She pulled a face. ‘Hardly.’
He leaned over and tapped the edge of her nose. ‘It was a compliment. So, what made you learn?’
That slight, vulnerable look he’d seen before briefly crossed her face and he was almost sorry he’d asked. Then she shrugged as if it didn’t matter and he knew that it did. A lot.
‘When my mother and unborn brother died my father was devastated and nothing I did seemed to help. One day while I was weaving a basket to sell at the markets, I saw how much fun the boys were having and how strong they looked, sparring with each other. It made me hate being a weak girl, so I asked to join them.’
‘I’m surprised your father let you.’
‘He didn’t know.’ She gave a rueful grimace. ‘For a long time he was sort of absent. But I knew how badly he had wanted a son and I wanted to impress him. So I trained hard and entered the tournament that we hold at the village once a year—and I nearly won.’
He smiled. ‘I have no doubt. And was he impressed?’
Farah looked across at Zach and realised just how much she’d told him and how easy he was to talk to—something else she hadn’t expected. Deciding that she might as well continue, she hugged her knees into her chest. ‘Shocked is probably more the word I would use.’ She pulled a rueful face, trying not to recall her father’s harsh disapproval and her utter sense of hopelessness at the time. ‘Sometimes it felt like nothing I did was—’ She stopped, feeling more exposed than when she was lying before him naked.
‘Good enough?’ He filled in. ‘Don’t look so surprised, habiba. Your father isn’t the only man to doll out conditional love.’ His expression grew grim. ‘My father was of the same ilk.’
Conditional love? Farah had never thought of it like that. Was that what her father gave? It seemed so obvious now, but always, in the past, she had thought there was something lacking in her.
A feeling of lightness came over her and she laughed. ‘Why did I never think of that?’
Zach shrugged. ‘Our fathers had a way of making us feel otherwise.’
Realising that Zach’s father must not have approved of him, either, she leant forward. ‘Are you saying you didn’t see eye to eye with your father, either?’
Zach gave a short bark of laughter. ‘That’s putting it mildly. Nadir was always his favourite and he had little time for me as his spare.’
Farah heard the layer of pain behind that one word and her heart went out to him, not for one minute having thought that they would have something like this in common. ‘And you never resented your brother for that?’ Because at times she still felt guilty about her old feelings of resentment towards her unborn brother, certain that her own death would not have wrought half the pain in her father that his had.
‘It wasn’t Nadir’s fault. My father was raised hard and he raised us hard.’
‘Still, I admire that you didn’t feel second-best.’
‘Oh, I felt it. Often. Second-best. Third-best. I did everything to get his attention: being good, being bad, being funny, being smart, being strong... Then I realised that beating my head against a brick wall was only denting my head, not his, so I stopped. I joined the Foreign Legion, did a degree in engineering and started my own company. When I first got back to Bakaan—as you know—there was a lot to do to settle down the unrest. Then I saw how badly things had become and I did what I could behind the scenes.’
Did what he could? Farah blinked. ‘It’s you,’ she said abruptly, instinctively knowing that he was the one who had organised the contraband goods their village—and probably others—received on a regular basis.
He smiled. ‘I hope so.’
‘No.’ She shook her head, still dazed to think it might be true. ‘You’re the one who organised the medical supplies and educational material that is sent out to the villages in our area.’
He shrugged. ‘I know it wasn’t much, but it was all I could do while my father was alive. That will change though.’
‘Thank you. That was...’ She swallowed, struggling for words. For years she’d carried around a grudge against the Darkhans because she had blamed them for the loss of her mother and the happy life she had known before. She hadn’t questioned the who, what or why of what had happened but had accepted her father’s view and taken it on as her own. How could she have been so narrow-minded? How could she have let the past colour her view of the world so completely? ‘I’m sorry. I think it was me who underestimated you this time.’