the chance.
There was something about the sharp focus Anya trained on him, complete with a faint frown between her brows, that he liked a lot more than he should. When he knew he would consider it nothing short of an impertinence in anyone else. And would likely react badly.
But even this doctor’s focus felt like passion to him.
“A coup? In the palace?” She waited for his nod. “You mean they came for you. Here.”
“They did.” He did not precisely smile. “More accurately, they tried.”
Rafiq had tried. Personally. A bitter wound that Tarek doubted would ever truly heal.
Still, he had the strangest urge to show her his scars. An urge he repressed. But he found himself watching the way her expression changed, and telling himself there was a kind of respect there.
“You’re lucky you have so many guards to protect you, then.”
He opted not to analyze why that statement bothered him so much.
“I am,” Tarek agreed, his voice cooler than it should have been, because it shouldn’t have mattered to him what this woman thought—of him or the kingdom or anything else. “Though they were little help when my brother and his men tried to take me after what was meant to be a quiet family meal commemorating the two-month anniversary of our father’s death.”
He did not like the memory. He resented that he was forced to revisit it.
Yet Anya’s expression didn’t change and Tarek could feel her...paying closer attention, somehow. With the same ferocity she’d used while demolishing a plate of pastries earlier.
Why did that make him want her so desperately?
But even as he asked himself the question, he knew the answer. He could imagine, all too well, that fierce, intent focus of hers on his body. On what they could do together.
He wrestled himself under control and wasn’t happy at how difficult it proved. “It was a confusing time. I regret that there were far more imprisonments than there should have been, and, indeed, your colleagues were released as soon as order was restored. But due to the vagaries of several archaic customs, you were not. I could explain why, but what matters is that the responsibility is mine.”
She broke her intense scrutiny of him then, glancing away while her throat moved. “They were released? How long ago?”
“As I said, when order was restored to the kingdom.”
She looked back at him, her eyes narrow. “Thank you. But is that a week ago? Seven months ago? Twenty-four hours after they were taken in?”
“I do not think they were incarcerated for very long.” That was no more and no less than the truth, as far as he knew it. He should not have felt that strange sense that he’d betrayed her, somehow. By telling her? Or by allowing it to happen in the first place—not that he’d known? Tarek felt the uncharacteristic shift about in his seat like a recalcitrant child. He restrained it. “No more than two months, I am given to understand.”
Across from him, Anya sat very still in her gray, faded tunic, that hair of hers tumbling all around her. She shook her head, faintly, as if she was trying to shake off a cloud. Or perhaps confusion. “I was forgotten about?”
Tarek held her gaze, surprised to discover he did not want to. He reminded himself that this was the foremost duty of any king, like it or not. Accountability.
It didn’t matter that he hadn’t known she existed, much less that she and her colleagues had been caught up in the troubles here. Just as it didn’t matter that he hadn’t known until this very afternoon that she had been languishing in his very own dungeon. He was responsible all the same.
He might as well have slammed shut the iron door and turned the key himself.
Tarek inclined his head. “I’m afraid so.”
She nodded, blinking a bit. Then she cleared her throat. “Thank you for your honesty.”
And for a moment, there was quiet. She did not reach for more food from the platters before her. She did not hold him in the intensity of her brown gaze, shot through with gold in the hectic light that filled this salon.
For a moment there was only the faint catch of her breath, hardly a sound at all. The sound of birds calling to each other outside. The lap of the fountain out on her terrace.
And the improbable beat of his own pulse, hard and heavy in his temples. His chest. His sex.
Tarek could not have said if it was longing...or shame.
He