her face between his hands again, but this time there was no darkness in it.
Because there was none left in him.
For she was a light far brighter than the desert sun, and he could feel her inside him like the brightest, hottest midday.
“Just as you deserve a place where you can shine, Anya,” he told her gruffly. “Queen always. My Queen, always. And whatever you want of me, you will have, as long as I draw breath.”
“Tarek,” Anya whispered. “I do love you. So much.”
“I love you,” he whispered back, because there was no other way to describe the tumult. The longing and the light. The fury and the fear. The endless need, the sharp joy.
Her. Anya.
It was falling and then falling more. It was a tumble from a height so high it made his whole body seize—
But the landing was worth the fall.
It was the way she smiled at him. It was the ferocity in her voice when she came to find him, wherever he’d gone. It was the way she’d knelt before him on a terrace long ago, taking him deep in her mouth and absolving him of the scars he wore, the wars he’d won.
It was the love in her eyes, then and now. Always.
“I love you,” he said again, because it barely scratched the surface. It was too small a word, and yet it was everything.
“Tarek,” she whispered. “I love you, too.”
“Teach me how to love you,” he demanded, urgently. “Teach me every day. And I promise you, Anya, I will give you the world.”
She slid her hands up the length of his chest, then looped her arms around his neck. And then they were both falling, together, and that was no less overwhelming, but it was theirs.
This was all theirs.
And it was good. And Tarek intended to keep on falling, forever.
He was the King of Alzalam, and he would see to it personally.
“Don’t you see?” Anya asked, breathlessly, still smiling as if she would never stop. “You already have.”
And later, Tarek thought, he would think of that scene by the pools as the real moment they became husband and wife, man and woman.
Them.
Forever.
But here and now, he stopped wasting time, and kissed her.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
TEN YEARS LATER, Anya waited for her husband near the pools at the oasis, on a night so like their wedding night that she found she couldn’t stop smiling.
This time, she wore a shift dress and little else, sitting on a rock with her feet in the silky water. No bulky wedding gown that had required both of them to remove.
Eventually.
They had kept their promises to each other. There had been press releases and publicity tours, but that fell under the mantle of duty. They were both deeply dedicated to doing their duty.
But when they were alone, they were something more than a king and a queen, the embodiment of a kingdom’s hopes and dreams.
They made their own hopes and dreams, together.
He told her stories of Rafiq and the childhood they’d shared, learning how to grieve what was lost without letting what had happened tarnish the good that had happened first. And because he’d trusted her with that, she told him about her panic attacks and her mother, and how she was reclaiming her own memories of the happy life she’d had when her mother was alive.
Because grief was love. And because they were together, there was no need to fear love, no matter how it presented itself.
Loving each other was the best antidote to fear that Anya could have imagined.
And it only grew with time.
Anya gave birth to Crown Prince Hakim before their first anniversary. She stood beside Tarek on the balcony called the King’s Overlook where he’d taken her to announce their engagement, showing off the next generation to the crowds below.
“You look so happy,” she’d whispered, brought nearly to tears at the sight of this tiny creature they’d made tucked up safe and sound in his father’s arms. And she didn’t think it was entirely due to her new mother hormones, either.
It was him.
Tarek had turned to smile at her—the smile that was only for her, no matter where they happened to be.
“I have long dreamed of this moment,” he’d told her. “But I find that now it is here, what I care about is you, by my side. My Queen outside these walls. My wife within. But most of all, mine.”
“Yours,” she’d agreed. “Always yours.”
They’d made two more princes to keep Hakim company, then a brace of princesses.