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Anya smiled again, edgily. “The responsibility of bearing his name comes with a requirement to help others. And surely the best way to do that is in controlled circumstances, like a surgical theater. Emergency rooms can be rowdy enough. But to risk myself in the middle of other people’s wars? He disdained these choices.”
“Surely the risk makes the help you give that much more critical.”
“I would love to sit here, agree with you, and puff myself up with self-righteousness.” Anya’s gaze was direct again, then. And this time it made his chest feel tight. “But it wasn’t as if I felt some glorious calling to immerse myself in dangerous places, all to help people who needed it. I know the difference, because every single one of my colleagues felt that call. But not me.”
“Then why?” Tarek asked, though he had the distinct impression he did not wish to know the answer. The twist of her lips told him so. “Why did you do it?”
Anya let out a faint sort of laugh, and looked away. She loosened her grip on her own fingers. “You have no idea what it’s like. The pressure. The endless stress. The expectation that no matter what’s happening in your own life, or to you physically, you will always operate with the total recall of everything you learned in medical school, be able to apply it, and never make a mistake. It’s a high-wire act and there is no soft landing. It’s day in, day out, brutal and grueling and all-consuming. And that’s just the emergency room.”
“As it happens,” Tarek said quietly, “I might have some idea.”
Her gaze slid back to him. “All that gets worse in a war zone. You have to do all of the same things faster and more accurately, with or without any support staff. All while knowing that any moment you could be caught up in the crossfire.”
“You say you were not called to do these things, but you did them,” Tarek pointed out. “Maybe the call you were looking for does not feel the way you imagine it will.”
He knew that well enough. Because it was one thing to spend a life preparing for duty, honoring the call from his own blood and history. And it was something else to stand beside the body of a man who had been both his King and his father, and know that no matter how he might wish to grieve, he had instead to step into his new role. At once.
Then to do it.
Even in the face of his own brother’s betrayal.
“I didn’t have a death wish, necessarily,” Anya told him, as if she was confessing her sins to him. “But I took risks the others didn’t because deep down? I wanted something to happen to me.”
He felt everything in him sharpen. “You mean you wished to be hurt?”
“Just enough.” She looked haunted, hectic. He could see how she was breathing, hard and deep, making her whole chest heave. “Just so I wouldn’t have to do it anymore.”
“Courage is not the absence of fear, Anya,” Tarek said, his gaze on hers, something hot and hard inside his chest. “It is not somehow rising above self-pity, wild imaginings, or bitter fantasies that you might be struck down into oblivion so you need not handle what is before you. I’m afraid courage is simply doing what you must, no matter how you happen to feel about it.”
She sat back in her chair, her eyes much too bright. “Thank you,” she whispered. “But I know exactly how much of a coward I am. Because I also know that there was a part of me that actually enjoyed eight months of rest. When no one could possibly expect me to pick up a stethoscope or try to make them feel better. I got to rest for the first time since I entered a premed program at Cornell.”
Tarek was riveted, despite himself. When surely, he ought to wrest control of this conversation. Of her. Instead, his blood was a roar within him. And he could not seem to make himself look away.
“So, yes,” Anya said softly. “I will marry you. But I have two conditions.”
“Conditions,” he repeated, provoked that easily. He made a show of blinking, as if he had never heard the word. “It is almost as if I am any man at all. Not the King of Alzalam. Upon whom no conditions have ever been applied.”
“If you want a press release, there are conditions.”
Tarek tamped down the sudden surge of his temper, telling himself that this was good. If she’d leaped into this, heedless and foolish, surely it would have been proof that she would be a terrible queen. He could not have that.
“Very well then,” he said, through gritted teeth. “Tell me what it is you want. I promised I would give it to you.”
“First,” Anya said, searching his face, “promise me that I will never have to be a doctor.”
“Done. And the second condition?”
He was fascinated to watch her cheeks heat up again. “Well,” she said, her voice stilted. “It’s a bit more...indelicate.”
“Was there delicacy in these discussions?” His voice was sardonic. “I must have missed it.”
“I want a night,” she blurted out. “With you. To see whether or not...”
And Tarek did not plan to ever admit, even to himself, what it cost him to simply...wait.
When everything inside him was too hot, too intent. Too hungry.
Anya cleared her throat. “To see whether or not this is real chemistry. Or if it’s because you were the first man I interacted with outside that cell. I...need to know the difference.”
