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But he did not use his hands. Not yet.
“I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told anyone before,” Anya said, her voice softer than he had ever heard it. She leaned forward, the flowing scarf she wore making even the way she breathed look like a dance. She propped her elbows on the table and smiled at him over the top of the fingers she linked together. “I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because you’re a stranger. A stranger who asked me to marry him after locking me up. If I can’t tell you my secrets, who can I tell?”
“Tell me your secrets, Anya,” he found himself saying, when he shouldn’t. When he ought to have known better. “And I will show you my scars.”
He was fascinated by watching herthink. He watched her blink, then her head tilted slightly to one side as her gaze moved all over him. “Are your scars secret?”
“Naturally.” Tarek kept his tone careless when he felt anything but. “Who wishes to see that their King is little more than a mortal man, frail and easily wounded?”
It seemed to take her longer than usual to swallow. “But surely the point of a king is that he is a man first.”
“A king is only a man when he fails,” Tarek bit out. He gazed at her until he saw, once more, that telltale heat stain her cheeks. “But first you must tell me your secrets. That is the bargain.”
“My father is a doctor,” she said, and he had the notion the words tumbled from her, as if she’d loosed a dam of some kind and could no more control them than if they’d been a rush of water. “Not only a doctor, mind you. He’s one of the foremost neurosurgeons in the country. Possibly the world. He would tell you that he istheforemost neurosurgeon, full stop. Even now, years past what others consider their prime, his hands are like steel. He’s deeply proud of that.”
“Is this secret you plan to tell me actually his secret? I will confess I find myself less interested in the deep, dark secrets of a man I have never met.”
Anya sighed. “Surgeons are a very particular type of doctor. A very particular type of person, really. They don’t think that they’re God. They know it.”
“My father was a king, Anya. I am familiar with the type.”
Her smile flashed, an unexpected gift. “And look at you, not only happy to be your father’s heir but apparently prepared to fight off a revolution so you can assume your throne after him, as planned.”
It was tempting to thunder at her about duty and blood, but Tarek did not. He thought instead of what it was she was implying with her words. None of it having to do with him.
He chose to simply sit and watch her. To wait.
“There was never any question that I would become a doctor as well,” Anya said, her voice something like careful. “To be honest, I don’t know if I would have been permitted to imagine a different path for myself. My mother died when I was small and I wish I could remember what my father was like with her, but I don’t. After she was gone I had a succession of stepmothers, each younger and more beautiful than the last. My father liked to praise their beauty while making a point of letting me know that the only thing he was interested in from me was my intellect. It never occurred to me to rebel. Or even to question. It was what he wanted that mattered. But then, for a long time, I wanted it as well. I wanted to show him that I could be smart like him, not merely a pretty plaything, easily ignored, like the stepmothers he replaced so easily. I wanted to make certain I wasspecial.”
Tarek waited still, his gaze on her and the storm in her eyes.
“But when it came time to pick my specialty in medical school,” she said quietly, “I failed him.”
“I do not understand.” Tarek lifted a brow. “You are a doctor, are you not?”
“My father likes to refer to emergency medicine as fast food,” Anya said. She shook her head. “Where’s the art? Where’s the glory? It’s all triage, addicts, and Band-Aids slapped over broken limbs while bureaucrats count beds. That’s a quote.”
“But you knew his opinion and you did it anyway.”
Anya smiled again, though it was a sad curve that didn’t quite reach her eyes. “That was my form of rebellion. My father accused me of being afraid of the responsibility a surgeon must assume. He’s not wrong.”
Tarek was baffled. “Surely handling emergencies requires you to save lives. Potentially more lives than a brain surgeon, if we are to count volume alone.”
“Sometimes he would sneer that it was ego. Mine. That I was afraid to enter into the same arena as him because he was so clearly superior to me. And that might have had something to do with my choices, I can’t deny it. But mostly, I didn’t want to compete with him.” She took a breath. “It took a long while for me to recognize that it wasn’t that I didn’t want to be a surgeon. It’s that really, I never wanted to be a doctor.”
Tarek noticed her fingers were trembling, as if she’d just confessed to treason. He supposed, by her metric, she had.
“I couldn’t tell him this,” she continued, her voice shaking along with her fingers. “I couldn’t tell anybody this. After all those years of study. All that work. All that knowledge stuck in my head forever. People arecalledto be doctors—isn’t that what everyone wants to believe? You’re supposed to want to help others, always. Even if it means sacrificing yourself.” She paused to take another shaky breath. “My father is unpleasant in a great many ways, but day in and day out, he saves lives no one else can. How could I tell him that having already failed to live up to his example, I was actually, deep down, not even a shell of a decent person because I didn’t want to anymore?”
Tarek waited, but he no longer felt the least bit lazy. Or even indulgent. He was coiled too tight, because he could see the turmoil in Anya’s gaze. All over her face. And she was gripping her hands together, so tight that he could see her knuckles turn white.
“I couldn’t tell him any of that,” she said, answering herself. “I simply quit. I walked out of my job and refused to go back. I signed up for the charity the next day, ensuring that I couldn’t have gone back even if I’d wanted to. And I don’t know why I didn’t tell him everything then, because believe me, Dr. Preston Turner was not on board with me heading off to what he calledsleep-away camp for doctors.”
“I am fascinated by this man,” Tarek drawled, sounding dangerous to his own ears. “It’s not as if you joined the circus, is it?”
“He knew that I was putting myself at risk,” Anya said softly. “He thought I was doing it because I was too foolish to see the potential consequences of my decision. By which he didn’t mean an eight-month stint in a dungeon. He assumed I would get killed.”
Tarek thought of his own father, and the expectations he had placed on his heir. “He does not have much faith in you.”
