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For a long while, Anya knew very little.
Slowly, she became aware of herself again, but barely. And only when Tarek shifted, pulling out of the clutch of her body, but moving only far enough to stretch out beside her. He shifted her to his chest and she breathed there while the night air washed over her body, cooling her down slowly.
Anya thought she really ought to spend some time analyzing what had just happened. If it was possible to analyze...all that. She should consider what to do now. Now that she knew. Now that there was no going back from that knowing.
But that felt far too ambitious.
Instead, she rested her cheek against his chest. She could feel the ridge of his scar and beneath it, the thunder of his heart. It felt a lot like poetry. She watched the torches set at intervals around them dance and flicker. From where they lay, stretched out on the wide sofa, she could see the tallest spires of the city in the distance. Rising up above them as if they were keeping watch while the desert breeze played lazily with the canopy far above.
Anya was wrecked. Undone.
And she had never felt so alive, so fully herself, in all her days.
“Well?” came Tarek’s voice, from above and beneath her at once.
He sounded different, she thought, as she shifted so she could look at him. And though he gazed at her with all his usual arrogance, there was an indulgent quirk to his fine, sensual lips.
She hungered for him, all over again, her body heating anew.
It should have scared her, these postprison appetites. But she knew that what charged through her was nothing so simple as fear.
Fear left her sprawled out on bathroom floors, gasping for her breath. It didn’t make her feel sunlight in a desert night, or as if she’d discovered wings she’d never known were there. Fear reduced her into nothing but a set of symptoms she couldn’t think through. It created nothing, taught her nothing, and never left her anything like sated.
Anya had never considered it before, but fear was simple.
What stormed in her because of Tarek,withTarek, was complicated. Possibly insane, yes. But there were too many layers in it for her to count. Too many contradictions and connections. Scar tissue and the stars above, and that delirious heat, too.
“And if I say that I have never been so disappointed?” she asked, though she couldn’t keep herself from smiling.
His smile did not change his face, it made him more of what he was.Like a hawk, she thought, as she had from the first. He made her shiver with a single look. But he also held her there, tight against his body, as if he would never let go.
“Then I will call you a liar,” he said, dark and sure. “Which is no way to begin a marriage, I think.”
He waited, that fierce gaze of his on her. Stark and certain. And yet Anya knew that all she needed to do was roll away from him. Thank him, perhaps, and he would let her go.
She could be back in the States before she knew it. Back to whatever her life was going to look like, on the other side of this. And bythisshe wasn’t sure she meant the dungeon so much as the fact she’d finally admitted all those dark, secret things in her heart. She had finally said them out loud.
How could she go back from that?
“Be my Queen, Anya,” Tarek urged her, his voice a dark, royal command. She could feel it in every part of her, particularly when he shifted so he could bend over her once more, bringing his mouth almost close enough to hers. Almost. “Marry me.”
He was holding her tight, yet she felt set free.
Whatever else happened, surely that was what mattered.
“I take it you want a real marriage,” she said as if the idea was distasteful to her, when it was nothing of the kind. “Not one of those ‘for show’ ones royals supposedly have. For the people and the press releases and what have you.”
And this time, she could feel his smile against her mouth. “I will insist.”
“All right then,” Anya muttered, trying to sound grumpy when she was smiling too. “I suppose I’ll marry you, Tarek.”
From captive to Queen, in the course of one evening.
It made her dizzy.
Then he did, when he took her mouth in a kiss so possessive she almost thought it might leave a bruise.
Anya wished it would.
