A savage light filled those golden depths. He looked fierce, dark, like one of the warriors he had told her about, as if there was a well of some bright fire inside of him that lit him from the inside out. Power and confidence radiated from him in waves.
Fear of some unknown crashed through her, and she clasped her hands together to stop their shaking. This was ridiculous. She knew this man, but the reassurance rang hollow.
“Zafir?” His name was an entreaty on her lips, a soft intonation. As if she could tame whatever it was that clung to him like a second skin. As if she could call forth that veneer of civilized sophistication that she’d always known was only skin-deep.
The hand in his hair with a towel stilled and he looked up at her. A thoroughly possessive light glinted in his eyes as his gaze lingered over her brow, her nose and finally rested on her mouth.
“Did I wake you?”
Clutching the voluminous folds of her dress, she pushed her feet to the ground and stood up. “No. How long have you been back?”
Another rough tumble of his hair and then the towel went flying into the corner. “An hour, maybe.” Catching her look around, he said, “It’s almost dawn.”
“It took so long?”
Powerful shoulders rose as he shrugged. “Go back to sleep, Lauren.”
She licked her lips to moisten them. “No. I’m fine.” An infinitesimal shudder racked the tense line of his shoulders. “You went for a swim in the oasis in the middle of the night? You must be freezing!”
“I needed to cool down.”
That matter-of-fact statement hung in the room, sparking into life a simmering fire.
He was half-naked and she was drowning in silk and yet, she felt as if she was the one utterly bared to him.
Reaching him on barely steady legs, she stilled. The skirts of her dress fluttered against his legs. She thought his mouth must have twitched at how strange she was acting, but when she looked into his eyes, there was only that deeply disconcerting hunger again.
He was just as still as she was, waiting for what, she had no idea.
Breath hitching in her throat, she tried to smile. She had no idea where the sudden tension was springing from, why she felt as if she was meeting him for the first time. How a ceremony could drench them in a strange kind of intimacy. “Did everything go okay?”
He frowned.
“At your meeting with the High Council?”
“How do you know?”
“Ahmed said it was a meeting of all the tribal chiefs and the council members, a meeting unlike he had ever heard of or seen before.” Hardness inched into his face until the planes jutted out starkly. “That none of the staff had any idea that they would even be arriving for the wedding. That they hadn’t set foot in the palace, much less the city for so long. That you brought this all about. Is that true?”
“Yes. They will not contest my rule anymore.”
Short, clipped and with a warning. That she didn’t heed. “That’s fantastic. Ahmed said—”
An edgy smile, more a snarl, touched his lips. “Ahmed, it seems, is a raging gossip and probably half in love with you, yes?” He seemed so utterly displeased that for a second it was like looking at a stranger in the same skin. “Maybe he needs a tougher assignment where he’s not mooning over my beautiful wife and speculating on state matters?”
Heat tightened her cheeks as she strove to make light of his claim. But there it was again, that tinge of barely civilized hint to it. “Please don’t do that. Ahmed’s...infatuation,” she said, and was relieved to see the tight set of his mouth relax a little, “is perfectly harmless and nothing I can’t handle.”
And then she was wondering why she had said please. Wondering what subconscious instinct made her want to appease him rather than argue like she had always done, what unnamed, wild thing inside him she recognized today, of all days.
At his raised brow, she flushed again. “I like him. He’s young and friendly and—”
“You can’t socialize with the guard, Lauren.”
If she didn’t know such a thing was impossible, she would have thought him jealous. But jealous meant caring on a different level and speculating on his feelings or lack of them meant she’d have to face what she wanted them to be.
She injected steel into her voice. “And not prone to prejudice or judgment, like other members of your staff is what I mean,” she finished, thinking of his mentor, Arif. Although, for the first time since she had seen the older man in the trade center that day, his rigid features had relaxed when he had looked at her at the feast today.
Grudging acknowledgment, maybe.
“Tell me about the meeting, about their impression of me.”