Yet...
Now he wondered if he had been incautious. If he had given too much of himself to his new bride and fed dreams he had not intended to feed. If he had let his guard down a little too often during the preceding week.
A sigh left his lips. He had a problem. A problem which could no longer be ignored, even though he’d been loath to address it. He certainly hadn’t wanted to ruin their short honeymoon and he hadn’t wanted to confront it in an environment where he would be unable to escape from his new wife.
A wife he suspected was falling in love with him.
He felt his mouth twist as familiar faint echoes of fear and cynicism washed over him in a dark tide. His own experience had fanned his determination to never fall victim to love’s capricious wiles, but he had been on the receiving end of unwanted devotion often enough to recognise the telltale signs when he saw them. The tender eyes and lingering glances. The shy biting of the lips followed by a gentle smile.
Yet because he had never been intimate with anyone before Caitlin, the problem had only ever been academic. Women had adored him from afar. He had never put himself directly in the firing line before because he hadn’t had to. He’d been able to walk away.
But he couldn’t walk away from his new wife and neither did he want to, because she came as part of a package and that package included his son. A son he needed to continue the Al Marara line for which he had worked so tirelessly.
His vision clearing a little, he stared down at the gleam of golden turrets as the jet circled the palace and a sense of resolve made him tighten his jaw. He liked Caitlin and enjoyed her company—he wasn’t going to deny that. But that was all it could ever be. He wasn’t going to start reaching for the stars, or reciting poetry to her.
She was going to have to learn to manage her expectations. He didn’t want her love distracting him and making demands on him. He didn’t want to talk about feelings. He didn’t want to engage in any kind of cloying emotional dependence. His jaw firmed. And as his wife, she needed to understand that.
‘Are you looking forward to getting back?’ he questioned, though from the brightness of her answering smile, you’d think he’d just lassoed the moon for her.
‘Of course I am. I can’t wait to see Cameron again. But I’m going to miss those nights, alone in the desert with you. And the days, come to think of it. I hope...’ She hesitated, before reaching across to squeeze his hand. ‘I hope things won’t be terribly different when we’re back at the palace.’
‘I think it will be difficult to maintain that same level of intimacy,’ he said, carefully removing his hand from hers. ‘The nature of my work is such that I cannot guarantee being available for you with such frequency.’
‘Oh.’
He flicked her a glance. ‘But you understand what it’s like, don’t you, Caitlin? You understand the demands of my role?’
Caitlin forced herself to nod, telling herself that was what an understanding wife would do and that was what she was determined to be. The words she had spoken before and during the marriage ceremony she’d meant from the bottom of her heart. More than anything, she wanted to make this marriage of theirs work and the honeymoon had given her hope that such a thing was possible. A honeymoon which had been...
She leaned back against the comfy airline seat and sighed.
It had been magical; there was no other way to describe it. Totally and utterly magical. She had seen a much softer side to Kadir than he’d ever revealed to her before. During those hot, desert days and icy-cold nights some of the unremitting layers which could make him seem so unapproachable had been peeled away. Beneath a huge and silvery moon, she had caught glimpses of the man who had first stolen her heart.
He had taken her riding on one of the hardy Akhal-Teke horses which had accompanied them on the trip—just the two of them—his bodyguards keeping a discreet distance. He had shown her some of the secrets of the desert and the life which hummed beneath the seemingly unforgiving landscape. She had been remarkably un-spooked by the zig-zagging track of a sidewinder snake and had captured the slow progress of a desert tortoise with her camera. She remembered marvelling at the incredible baswa tree, which survived the barren conditions against all the odds, whose leaves could be boiled to make an invigorating tea and whose sap produced a delicious syrup.
And by night... Her heart pounded with erotic recall. Kadir was the most amazing lover—she’d known that before, of course, but somehow their marriage seemed to have strengthened the bond between them. At least, it had from her point of view. Sometimes when he was deep inside her, she wanted to cry because it was so beautiful. It was just like all those romantic novels and corny songs. It was like the first time she’d met him, only more so—because this time she knew him.
And she had fallen in love with him.
Was that so wrong? She stared down at her giant diamond ring, still glinting rather aggressively on her finger. How could it possibly be wrong, when he was her only lover and the father of her child? It wasn’t as if she were demanding he love her back, because Kadir had told her he could never do that. But she was convinced she could be contented with things as they stood, because she’d never felt this happy before. As if she were floating on air. As if she could conquer the world, if only the world would let her!
She turned to look at him, her gaze resting on his hawklike profile and the jet-darkness of his thick lashes. My husband, she thought lovingly. My brave and beautiful husband. ‘Shall we have dinner tonight, as a family?’ she asked.
He turned his head to meet her eyes and Caitlin wondered if she had imagined the sudden steely glint which had penetrated his his black gaze. For a minute he had looked... Her heart began to race with something which felt like fear. It was almost as if he were looking through her, rather than at her. As if the powerful connection which had existed between them all week had suddenly been snapped.
‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible,’ he said, his apologetic shrug seeming a little half-hearted.
Caitlin was unable to keep the disappointment from her voice. ‘Oh?’
‘I must meet with my advisors after so long away. Naturally, I’ll come and say hello to Cameron as soon as we arrive and spend some time with him, but after that you will have to excuse me.’
She waited for the placating kiss, for the smile which would reassure her that nothing had changed, but neither of these things happened and as the plane touched down she couldn’t shake off her faint feeling of panic.
And wasn’t it funny how panic could grow? A bit like a blemish on your face which nobody else could really see, only you kept touching it and touching it until suddenly it was livid and red and enormous. Because that was how it was with them. That was what her relationship with Kadir suddenly became. One minute she’d been kissing him beneath a canopy of stars—and the next she was left wondering whether the whole honeymoon had been as insubstantial as a desert mirage.
She tried her best to be pragmatic. She told herself that maybe her expectations had been unrealistically heightened by the emotion of the wedding, and she must be prepared to accept a less heady lifestyle now they were back in the palace. But even before their honeymoon, Kadir used to spend every night in her bed, even if he had slipped away before the rest of the palace had woken up. Whereas now he was absent for one, sometimes two nights in a row. He’d been busy with work, he said. He was making up for lost time, he said. And there was plenty of space for him to sleep in his office. Even though they had their own enormous section of the palace, she sometimes awoke in the lonely hours before dawn to find the space beside her still empty.
She tried to reassure herself about that too—because when he was in bed with her, it was as heart-stoppingly good as it had been before. And if she thought that sometimes he was only pretending to be asleep—well, that was just her imagination, wasn’t it?