his appropriately commanding desk, had visibly bit back a smile.
If Anya was fully honest she didn’t really want to face the outside world. Every time she thought of her overly full mobile, she shuddered. But she also knew that as much as she might have liked to do absolutely nothing but lose herself in the passion she had never felt before in her life, that slick and sweet glory only Tarek seemed to provide, that wasn’t the bargain they’d made.
She was going to have to face the real world sooner or later, she reasoned. That might as well be under the aegis of the palace, so they could control the message. And help shelter her from the response.
“Timing is an issue,” Tarek said after a moment, no trace of laughter in his voice. “We would not wish to suggest that there was any romance conducted while you were more or less in chains.”
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