He traced the line of her lips with the tip of her finger. ‘Yes, it does. Of course it does.’ He smiled. ‘It means that I was not rejected nor forgotten by the Sheikh, nor denied a heritage that was truly mine. He simply didn’t know anything about me.’
He tilted her face so that their eyes collided, blue with gold. ‘But that’s enough about Maraban.’ His voice was soft now. ‘I came here to talk about something quite different—something more important still.’
Her heart had begun to race. ‘Oh?’
Once more he picked his words with care, recognising their significance and knowing how important it was that she believed them.
‘I want to tell you why I came back,’ he said simply.
‘Oh?’
This was hard, to just come right out and say it, but he knew that he had to. For both their sakes. ‘I never felt complete before, Lara.’ He hesitated, trying to make sense of it. For her. And for him, too. ‘Maybe that’s the way it always is when you don’t know what your true parentage is. And knowing is one thing, but seeing is something else. Seeing really is believing. When I tasted some of the life in Maraban, saw my father’s home and land and the way he must have lived his life, I felt in a way as if I had come home.’
He paused, remembering how Khalim had told him that to feel deeply made you more of a man, not less. But it went against the grain with Darian. Old habits died hard. He had grown up believing that it was a sign of weakness to express your feelings. Yet now he recognised the importance of saying what he really meant, not hiding behind the tough, macho exterior which had been his childhood protection.
‘When you discover your identity—you come home. You’re at peace with yourself—at least in theory.’
She raised her face to his. ‘I…I don’t understand.’
It had taken him a little while, too. ‘I found the peace which comes with knowing what my roots are, but I had lost something, too—the something that makes everything in life worthwhile. The something that makes living wonderful and the world an empty place if it isn’t there.’ He felt the thaw around a heart which had always been hard and tough and cold. It was like taking a leap into the unknown, he thought. Unexplored, uncharted territory—which took more courage to confront than any barren and inhospitable Maraban desert.
‘Love, Lara,’ he said simply. ‘I found you, and I found love, and when you went away something was missing. You’d struck a hammer-blow to my heart and it made me realise how much I wanted you in my life.’
‘Oh, Darian,’ she whispered, her voice faint, her blood pounding a symphony inside her head, weakened with pleasure and a sense of wonder. ‘Darian.’
He smiled. ‘But it wasn’t the first time I’d felt that way.’ His voice softened. ‘I experienced it the first time I lay in your arms, but it scared the hell out of me. I put it down to the fact that we’d just had amazing sex. It made me feel vulnerable, you see, in a way I wasn’t used to feeling. It’s what made me not ring you.’ He sucked in a deep breath. ‘But I was blinding myself to the truth—then and later.’
‘Oh?’ The word was barely audible.
‘That you were the missing part of the equation, Lara. That once you’d left Maraban it no longer felt like home. Home is where the heart is, and you have my heart. You were the factor which somehow made it all complete. Made me complete,’ he finished, and it was a declaration so raw and intense that Lara felt rocked, shocked into a disbelieving silence.
&n
bsp; ‘I love you, Lara,’ he said simply. ‘And I want you in my life. Permanently. Yours is the face I want to see first thing in the morning and last thing at night.’
Part of her was still scared that he was just saying it because he was in a heightened state of emotion, because all his past had coming flooding back in such a dramatic way. But when she looked into his eyes she saw the shining truth written there, and she knew she owed him nothing less in return.
‘And I love you,’ she said shakily. ‘So very, very much.’
He touched her hair with a sense of wonder. ‘When did it happen?’ he mused. ‘And how does it happen? In a moment? In a look, or in a kiss? In an emptiness when someone isn’t there any more and you wish they were?’
‘All of those things,’ she agreed. ‘And a few more besides.’
‘Yes,’ he said thoughtfully.
‘Please, Darian,’ she begged, ‘will you just kiss me now?’
‘Oh, God, Lara,’ he said unsteadily. ‘Try stopping me.’
He kissed her until he had to force himself to stop, drawing his lips away from her dazed and reluctant face.
‘Oh!’ She pouted. ‘Why did you do that?’
He moved away with difficulty. ‘I hardly think it will make a good impression on your father if he comes looking for us and finds the door to his sitting room locked! Come on,’ he said tenderly. ‘Let’s go and find your family.’
Nothing more was said, not then, but nothing needed to be and nobody asked. Maybe it was plain for everyone to see, thought Lara. They went back into the dining room, where her mother had cleared the table and made tea, and Darian sat down and was welcomed and introduced properly.
She feasted her eyes on him as he solemnly began to assist her niece in dressing her new dolly while her smallest nephew tugged insistently at the leg of his trouser, and he looked up at her and smiled, and it was all there, written in that silent and loving curve of his lips.