Chosen For His Desert Throne by Caitlin Crews

Author:Caitlin Crews [Crews, Caitlin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mills & Boon Modern
Published: 2020-12-24T18:27:12+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

LIFE IN THE DUNGEON was slow. One day crawled by, then the next, on and into eternity, every one of them the same. The world outside the windows turned. Changed. Seasons came and went, but the dungeon stayed the same.

But after Anya agreed to marry Tarek, everything sped up.

“First,” said Ahmed, the King’s dignified, intimidating aide and personal assistant in one, a few days after she and Tarek had come to terms, “I believe there is the issue of press releases to local and international outlets alike.”

“Oh,” Anya said after a moment, staring back at the man. “You mean real ones.”

“Indeed, madam. They would otherwise be somewhat ineffective, would they not?”

She was seated in the King’s vast office, trying to look appropriately queenly. Trying also not to second-guess herself and the choices she’d made. But she’d snuck a look at Tarek then. “We wouldn’t want that.”

And she’d taken it as a personal victory when the stern, uncompromising King of Alzalam, sitting like a forbidding statue behind his appropriately commanding desk, had visibly bit back a smile.

If Anya was fully honest she didn’t really want to face the outside world. Every time she thought of her overly full mobile, she shuddered. But she also knew that as much as she might have liked to do absolutely nothing but lose herself in the passion she had never felt before in her life, that slick and sweet glory only Tarek seemed to provide, that wasn’t the bargain they’d made.

She was going to have to face the real world sooner or later, she reasoned. That might as well be under the aegis of the palace, so they could control the message. And help shelter her from the response.

“Timing is an issue,” Tarek said after a moment, no trace of laughter in his voice. “We would not wish to suggest that there was any romance conducted while you were more or less in chains.”

“A king romancing a captive can really only occur within a certain window,” Anya agreed merrily. “Lest we all forget ourselves and start fretting about upsetting power dynamics.”

“No one who has met you, Doctor,” Tarek murmured then, “would have the slightest doubt where the power lay.”

And though Ahmed looked at her as if that was meant to be an insult, Anya knew it wasn’t.

Because when they weren’t discussing media campaigns, wedding arrangements, or thorny issues of which family members to invite—what with her father being her father, and a number of Tarek’s relatives being in jail for attempting to kill him—they were exploring that fire that only seemed to blaze hotter between them.

Tarek, it turned out, hid a sensualist of the highest order beneath his stern exterior.

“You are always hungry,” he mused one night as Anya happily polished off yet another feast. They’d taken to eating in one of the private rooms in her apartments, the two of them sitting cross-legged on the floor where it was far easier to reach for each other when a different sort of hunger took control.

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