AllFreeNovel
Share Us
But Tarek had been fighting more dangerous battles for a year. He did not waste time girding his loins. He dove in. He rounded the last corner and marched himself up to the mouth of the cell.
And then stopped dead.
Because the human misery he had been expecting...wasn’t on display.
The cell was no longer bare and imposing, the way it was in Tarek’s memory. There was a rug on the floor. Books on shelves that newly-lined the walls. And the bed—a cot in place of a pallet on the stone floor—was piled high with linens. Perhaps not the finest linens he’d ever beheld, but clearly there with an eye toward comfort.
And curled up on the bed—neither in chains nor in a broken heap on the floor—was a woman.
She wore a long tunic and pants, a typical outfit for a local woman, and the garments did not look ragged or torn. They were loose, but clean. Her dark hair was long and fell about her shoulders, but it too looked perfectly clean and even brushed. She was lean, but not the sort of skinny that would indicate she’d been in any way malnourished. And try as he might, Tarek could not see a single bruise or injury.
He assessed the whole of her, twice, then found her eyes.
They were dark and clever. A bit astonished, he thought, but the longer she stared back at him, the less he was tempted to imagine it was the awe he usually inspired. And the longer he gazed at her, the more he noticed more things about her than simply the welfare of her body.
Like the fact she was young. Much younger than he’d imagined, he realized. He’d expected to find an older woman who suited the image of adoctorin his head. Gray-haired, lined cheeks... But this doctor not only showed no obvious signs of mistreatment, she was...
Pretty.
“You look important,” the woman said, shocking Tarek by using his native tongue.
“I expected you to speak English,” he replied, in the same language, though Ahmed had only said she was Western, not English speaking. She could have been French. German. Spanish.
“We can do that,” she replied. And she was still lounging there on the bed, whatever book she’d been reading still open before her as if he was an annoyance, nothing more. It took Tarek a moment, once he got past the insolent tone, to realize she’d switched languages. And was American. “You don’t really look like a prison guard. Too shiny.”
Tarek knew that his staff had filed in behind him at the shocked sounds they all made. He lifted a finger, and there was silence.
And he watched as the woman tracked that, smirked, and then raised her gaze to his again. As if they were equals.
“Importantandyou have a magic finger,” she said.
Tarek was not accustomed to insolence. From anyone—and certainly not from women, who spent the better part of any time in his presence attempting to curry his favor, by whatever means available to them.
He waited, but this woman only gazed back at him, expectantly.
As if he was here to wait upon her.
He reminded himself, grudgingly, that he was. That he had not fought a war, against his own brother, so that the world could sit back and judge him harshly.
At least not for things he had not done deliberately.
“I am Tarek bin Alzalam,” he informed her, as behind him, all the men bowed their heads in appropriate deference. The woman did not. He continued, then. “I am the ruler of this kingdom.”
The doctor blinked, but if that was deference, it was insufficient. And gone in a flash. “You’re the Sheikh?”
“I am.”
She sat up then, pushing her hair back from her face, though she did not rise fully from her bed. Nor fall to her knees before him, her mouth alive with songs of praise.
In point of fact, she smirked again. And her eyes flashed.
“I’ve been waiting to meet you for eight long months,” she said, the slap of her voice so disrespectful it made Tarek’s eyes widen.
Around him, his men made audible noises of dismay.
Once again, he quieted them. Once again, she tracked the movement of his finger and looked upon him with insolence.
“And so you have,” Tarek gritted out.
