handle what is before you. I’m afraid courage is simply doing what you must, no matter how you happen to feel about it.”
She sat back in her chair, her eyes much too bright. “Thank you,” she whispered. “But I know exactly how much of a coward I am. Because I also know that there was a part of me that actually enjoyed eight months of rest. When no one could possibly expect me to pick up a stethoscope or try to make them feel better. I got to rest for the first time since I entered a premed program at Cornell.”
Tarek was riveted, despite himself. When surely, he ought to wrest control of this conversation. Of her. Instead, his blood was a roar within him. And he could not seem to make himself look away.
“So, yes,” Anya said softly. “I will marry you. But I have two conditions.”
“Conditions,” he repeated, provoked that easily. He made a show of blinking, as if he had never heard the word. “It is almost as if I am any man at all. Not the King of Alzalam. Upon whom no conditions have ever been applied.”
“If you want a press release, there are conditions.”
Tarek tamped down the sudden surge of his temper, telling himself that this was good. If she’d leaped into this, heedless and foolish, surely it would have been proof that she would be a terrible queen. He could not have that.
“Very well then,” he said, through gritted teeth. “Tell me what it is you want. I promised I would give it to you.”
“First,” Anya said, searching his face, “promise me that I will never have to be a doctor.”
“Done. And the second condition?”
He was fascinated to watch her cheeks heat up again. “Well,” she said, her voice stilted. “It’s a bit more...indelicate.”
“Was there delicacy in these discussions?” His voice was sardonic. “I must have missed it.”
“I want a night,” she blurted out. “With you. To see whether or not...”
And Tarek did not plan to ever admit, even to himself, what it cost him to simply...wait.
When everything inside him was too hot, too intent. Too hungry.
Anya cleared her throat. “To see whether or not this is real chemistry. Or if it’s because you were the first man I interacted with outside that cell. I...need to know the difference.”
A good man might have pointed out that it seemed likely this was all yet another attempt at self-immolation on her part.
But then, Tarek had no problem being her fire.
“Come,” he said, reaching out his hand as he had at the mouth of the prison cell, his gaze hot enough to burn. “Let us find out.”
CHAPTER SIX
A WISE WOMAN would have questioned her own sanity, Anya thought. Or certainly her motives.
Wise or foolish, Anya hadn’t stopped trembling for some time. Deep inside, where every part of her that shook was connected to the heat that seemed to blaze between her and Tarek, and that aching, slick fire between her legs.
She told herself that what mattered was that it all made sense in her own head.
He wanted a queen. A press release and the performance that would go with it.
And she wanted a different life. With the clarity she’d gotten in the dungeon, Anya knew she could never go back. Not to who she’d been, destroying herself with stress, locking herself away when the panic hit, terrified that she was moments away from being found out for the fraud she truly was. She couldn’t keep moving from one way of administering medicine to another, until she started hoping that mortar fire might take her out and save her from her inability to walk away from the life she’d spent so long—too long—building.
Maybe if she was the Queen of a faraway country she could do more good than she’d ever managed as a doctor riddled with her own guilt and shame.
And somehow, all of that seemed tied together with Tarek himself. Not the King, but the man.
Too beautiful. Too intense.
And unless she was mistaken, feeling all the same fire that she was.
Anya didn’t want to be mistaken. But she also wanted to feel alive.
She didn’t need a primer on all the ways it could go badly for her to marry this man on a whim. All the ways it could turn out to be a far worse prison than the one she’d just left.
She wanted one night. One night, just the two of them, to see.
“No kings, no queens,” she said, looking up at him as he rose