to such pettiness.
He had already paid dearly for the affection he’d held for his younger brother. He could not afford a far worse blindness. He would never forgive himself.
“Imagine my surprise,” Anya had said at dinner one day after she’d finally got a comprehensive tour of the Royal Palace. “I thought the dungeon was the scariest place in this building. But you actually have a harem.”
Tarek had been feeling expansive and relaxed. He had eaten, then spread his woman out on the table. He had eaten his dessert from her skin—sweets from the sweet—before burying himself inside her to the hilt. Then they’d gone out to the tiled tub on her balcony and sunk into the hot water. He had smiled at Anya’s wide eyes and scandalized tone.
“I was raised in the harem,” he told her. “My mother was only the first of my father’s many wives.”
And he was not a nice man, and nothing like a good one, because he had greatly enjoyed Anya’s look of horror.
“The only words we’ve discussed were wife and queen,” she’d said then. Her shoulders had straightened with a sharp jerk, enough to make the water slosh around them. “Wife was never plural. And neither was queen.”
“I enjoyed my childhood,” Tarek had told her, reaching over to pull her to him, settling her before him, her back to his front. “My brother and I were doted upon and when our half siblings arrived, they were, too. We all grew up together. We had maternal attention from all sides, and therefore felt that any attention we received from our father was a gift.”
He had not wanted to think about those years. When he and Rafiq had been so close. When it would have seemed laughable to him that anything could ever change that.
Even now, he sometimes forgot what had happened and thought to call his brother. Only to remember it all over again, with a sickening sort of lurch.
Anya’s shoulders were no longer braced for an attack. She’d softened against him, and he liked that better.
“It’s so hard to imagine that he could grow up and...do what he did,” she said quietly.
Tarek tensed, and hated that she could feel it. “When it comes to my brother, I do not imagine anything but his prison sentence.”
And his voice was so forbidding he could actually watch her respond to it. Her shoulders had risen all over again. Her breath went shallow.
He told himself he did not, could not mind it. His brother had no place here. Childhood memories were one thing, but he would have no...imagining.
“I think you would love the harem,” he had continued after a moment. He’d tried to sound relaxed again, looking over her head toward the city before them. The sky above, the lights below. And Anya between. It made something in him...settle. “It would certainly be one way to make friends in the kingdom.”
He’d wondered if she would nurse her upset. If she would act as if he’d bruised her—
But this was Anya.
All she did was twist around to glare at him as if his brother had never been mentioned.
“That, right there, is why I have no intention of filling my harem with all the wives I can support, though I certainly could. It is not worth all the fighting. The jealousy, the petty attacks, the attempts at power grabs.” He’d shaken his head, thinking of those years. Thinking of his father’s wives, not Rafiq. “My father always acted as if he was unaware of such things, but I’ve never seen greater personal viciousness than I did then. It was never directed at me, but that didn’t mean I didn’t see it.”
“Thank you for this lesson on the historical use of harems here,” Anya had said darkly. “I have no desire to be in one, thank you. I would rather become a neurosurgeon.”
“The same accuracy and skill is needed to rise to power within one, I assure you.” He’d laughed. It had been a shade more hollow a laugh than it might have been otherwise, but it had still been a laugh. “I might assemble one for the sheer pleasure of forcing your hand. I suspect you would rule with an iron fist.”
She had sniffed. She had not mentioned his brother again. “You can try.”
Tarek had a different way of trying. He’d pulled her astride him, pushing his way inside her again. Then he’d watched as she wriggled to accommodate him. It was his favorite show and no matter how many times