She got out of bed, grabbing hold of her robe, sliding the diaphanous fabric over her flimsy nightgown. She pushed her hair back from her face and walked quietly toward the door, the marble cold beneath her feet. That unbearable curiosity of hers was warring with her sense of self-preservation.
You are being overdramatic. You are in a palace. You’re a visiting political ally. Nothing is going to happen to you.
She was just firmly in that place of paranoid thinking she’d been knocked into after Marcus’s sudden death. Where everything was potentially fatal, and most certainly out to get her. She blew out a determined breath and took another step to the door, cracking it cautiously, peering out at the corridor.
Her breath froze completely in her lungs when she caught sight of the figure prowling in the darkness. A man, large, imposing. Naked. In his hand was a sword, a deadly, curved blade glinting in the moonlight that filtered through the high-set windows that lined the long hall.
She should be terrified. And she was, rivulets of fear sliding through her, freezing, increasing the icy terror that wound itself around her lungs. She was also fascinated.
He turned, long hair sweeping to the side with the movement, and she caught sight of his face. Tarek.
He didn’t look like anything that should be here in this time. He was like a relic of a bygone era. A Viking warrior or fierce desert marauder. His chest was broad, thick, the muscles of his arms massive. They would have to be to wield the sword the size of the one in his hand. He was a statue made flesh, the perfect specimen of a man lovingly crafted by an artist’s hands. Brought to deadly, feral life.
He turned away again, prowling down the same length of hall he had done the first time before coming back, moving toward her room. She froze, stopping her breath. She would have stopped her heart for a moment if she had the power. But just like before, he ended his march at the edge of the door to his chamber. A sentry, on guard, weapon in hand.
He didn’t know where he was, that much she was certain of. Though she couldn’t be entirely sure why she was certain. Perhaps simply because she was reasonably sure he wouldn’t normally stand watch without anything to cover his body.
A shaft of light fell across his bare back, highlighting the ridges of muscle along his spine and down lower. Now she couldn’t breathe even if she wanted to.
Her heart thundered a hard and even beat, the blood in her veins running hotter. Faster.
She had no explanation for it.
Except that it had been two years since she’d touched a man. But surely she wasn’t that basic.
So basic that she found herself captivated by a naked man holding a sword, a stranger, when she should be afraid and possibly calling for help.
But her mouth didn’t work anymore, her throat too dry for words to escape.
When he turned again, the light fell across his face. In that moment, it wasn’t his beauty she was captured by, but his torture. His pain. It was there, evident in the lines etched into his skin, in the deep hollowness of his eyes.
She could feel his pain. As though it had invaded her own chest, wrapping itself around her heart and squeezing tight.
That was when she closed the door. There was an ornate key jammed into the lock and she turned it, securing herself in the chamber. She wasn’t sure she was locking him out, or locking herself in. She wasn’t sure of much at the moment.
She grabbed the edges of the robe and held it more tightly around herself, climbing back into bed and covering her head. All she could hear now was the beating of her own heart, her own ragged breathing.
She had a feeling it would be a very long wait for sunrise.
CHAPTER THREE
TAREK FELT AS though he hadn’t slept. Odd, considering he now lived in a palace, when before he had lived in the hollowed-out shells of houses not inhabited by anyone other than him for the past two hundred years. One would think he would find better rest protected by guards, in a temperature-controlled environment. With a mattress. And yet, he found he didn’t.
He’d been awake for only an hour, and already he had been accosted by several members of staff while walking through the halls. So many decisions that had to be made before he had seen to his morning routine.
In the desert, he had started a fire early every morning, boiled water for coffee. Usually he ate bread or an instant hot-cereal packet he acquired from different traders that came and did business with him every few months.
He spent the morning getting into the rhythm of the day. Tasting the weather on his tongue, getting a sense for what the earth had in store for him. He worked hard, and when his brother had need of him, he did dangerous, bloody business. But he would also go many days in a row without ever speaking to another person. Without doing much beyond physical training and tending to his encampment.