kept herself from waving an imaginary scepter in the air between them.
Tarek’s dark eyes gleamed with the fire she knew best. “Not yet, Anya. Not quite yet.”
“I will be the Queen in a week, and you are trying my patience.” She sniffed haughtily. “Daring to come before me and speak to me of petty concerns when you could be pleasuring me, even now.”
She was sure she could see him waver there. He looked torn between the sort of erotic outrage she was going for or more of whatever temper had brought him here, too much like a storm cloud for her liking.
Anya held her breath. She waited. And she could see exactly when that hunger that never seemed to wane between them won.
“You may not like the way I worship you, my Queen,” Tarek told her then, his voice deep, suggestive, and a kind of dark threat that made her shiver, happily. “But I will.”
Then he fell upon her. Both of them ravenous, both of them wild.
And when he held her before him, on her hands and knees so he could take her as he liked, Anya gloried in it, in him. The impossible iron length of him was a wildfire inside her. A gorgeous catastrophe of sensation and need. She was bared entirely to his gaze and to the desert sky, vulnerable and invulnerable at once, while he surged deep inside of her and made her scream.
It was quickly becoming her favorite melody.
A song she wanted to sing out, heedless and loud, for the rest of her days.
But Tarek wasn’t done. And as he pounded them both sweet again, until they were them again, Anya gave herself over to the only form of wedding vow she thought she’d ever need.
Again and again and again.
CHAPTER EIGHT
THE WEDDING GUESTS began to pour in the day after their announcement.
From near and far they came. Tarek welcomed in men who had fought with him, relatives and business allies, foreign heads of state and an inevitable selection of celebrities. He pretended he did not know which of his guests had spoken against him over the course of the last year and which had given him nothing but their quiet support.
But he knew. And they knew. And there was a power in the invitation to his would-be enemies, to permit them to witness how wrong they’d been about him up close. It was the logical extension of the press junket he and Anya had undertaken and Tarek could not pretend he didn’t enjoy it.
There was a grand party that night to kick off the traditional week of celebrations. It was also the first opportunity for Anya to prove to the international crowd that she was not under duress. And for the people of Alzalam, that she was worthy of the role she was to assume at the end of the week.
“No pressure, then,” she’d said earlier in the flippant manner only she dared employ in his presence.
Tarek had found he had to have her, in a slick rush of need, even if it meant that her aides would have to reapply all the beauty enhancements—to his mind, wholly unnecessary—that they’d used on her to prepare her for the evening.
“You will be a natural.”
“Because you say so?” She had been slumped in a delicious sort of ruin where he’d left her, bonelessly draped over an ottoman in her bedchamber.
“Yes, because I say so,” he’d replied. “Am I not the King?”
Anya had smiled at him, the way he liked best. Dreamy and sweet. Private.
The Anya who appeared in public never looked that soft. That was for him alone.
And as he stood in the middle of the grand party in one of the palace’s ballrooms that night, Tarek found himself thinking about that smile more than he should.
Just as he thought about her more than he should, when he knew better.
Because while it turned out that the former prisoner he was marrying for purely practical reasons was remarkably good at distracting him from the things he brooded about, that didn’t change the truth of them.
Like the fact he was obsessed with this woman.
Tarek knew better than that. The history of his kingdom was filled with examples of why romantic obsession was a scourge. Nothing but a curse. Many of his ancestors had been endlessly derailed by theatrics in the harem. Favorite wives seemed to lead inevitably to catastrophes—witness his former betrothed and the shame she had brought to her family. Tarek had always vowed he would never succumb