“Nawar tells me that you promised her a new mother soon.” And the news should not bother her—she knew it shouldn’t.
This time around, she had known they had no future. But the hurt was there all the same. This man had always been able to get past her defenses and believing this time would be different had been more than shortsighted of her, it had been criminally stupid.
“Yes.”
When he didn’t say anything else as they followed the trek through some trees and up the side of the mountain, Iris contemplated demanding answers and/or kicking him in the shin. Neither prospect promised to have an advantageous outcome.
“It’s true, then?” she asked regardless.
“It is.”
“So this is just like six years ago?”
“No.”
She stopped and grabbed his desert robe to halt him, as well. He turned to face her, his inscrutable sheikh face firmly in place.
“How is it different?” she demanded. “You’re having sex with me while planning to marry another woman.”
For a moment something like pain flared briefly in his espresso gaze. “No.”
“No?” Iris asked sarcastically. How could he say that? “You don’t have another woman picked out and waiting in the wings to step in as Nawar’s mommy?”
As his wife.
“No.”
“But…” She did her best to assimilate the meaning of his answers in the face of what Nawar had said.
Asad had promised his daughter a mother. He did not deny it. Yet he hadn’t said he knew who that woman was going to be. In fact, if he did, wouldn’t Nawar have already met her?
He loved his daughter too much to choose a wife without insuring she was compatible with his daughter.
So the replacement had not been chosen. Inexplicably, that knowledge lightened Iris’s heart immeasurably. “I see.”
“I sincerely doubt it.”
“I’m not stupid.”
“Just blind.”
She let go of the hold she still had on his sleeve and took a step back. “I stopped being blind six years ago.”
“Six years ago I was the blind idiot, not you.” He turned and started back on the path.
Feeling uncertain, yet oddly hopeful, she followed him. “Yes, well…we both learned our lessons I guess.”
“Did we? I’m beginning to wonder.”
“So, where does this path lead?”
“To an overlook popular with shepherds and lovers.”
“Um…okay.”
They’d been walking in an unexpectedly companionable silence for several minutes when he observed, “It bothered you to think I had plans to marry another woman.”
Technically he still did, but she didn’t want to get into that discussion. “I would never willingly be the other woman.”
“No, you have too much integrity for that.”
“I was, though, six years ago.”
It was his turn to stop their progress. He turned to her, his expression grim. “No, you were not.”
“You said—”
“That I had plans to marry Badra, not that she’d accepted my proposal. My plans were not hers, nor were they set in stone, no matter that my will insisted it be so. In fact, the first time I asked her, she told me with great contempt that she would never tie herself to an ignorant goatherd.”
That explained his oversensitivity on the topic, but Iris couldn’t help feeling pleased at the knowledge she had never truly been cast in the role of mistress.
“You were in line to be sheikh, though.”
“Of a Bedouin tribe.”
“What difference does that make?”
“I live in a beit al-sha’r, the house of hair. Not a palace.”
“By choice.”
“It was not a choice Badra approved of.”
“Even if she hadn’t been a cheating abandoner of children, you two would have been a really bad match.” Iris hoped Asad could see that now.
He really had been every bit as blind as she was six years ago.
“You think she abandoned Nawar?” he asked curiously.
There was no doubt in Iris’s mind, or her heart. “Didn’t she? Badra signed over parental rights in exchange for a cushy lifestyle and the promise of freedom at the end of five years.”
It was only as she said the words that she realized that Asad’s parents had done much the same to him.
“You mean like my parents,” he said, proving that just like in the past, their brains often traveled down the same paths.
“No. I’m not saying I could or even would have made the choices your parents made, but they kept loving, kept wanting to be part of your life. I get the feeling Badra was a little more like my parents, completely uninterested in having her daughter in her life.”
“Nawar is my daughter and you are absolutely right.”
“You protected Nawar because you understood what it felt like to have your parents put your interests second,” Iris said in sudden understanding on a burst of emotion she didn’t want to name.
“I did not consider it in the same light. I always had my grandparents and my place here among the Sha’b Al’najid.”
But his parents had traded the right to raise their oldest son in their home for the ability to have that home where and at the level of luxury they wanted it. The desire to reach out and comfort him was too strong to deny and she took his hand.
He said nothing, but his grip on her hand was strong.
They continued their walk in silence, Iris’s brain too busy to truly appreciate the beauty around her. She could not stop thinking about the fact that if Asad was not actively looking for his next wife, he would be soon.
Not until after Iris had left Kadar, though…from his attitude she was pretty certain of that.
A small voice in her heart asked why that woman could not be Iris? For once, her usually analytical brain could not give an adequate answer. Why couldn’t she be Nawar’s mom and Asad’s wife?
Iris would love Nawar as if she’d given her birth; she was close to doing so already. There was something about the small girl that Iris identified with, a vulnerability she understood all too well. Iris knew what it was to be abandoned emotionally by a parent; she would never let the little girl experience that pain at her own hands.
Beyond that, their relationship six years ago had proven she and Asad were compatible in and out of bed. They had been best and truest friends. That compatibility was very much in evidence again today. As was their friendship, maybe even a deeper one.
They’d shared things they never would have six years ago, being open in ways that they hadn’t been then.
And it felt right and good.
So, why not her?
Iris might not be a snooty Middle Eastern princess, but that was a benefit to her way of thinking. Neither Nawar nor Asad had done so well the first time around with one of those. Genevieve hadn’t been either and Asad claimed she’d been the most beloved Lady of the Sha’b Al’najid in generations.
His grandfather certainly didn’t seem disappointed in his wife’s lack of Middle Eastern heritage or pedigree.
Surely Asad had to realize that a woman who loved him and Nawar would be better than any pedigreed pretender.
And Iris did love him, totally and completely. It was inevitable. Staying out of his bed would not have prevented it, because Russell had been right. There had been no danger of Iris falling in love a second time when she?
??d never stopped in the first place.
No amount of will could prevail against the depth of feeling she had toward Asad.
This time around, she knew she had to fight for what she wanted, that the possibility of having it taken away again lurked around the next bend in the road.
She had to show him that she would make him a better wife than any other woman ever could, just as he would be the ideal husband for her. He might not realize he loved her, but he couldn’t make love to her the way he did and feel nothing.
She’d thought at one time he had done, but now she knew it had cost him to leave her. That he’d never forgotten her. He’d even named his daughter after her. And he’d wanted her back in his bed enough to cajole his cousin into making sure she was the geologist sent for this survey.
Any way Iris looked at it, Asad felt more for her than he realized.
Marrying him might mean Iris giving up her current job, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t start something new. Living among the Sha’b Al’najid and exploring the world they lived in could take a lifetime for even the most devoted geologist.
Six years ago Asad hadn’t considered Iris a candidate to become part of his family, but he’d admitted to having been blind and stupid. He implied he wasn’t either any longer.
If that was true, then she had a few short weeks to show her new and improved, open-eyed sheikh the light.
It had taken Iris twenty-four years to give up on fighting for her parents’ affection. She could be stubborn and determined with the best of them, even if others rarely saw that side of her.
It was time Asad did, at least.
When they reached the overlook, Iris had no trouble understanding why it was popular with lovers. “The view is magnificent,” she said with an awe that was becoming familiar.
Asad might not live in a palace, but his home was one of the most beautiful places on earth.
“It is. I come here to think, to ponder my people’s needs in the face of the modernization of our world.”
She let her gaze travel over the panoramic vista. Off in the distance, she could see a herd and she bet they were animals cared for by the Sha’b Al’najid. “Seeing all this, it helps you keep perspective, doesn’t it?”
“You know me well.” He turned to face her, his eyes smiling even though his lips were still.