lips, waiting for a comment like that to turn dark. For Tarek to make her feel bad the way her father always had, with snide little remarks like knives.
But instead, he smiled. “I take pleasure in sating each and every one of your hunger pangs.”
And he made good on that at once, tugging the napkin from her fingers and laying her out flat before him on the scattered pillows. He drew the hem of the long, lustrous skirt she wore up the length of her legs. Then he lifted her hips and settled his mouth at her core, licking his way into her molten heat.
Only when he had her bucking against him, shattering and sobbing out his name, did Tarek sit back again. Then sedately returned to his dinner, merely lifting an arrogant brow when she cursed him weakly, lying there amongst the pillows in complete disarray.
“I do not wait for my dessert,” he told her, as if he was discussing matters of state. “If I wish to indulge myself, I do so immediately.”
“As you wish, Your Majesty,” she panted.
It took Anya a full week to face up to the reality of what awaited her on her mobile, much less the repeated requests for appointments with the American embassy. Not to mention the press releases—more a press junket, Ahmed informed her solemnly—that she’d promised Tarek.
A week to face her new reality and another week to decide that she was well enough prepared to handle it. Or if not prepared, not likely to suffer irreparable harm when subjecting herself to reporters and their intrusive questions.
She did the biggest interviews first, sitting in a room of the palace that seemed like an anachronism. It was tucked away next to an ancient courtyard that a small plaque announced had existed in one form or another even before the palace had been fully built. Truly medieval, yet it invited any who entered to breathe deep and forget about the passage of time.
But inside the media room, it was very clear what century Anya was in. It was all monitors and lights, cameras and green screens. The palace’s senior press secretary ushered her through the roster of engagements, where all Anya had to do was tell her story.
And more critically, her reasons for remaining in Alzalam now she’d been freed.
“It’s hard to imagine what would keep you there,” said one anchorwoman. She wrinkled her brow as if in concern—or tried. “Surely most people in your position would try to get home as quickly as possible.”
“I don’t know that many people in my position,” Anya replied. She reminded herself to smile, because if she didn’t, people asked why she was so mad. “Captured, held, then released into a royal palace. Maybe I think that having spent so much time in the kingdom, it might be nice to explore it a little.”
And then, on the heels of a morning filled with interviews from all over the world, she marched herself back to her rooms, dug her phone out of her bag, and forced herself to deal with all of her messages and voice mails.
It took hours. But when she was done, she felt both more emotional than she’d anticipated, and less panicky. A good number of the voice mail messages were from an array of journalists, some of whom she’d already spoken to. A few friends had called over the past eight months, claiming they only wanted to hear her voice and letting her know they’d been thinking of her during her ordeal. She took a surprising amount of pleasure in discovering that a bulk of her email was, as always, online catalogs she couldn’t remember shopping from in the first place.
It made her feel as if, no matter what, life went on.
Better still, Anya felt somewhat better about the fact she still hadn’t called her father, because he had neither written nor called her. Not once in all the time she’d been held in the dungeon. And, of course, not before that either, because he hadn’t approved of her wasting her time in an aid organization when she could do something of much greater status and import.
Maybe it told her something about herself—or him—that she felt a bit triumphant when she finally dialed the number of the house she’d grown up in. She knew the number by heart, still, even though the house and the number attached to it hadn’t been hers in a long while. Since long before she’d left it, in fact.
She stood in