he was there. As if she’d conjured him from the spires and lights that spread out behind him.
Anya smiled, then studied that face of his, sensual and harsh at once. “What’s the matter?”
She was learning how to read him now, this man she would marry in seven days. He was always fierce. He was always, without question, the King. But there were different levels of ferocity in him, and tonight it seemed...darker.
Something inside her curled up tight in a kind of warning. The knot inside her grew three sizes.
But she kept her gaze on Tarek, and ignored them both.
“Nothing is the matter,” he told her, standing there at the foot of the chaise where she was curled up. In a voice that was little more than a growl. “Save my own weakness.”
“You have a weakness?” Anya asked lightly. “Quick, tell me what it is, so I might exploit it.”
Tarek didn’t laugh at that. His hard mouth did not betray the faintest curve. Anya ordered herself not to panic, or note that it felt too much like loss.
Or worse, ask herself how she could feel the things she felt after so little time.
“I spent the night in tense negotiations,” Tarek said, staring down at her as if he couldn’t quite make sense of her. Or as if Anya had done something to him. “It is the kind of diplomacy that I abhor. Snide remarks masquerading as communication. All employed by men who would never last a moment on any kind of real battlefield. Still, these things are part of what I am called to do. As such, they deserve my full attention.”
“I’m sure you give everything your full attention.”
As it happened, Anya had become something like obsessed with the force of Tarek’s full attention. With the sorts of things he could do with all that focus. Her body shivered into readiness at once, her nipples forming hard peaks, her belly tightening, and the soft, yearning place where she wanted him most like fire.
The ways she hungered for this man never ceased to surprise her. But the way he looked at her now did. As if she’d betrayed him in some way.
“The only thing I could think about was you,” he told her, his voice a rough scrape against the dark.
It was not a declaration of feelings. It was an accusation.
An outrage.
For a moment, Anya froze, feeling as if he’d kicked her. That terrible knot grew teeth. But in the next moment, she breathed out. And again, as she had the night he showed her his scars, Anya understood that this was not something she could laugh away. She couldn’t show him her first reaction. Once again, it was not softness or emotion he needed.
Maybe, something in her whispered, all that medical training was not to keep your cool in an emergency room. Maybe it was so you could stare down a king no matter his mood, and be what he needs. Whether or not he knows how to ask for it.
Not because she was losing herself in him, as one article she’d read about herself tonight had suggested. But because he wasn’t simply a man, who a woman might argue with about domestic arrangements or respect or any number of things.
His people needed him to rule above all else. They had told her so themselves, out in the winding streets of this age-old city. And if she wanted to marry him, to be his Queen as well as his woman, she needed to support the King first.
Only once the ruler was handled could she tend to the man.
Because she was the only one who got both.
“You’re welcome,” Anya said, neither gently nor particularly apologetically.
He blinked at that, a slow show of arrogant disbelief that made her pulse pick up. “I beg your pardon?”
She didn’t quite shrug. “Tedious negotiations with terrible people, you say? How lucky you must feel to know that I’ll be waiting for you at the end of it.” Anya nodded regally toward the foot of her chaise. “And you are even more lucky that I find myself in the mood for a king.”
“Are you suggesting that it is possible that you might ever not be in the mood for your King?” Tarek was gazing down at her as if thunderstruck. Far better than the look that had been in his eyes before, by any reckoning. “An impossibility, surely. Or treason. You may take your pick.”
“I am the Queen of this land,” she told him grandly, and only just