She looked at him and swallowed painfully. ‘Me. Because I need them.’
Zafir shook his head. Not understanding. And why would he?
‘Tell me why you need them when you’re standing in front of me right now.’ He sounded harsh now.
It was time to stop hiding. Kat reached down and caught her dress in one hand. She pulled it up, revealing her prosthetic limb and the joint where it met her leg.
Even so, it took a few seconds for Zafir to understand what he was looking at—and when it finally registered he went pale. Eventually his gaze lifted back to her face. The room was so silent it felt like time had stopped.
‘What are you showing me?’ Zafir’s voice was hoarse.
The dress fell from nerveless fingers to cover her leg again. She started to tremble and felt cold. She was going into shock. ‘The accident...the one I mentioned. It was worse than I let you believe. They had to amputate... My foot...was crushed.’
She must have swayed or something, because suddenly Zafir was there, hands on her shoulders, pushing her down into a chair. He disappeared for a moment and then reappeared with a glass in his hand.
He held it up to her mouth. ‘Drink some of this.’
Kat’s eyes were on his as she lifted shaking hands to the glass and tipped back her head. The liquid burned down her throat and she coughed. Zafir took the glass away as fire bloomed in her chest, having an almost immediate effect on the numb coldness that had gripped her.
He put down the glass. His hands were on the chair’s armrests either side of her. He looked as if he’d just been punched in the gut.
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
Because I was using it as a crude defence to resis
t you.
Kat opened her mouth and shut it again uselessly, before saying finally, ‘At first I didn’t see that it was any of your business. And then...when you offered all that money to do the job...I couldn’t afford to say no and I was afraid if you knew you’d think I couldn’t do it.’
Zafir’s grey gaze bored all the way through her. ‘I don’t think that’s it at all—or not all of it.’
Feeling threatened, and horribly exposed, Kat pushed herself up out of the chair, forcing Zafir to stand. She stalked away from him, acutely aware of her limp now.
She whirled back, the truth spilling out. ‘I’m different now, Zafir. You want the Kat I was before, and she doesn’t exist any more. I didn’t want to see you look at me the way others do—with horror and pity.’
She’d dreaded this moment ever materialising, and she feared that she’d avoided it for so long for the most basic reasons of vanity more than anything more noble. And that killed her when she knew she was so much stronger than that. But standing here now, in front of the only man who’d ever made her feel truly alive, she couldn’t bear it. Tears weren’t far away, and that would be the worst humiliation.
‘You know where the door is, Zafir. Please, just go.’
But he didn’t go. He came closer, and Kat held herself rigid for fear she’d shatter into a million pieces before she was alone again, when she could lick her wounds without that devastating gaze on her.
When Zafir spoke, he sounded harsh. ‘You really think I hadn’t realised that you’d changed in some very fundamental way? Have you not noticed that if anything it’s only made me want you more?’
Kat blinked. She’d expected to be looking at a retreating back and a closing door. Not listening to Zafir sounding almost...hurt.
‘You really think I’m that shallow?’ he asked.
She might have before, when he’d more or less admitted he’d only proposed because she embodied some physical ideal, but now everything she’d thought she’d known about this man was jumbled up and contradictory.
She couldn’t speak. The fact that he was still here was too much. The tears she was desperately holding back filled her eyes. She heard a curse, and then Zafir’s white shirt became a blur in her vision as she was enveloped in strong arms and held tight against his body.
It was heaven and hell as a storm took hold of Kat that she had no control over and no choice but to give in to it. She wept for everything: her heartbreak, the loss of her leg, for her deceased and damaged mother and for the fact that she’d longed for Zafir’s arms around her so many times...even though she’d denied it to herself.
For a long time she stood in the harbour of Zafir’s arms as his hands moved soothingly over her back. Compassion. Another facet to this man she hadn’t seen before, adding to the complexity she felt around him now.
When her sobs had finally died away she pulled back and looked with horror at Zafir’s wet shirt. She could see the darkness of his skin underneath, and despite her paroxysm of emotion she felt awareness sizzle deep inside. Mortified—because any desire Zafir had ever felt for her must have been incinerated by now—she pulled herself free of his arms completely, wiping the backs of her hands across her hot, wet cheeks.
He was the last person in whose arms she’d expected to find solace. Her eyes felt swollen. She must have rivers of mascara down her cheeks. This truly was her lowest moment. And that was saying a lot, considering what she’d been through.