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Sheikh. Ruler. King. Whatever they called him, he looked like the love child of the desert sun and some sort of bird of prey. A falcon, maybe, cast in bronze and inhabiting the big, brawny body of an extraordinarily fit man.
She was holding her breath again, but it was different. It was—
Stop it, Anya ordered herself.
This was no time to pay attention to something as altogether pointless as how physically fit the man was. So what if he had wide shoulders and narrow hips, all of it made of muscle. So what if he made gilt-edged robes look better than three-piece suits.
What mattered was that he’d thrown her into his dungeon and, as far she could tell, had thrown away the key, too. Anya had done a lot of dumb things in her lifetime—from allowing her father to bully her into medical school to focusing on emergency medicine because he’d told she was unsuited for it, to accepting the job that had brought her here, mostly to escape the job she’d left behind in Houston—but surely sudden-onset Stockholm syndrome would catapult her straight past dumb into unpardonably stupid.
She was sure she saw temper glitter in his dark, dark eyes. She would have sworn that same temper made that muscle in his jaw flex.
Shedid notfeel an echo of those things inside. She refused to feel a thing.
“Please accept my humblest apologies,” he said, and now that she wasn’t gearing up to tell him what she thought of him, there was no escaping the richness of his voice. He spoke English with a British intonation, and she told herself it was adrenaline that raced through her, then. She’d forgotten what it felt like, that was all. “There has been great unrest in the kingdom. It is unfortunate that your presence here was not made known to me until now.”
That was not at all what Anya had been expecting.
It felt a lot as if she’d flung herself against the walls—something she had, in fact, done repeatedly in the early days—only to find instead of the expected stone and pitiless bars, there was nothing but paper. She suddenly felt as if she was teetering on the edge of a sharp, steep cliff, arms pinwheeling as she fought to find her balance.
Something knotted up in her solar plexus.
It was a familiar knot, to her dismay. That same knot had been her constant companion and her greatest enemy over the last few years. It had grown bigger and thornier as she’d grown increasingly less capable of managing her own stress.
When here she’d been all of five minutes ago, feeling something like self-congratulatory that no matter what else was happening—or not happening, as was the case with whiling away a life behind bars—she was no longer one panic attack away from the embarrassing end of her medical career.
Thinking of her medical career made that knot swell. She rubbed at it, then wished she hadn’t, because the Sheikh’s dark gaze dropped to her hand. A lot like he thought she was touching herselfforhim.
Which made that prickle of sensation tracing its way down her spine seem to bloom. Into something Anya couldn’t quite convince herself was fear.
“Are you apologizing for putting me in your dungeon or forforgettingyou put me in your dungeon?” she asked, a little more forcefully than she’d intended. But she lifted her chin, straightened her shoulders, and went with it. “And regardless of which it is, do you really think eight months of imprisonment is something an apology can fix?”
He shifted slightly, barely inclining his head at the man beside him, who Anya knew was in charge of these dungeons. As the round little toad had pompously informed her of that fact, repeatedly. And she watched, astonished, as the keys were produced immediately, her cell was unlocked, and then the door flung wide.
The Sheikh inclined his head again. This time at her.
“I can only apologize again for your ordeal,” he said in that low voice of his that made her far too aware of how powerful he was. Because ithummedin her. “I invite you to leave this prison behind and become, instead, my honored guest.”
Anya didn’t move. Not even a muscle. She eyed the obvious predator before her as if, should she breathe too loudly, he might attack in all that ivory and gold. “Is there a difference?”
The man before her did not shout. She could see temper and arrogance in his gaze, but he did not give in to them. Though there were men all around him, many of them scowling at her as if she was nothing short of appalling, he did not do the same.
Instead, he held her gaze, and she could not have said what it was about him that made something in her quiver. Why she felt, suddenly, as if she could tip forward off of that cliff, fall and fall and fall, and never reach the depths of his dark eyes.
Then, clearly to the astonishment and bewilderment of the phalanx of men around him, Sheikh Tarek bin Alzalam held out his hand.
“Come,” he said again, an intense urging. “You will be safe. You have my word.”
And later, Anya would have no idea why that worked. Why she should take the word of a strange man whose fault it was, whether he’d known it or not, that she’d been locked away for eight long months.
Maybe it was as simple as the fact that he was beautiful. Not the way the men back home were sometimes, mousse in their hair and their T-shirt sleeves rolledjust so.But in the same stark and overwhelming way the city outside these windows was, a gold stone fortress that was, nonetheless, impossibly beautiful. Desert sunrises and sunsets. The achingly beautiful blue sky. The songs that hung over the city sometimes, bringing her to tears.
He was harsh and stern and still, the only word that echoed inside her wasn’tpig.It wasbeautiful.
Anya didn’t have it in her to resist.
Not after nearly three seasons of cold stone and iron bars.
Before she could think better of it—or talk herself out of it—she rose. She crossed the floor of her cell as if his gaze was a tractor beam and she was unable to fight it. As if she was his to command.
