will make it so. Anything at all.”
“For all you know I’m going to ask for a spaceship.”
“Then one shall be built for you.” He bit back his smile. “Is that what you want? I assumed it would be more along the lines of wishing to practice medicine here in the capital city, even once you become Queen.”
But to his surprise, she paled at that.
He didn’t know quite how to feel about it when she blew out a breath, then met his gaze once more as if she hadn’t had that extreme reaction. “You say that as if a female doctor is as fantastical as a spaceship.”
But Tarek found he liked her spiky voice better than watching her pale before him.
“Alzalam is not in the Stone Age, Doctor,” he murmured. “No matter what foreign publications may imagine. We have a great many female doctors. But what we do not have, and never have had, are queens who work. Perhaps that is an oversight.”
Anya huffed out another breath, as if she couldn’t comprehend that. “I have to tell you, of all the endings I imagined to my time in prison, talk of queens did not enter into it.”
She was too pretty, he thought. And getting more so by the moment, to his mind. Because he liked her bold. He liked how little she seemed in awe of him. He could not deny that he also liked the hint of vulnerability he saw now.
Did he want to give her a throne or did he simply want to take her to bed?
Tarek found he couldn’t answer the question. Normally, that would have been all the convincing he needed that he was headed down the wrong path. He had never let a woman turn his head and he would have sworn on Alzalam itself that he never would.
But then, when it came to his doctor, there were practical considerations that outweighed everything else. Trade implications, for example, and potential sanctions. He could weather those, as his ancestors had upon occasion, but if there was no need to put himself in bed with only those economies who did not fear the taint of a regime considered monstrous, why would he condemn his country to such a struggle?
That he found himself longing to taste her was a problem when his country was at stake. Tarek tried to focus. “You have yet to tell me what it is you want most, Anya.”
Had he said her name aloud before? He couldn’t recall it. But it sizzled there, on his tongue. It felt far more intimate than it should. And in case he was tempted to imagine that it was only he who felt these things, he saw her eyes widen—her pupils dilating—as she sat there within reach.
But he did not use his hands. Not yet.
“I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told anyone before,” Anya said, her voice softer than he had ever heard it. She leaned forward, the flowing scarf she wore making even the way she breathed look like a dance. She propped her elbows on the table and smiled at him over the top of the fingers she linked together. “I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because you’re a stranger. A stranger who asked me to marry him after locking me up. If I can’t tell you my secrets, who can I tell?”
“Tell me your secrets, Anya,” he found himself saying, when he shouldn’t. When he ought to have known better. “And I will show you my scars.”
He was fascinated by watching her think. He watched her blink, then her head tilted slightly to one side as her gaze moved all over him. “Are your scars secret?”
“Naturally.” Tarek kept his tone careless when he felt anything but. “Who wishes to see that their King is little more than a mortal man, frail and easily wounded?”
It seemed to take her longer than usual to swallow. “But surely the point of a king is that he is a man first.”
“A king is only a man when he fails,” Tarek bit out. He gazed at her until he saw, once more, that telltale heat stain her cheeks. “But first you must tell me your secrets. That is the bargain.”
“My father is a doctor,” she said, and he had the notion the words tumbled from her, as if she’d loosed a dam of some kind and could no more control them than if they’d been a rush of water. “Not only a doctor, mind you. He’s one of the