He carried her through the tent, one section after the next. She had the impression of salons made of tapestries, delicately carved furnishing, and wide wooden trunks. But she only knew they’d reached a bedroom when he laid her down on a wide, soft bed. Lanterns lit up the brightly patterned walls and made their own shapes out of shadows.
But all Anya could really focus on was Tarek.
His robes were ivory and gold again, but there was far more gold tonight. The light caught at it, making him gleam. He was resplendent and beautiful, powerful and pitiless, and she loved him so much and so hard it made her feel lightheaded.
That in no way made her less mad at him.
Anya was panting as much from the force of the things she wanted to say to him as his deep, drugging kisses, and she pushed herself up on her elbows so she could glare at him with the full force of her displeasure.
But all he did was follow her down to the bed, making them both groan as their bodies came together. He wasted no time in getting his hands on her, up beneath skirts and then streaking up to her knees. He found her upper thighs, and took a moment to trace the place where her stockings were attached with clips. Then he moved on, finding the white-hot, molten truth of her. Of this.
Of them.
Tarek stroked her then, intent and deep. She fell back down into the soft embrace of bed, piled high with silk and linen and surrounded by the scent that rolled over her the way this man—her husband, her King—did. She told herself to fight, but she was unable to do anything at all but lift her hips to take his clever fingers as they found their way into her slick, wet heat.
And she knew that she should be ashamed of this. That he could tell her there was nothing between them but sex, then prove it so easily. That she could claim she loved him and sex was the least of it, then succumb to his touch so wantonly.
But her hips lifted with abandon. Her back arched to give him better access. She was moaning out his name, even before he began to thrust his fingers deep inside her.
His other hand moved to her face, guiding her mouth to his all over again. Taking what he wanted. Showing her who she was.
Tarek kissed her, deep and hot, dark and demanding.
And when she broke apart, it was against his mouth. He groaned back as if he was consuming every last noise she made. As if she was his, and the sounds she made were his, and he was branding her mouth and sex alike.
But it was not love, he would claim. It was only sex, this mad possession.
Tarek moved over her and she could feel his hands working between them. A tug here, and adjustment there. Then the broad head of his hardness found her slick folds.
He waited.
Anya opened her eyes to meet his, stark and commanding.
“I love you,” she whispered.
Tarek made a rough noise, then he was thrusting inside her, deep and hard. Reward or punishment, or both wrapped in the same shock of connection and belonging, hunger and dark delight—it was hard to tell.
She’d had him so many times by now. She knew his body so well. She knew his scent, his weight, the glory he could work with a twist of his hips or that merciless mouth of his.
She knew too much.
And this was different from what had come before. This was a storm all its own, a wildly different claiming.
It was raw, untamed, and just this side of too much.
It was like a fever. It was all those things she’d felt all day, whirling around and around, all of them a crisis.
And still he pounded into her, braced there above her, as he made her his in a new way to suit the new things they were to each other.
Husband and wife. King and Queen.
This.
He could call it what he liked. Anya knew better.
But still, when the explosion came rushing at her, she wasn’t entirely sure she would survive it. Or even if she wished to.
Tarek let her fall apart first, but he kept going until she sobbed. His name, maybe. Or a cry for the mercy she both did and didn’t want. Until her fingers dug so hard into the back of the robes he still wore that she felt a nail break.
Still he continued.
Proving a point, she was sure. Driving them both wild. Making her shake and shake, sensations roaring through her with such intensity it almost scared her.
“I love you,” she cried out as she hurtled off a cliff she hadn’t seen coming.
And only then did Tarek follow, with a roar she felt shake through her all over again, like a new kind of shattering.
And there was no drifting off into bliss. There was no oblivion.
Tarek lifted his head, shifting his weight to his elbows. Anya was too aware of how he was covering her then, that rangy body of his, heavy and muscled everywhere, pressing her down into the bed.
Another claim, she knew. Like the rings he’d put on her hand today. Like the title he’d bestowed upon her, the throne they now shared, the palace that was to be her home.
He had never looked more like a predator than he did then, the lanterns throwing odd shapes onto the walls of fabric all around them. He was stone and hawk, carved from granite and cast in metal.
And the way he looked at her broke her heart.
Tarek moved to wipe moisture from beneath her eyes. He used his thumbs, touching her carefully, but there was nothing gentle in the expression on his face.
Something inside her rolled over hard, then sank.
“That is a pleasurable duty,” he said, horribly. Deliberately. “But it is a duty, Anya. Everything I do, everything I am, is that duty. Sex to me is about succession before it is anything else.”
“Succession...” she repeated.
But she was winded. She could feel it as if he’d reached in, scraped her raw, and then sucked everything she was out.
And in return, what was left was that familiar knot in her chest.
It swelled, then pulsed.
“You are a doctor,” he said in the same darkly calm way. Still lodged deep inside her, his shoulders wide enough to block the light, as if he’d taken over the whole world. As if he was the whole world. “Surely you must have noticed that we have never used anything that might prevent nature from taking its course.”
And Anya’s brain...blanked out at that, more or less. Still, she heard him. She knew that he was talking about birth control and that she ought to have thought about it.
Why hadn’t she thought about it?
Because she hadn’t. It had been a month, she was indeed a doctor, and she had never even raised the subject in her own mind. No matter how many times they came together like this. No matter how many times she’d felt him flood her with his release.
Why haven’t I thought about it? she demanded silently.
But no answers presented themselves.
There was a curious look on his hard face. “You look so shocked. I assumed it was what you wanted. You surely knew, and when you did not raise the topic, neither did I.”
She couldn’t quite catch her breath. Or move. “Why would you...?”
“I told you I wanted to marry you.” He did something with his jaw that might as well have been a shrug, though there was nothing careless in it. “I am not a man of half measures. Of course if I wished to marry you, that would mean children to follow. You can tell me that you did not know this, if you like. But between you and me, wife, I don’t believe it.”
And there was a truth in his words that she didn’t like. Especially not now, when she felt as if he had stripped her of everything, leaving her with nothing.
Nothing but that terrible knot that seemed to grow twice its size in a moment. Then three times its size in the next.
Worse, it hurt.
“You told me I could have whatever I wanted. You promised that no matter what it was, you would make it happen.” She shook her h
ead, horrified when she felt tears spill over, but completely unable to do anything but let them. “What do you call this?”
“Practicality,” he said, there against her mouth, a bitter kiss. “We can none of us be anything but what we are, Anya. Remember that. It will save you pain.”
Then he was moving. Anya struggled to sit up, some part of her thinking she ought to leap to her feet, chase after him, do something.
But she couldn’t seem to move.
“What if I’m not practical?” she demanded of him as he stood there beside the bed. “Will you throw me back into your dungeon? It is called the Queen’s Cell, after all.”
“Now I know why,” he threw back at her. “You decide if you want to be my Queen or you wish to be my curse, habibti. And I will respond in kind.”
And then she watched, in shocked disbelief, as he left her.
On their wedding night.
When he had just finished telling her how little she truly meant to him.
She stayed where she was, trying to breathe. Trying to think of how best to keep fighting—
Until she heard the sound of a motor turning over outside, and she understood.
He wasn’t simply leaving the room. He was leaving, full stop.
The message was clear. As long as she insisted on loving him, there could be no stopping him.
When the panic attack hit her that time, she honestly thought that it might kill her. Or maybe she wished it would, this time.
It came on all fronts, walloping her again and again.
She couldn’t catch her breath. Her heart pounded so hard it frightened her. She was nauseated. Sweating. Hot, then cold. Then this close to bursting out of her skin—
And all the while the tent spun around and around and around, until she was so dizzy she was afraid she might fall down.
It took her a long while to realize that she was already lying flat.
Slowly, laboriously, she pulled herself up, but she couldn’t stand. On and on it went, as if she was caught on some sort of horrid carnival ride. Eventually she made to the side of the wide bed, then to the floor, crawling on her hands and knees across priceless rugs, sure she would die there. Any moment.
There were too many things in her head. The certainty that this time, she really was going to die. That she’d minimized these attacks, called them panic, but this would be the end of her. Left behind in her wedding dress, on her hands and knees on the floor of a tent in a desert that even her emotionally vacant father had warned her she’d only chosen to stay in because something was terribly, terribly wrong with her.
She was sobbing or she was gagging, or it was both at once. But still, Anya crawled until she found the bathroom.
And then she celebrated her first night as Queen of Alzalam by curling up in a wretched ball next to yet another toilet, waiting for this violent death to claim her once and for all.
Which gave her ample time to think about all the things that Tarek had thrown at her tonight.
Her love. His horror that she would even use the word. His talk of duty, and her place.
She thought of the Queen’s Cell and felt the panic rise all over again as she imagined him throwing her straight back in for another stint of cold stone walls and unyielding iron bars.
Not that it mattered, she thought miserably, there on the floor. Because wasn’t this marriage just another kind of prison? Not the way she’d imagined it, but clearly the way Tarek intended.
A sick little repeat of her childhood and the life her mother had left her to, however unwillingly.
Anya already knew where that led.
To this, right here. To that throbbing, blaring knot in her chest and her in a ball on the floor, alone.
And then, through all of that noise and riot, nausea and anguish, she heard a voice as clearly as if someone stood over her.
She blinked, but she was still alone.
“You are brave, Anya,” said her mother in her head. In her heart. “You are fiercer than you know. And you can make your life whatever you want it to be.”
My life, she thought then. And certainly my marriage.
She pulled in a shaky breath, deep. Then let it out, and like magic, the panic disappeared with it.
As if it had never been.
Anya sat up carefully. Gingerly. Waiting for all of those terrible sensations to slam back into her and throw her straight back down into that miserable ball, writhing within reach of yet another toilet.
But it was still...gone.
“You are the bravest girl I know,” her mother whispered, deep inside, where Anya understood, then, she always would.
She pressed her hand to that place in the center of her chest, the place where that knot had always blazed at her, and felt her eyes fill anew.
But for a different reason this time.
She’d thought it earlier today, hadn’t she? That the panic was her feelings all along. That all those things she’d locked up in her attempt to please her father had only ever waited for her there.
Now she understood that it was more than that.
It had come out medically, because that was the only thing she allowed herself. It had burst forth in symptoms, so she could catalog them. List them. Pretend she could clinically examine her own breakdowns.
Because medicine was the only emotional language she’d ever allowed herself.
But now... Now she knew.
It had been her mother all along, talking to her. Telling her. Showing her by making her stop. By making her listen.
By coming to Anya in the only way she would hear.
She laughed a little bit, there on the floor of a desert tent, still wearing her wedding gown as she crouched there in yet another bathroom.
Because it had worked.
She’d had a panic attack before she chose her specialty in medical school, and knew she wasn’t going to choose neurosurgery. She’d another panic attack, a terrible one, the night before she’d taken her medical boards. She’d had them with regularity as a resident. Then, for a time, she’d thought she’d gotten them under control.
Until that last one she’d had while she was still an ER doctor. The one that had made her realize that if she didn’t change something, radically, she very well might die of that pressure in her chest.
“Thanks, Mama,” she said now, out loud, though her voice was scratchy. “You were pushing me where I needed to go all along.”
“Be brave, Anya,” her mother had whispered the last time Anya had seen her alive. She’d held her tight, though she’d been so thin by then. So frail. “I will be with you, always. You only have to look.”
Anya hadn’t looked, but that was okay. Her mother had kept her promise just the same.
She wiped at her face. She took a breath.
And she knew, with a new sort of certainty that reached deep into every last part of her, that she was not going to have a panic attack again. Not ever again.
Because she’d finally cracked the code.
It was love. And who had ever said that love had to be all soft plush toys, big eyes and faint trembling? Anya loved a king who happened to also be a hard man, made of this desert in its formidable starkness.
Loving a man like Tarek was a challenge. Even a calling.
Her calling, she knew, without a shred of doubt.
And this time, Anya was choosing a calling because of love. Because her blood moved hot inside her and she had never felt so much all at once without it flattening her on cold, impersonal bathroom floors. Because she didn’t fear him, she loved him, and that meant she could take whatever came. No matter what it was.
Even if what came for them was him.
She was not a soft and trembling thing herself, and that was why he’d chosen her. Tarek could say what he liked about practicality and duty and all the res
t. But he’d chosen her all the same.
Just as Anya had chosen him. Because he was absolutely right. She hadn’t spared a thought to the possibility they might make a child, and that was so unlike her it really should have been funny.
All along, no matter what they pretended—to themselves and each other—the two of them had been choosing each other.
Anya simply knew it. It was in her now, part of her DNA. And she could have stayed where she was, reveling in this new knowledge, but there was no time for that.
Because Tarek had given her golden opportunity to prove that she was truly his Queen. That she was deserving of the title, and that he might give her anything she wanted, but she would do better in return. She would give him what he needed.
If she had to walk all the way back to the palace, she would.
She staggered to her feet and wandered through room after room of this marvelous, plush palace that was something far more than a tent. She found the entrance and pushed her way out, stopping outside when the beauty of the oasis hit her.
The canopy of stars. The soft lights that showed her date trees dancing in the breeze, and set to glowing all the glorious pools set into the sand.
But most beautiful by far was the figure she saw standing near the water, looking into the indigo depths as if tortured.
Anya glanced to the side and saw a jeep pulled up beneath the palms. When she had been so sure he’d driven it off. That he’d left her here.
Because that was something, she realized, her father would do without a second thought.
And she decided, then and there. This was not her childhood. She was not that daughter her father had ignored—and she was not her mother, either.
Tarek was her husband. This was her marriage.
And Anya was brave. She was fierce. She would make their lives exactly what she wanted.
All she had to do was be the Queen he had chosen her to be, at last.
CHAPTER TWELVE
TAREK STOOD BY the ancient pools, looking for wisdom in the water that men of his blood had long called holy, but seeing only himself.
And the monster he had become.
He despised weakness, and yet it had taken hold of him. It had eaten away at him, leaving nothing behind but the hunger he could no more control than he could feed enough to sate himself.
Chosen for His Desert Throne Page 14
