She shook her head furiously. ‘No, no, not at all.’ She had insulted him and it hadn’t been her intention. ‘But it does make you different from the man I believed you to be.’
‘How?’ he said. ‘I am the same man underneath the suit as the robe. As you can see.’ He spread his arm out, drawing her eyes to the many scars on his chest, illuminated by the light from the bathroom, the red marks where her nails had scored his skin during their lovemaking, and the faded ink of the tattoo. ‘It is only your perception that is different.’
Was it? Perhaps he was right, and her impression of him was about her own prejudices—her own fantasies. And the truth was that so much of him was unchanged from their night in the desert. But, still, she couldn’t quite give up her argument.
‘Really? Would you have chosen to get that tattoo now?’ she asked, seizing on the crude, pagan and unsettling design—which made him look even more wild than all the injuries he had suffered. He must have got it when he’d become Chief of the Kholadi, as a teenager, the serpent a well-known symbol of the tribe.
He glanced at his shoulder, almost as if he had forgotten the tattoo was there. Then stared back at her.
‘This tattoo was not my choice. My father had me inked before he threw me out.’
‘Sheikh Tariq forced you to have that tattoo?’ Shock and sympathy hit her like a punch to the stomach. ‘But… Why?’
‘So everyone would know I was nothing more than a Kholadi whore’s brat.’
She tried to absorb the horror of that, and the sadness at the casual way he made the remark. ‘How old were you?’
He shrugged, making the snake writhe in the dim light. ‘Ten.’
Ten? ‘But that’s… That’s hideous.’
She’d heard the stories about Tariq’s abuse of Zane. When she and Cat had gone to the marketplace together during the early days of her friend’s employment, an old woman who had delivered fabric to the palace had told of how Zane had been beaten for trying to run away, after being kidnapped from his mother in LA.
Why was she even surprised that Tariq had treated his other son with equal brutality? The old Sheikh had become mad with bitterness after Zelda Mayhew, Zane’s mother, had run away from him with her baby son. But this wasn’t just cruel, it was twisted. To permanently mark a child, to treat him with such contempt, your own flesh and blood. How could Tariq have done such a thing? And how had Raif survived it?
‘Do not be distressed.’ He sent her a confused half-smile. ‘I survived. Once you get used to the needle, it doesn’t hurt. And I wear the tattoo with pride now as the Kholadi’s Chief. He was crueller to my mother.’
The minute he had mentioned his mother, Raif knew he should not have done. Because Kasia shot upright, dislodging his arm, the curiosity in her gaze outstripped by the concern and compassion that had already turned her eyes into twin pools of amber. Pools he had lost himself in a moment ago.
Was that why he’d mentioned his mother, because he was basking in the compassion? Exactly how weak and pathetic did that make him?
‘Your mother? You mean…’ She paused and looked down, her fingers toying with the robe’s belt. She didn’t want to say the word, he realised—and was trying to think of a more polite way to describe her. At last she raised her chin, the honest sympathy turning the pang in his chest to an ache.
‘I’m sorry, I only know the stories about your mother, that she was a…’ He waited for her to say it, a word he had heard many times, a word he himself had u
sed to describe his mother. A word he had always been determined to own. People had judged him because of her and he had hated her for it, but had refused to admit the shame he felt, persuading anyone who would listen, his brother included, that he was proud to be a whore’s son.
Strange to realise that when he’d finally discovered the truth about her, two years ago, while reading his father’s papers, the only real emotion he had felt, instead of anger or regret or sadness for the woman who had given birth to a sheikh’s son and been destroyed in the process, had been a vague feeling of disappointment. That he had gone through his childhood, his whole adult life fighting to prove it didn’t matter that his mother was something she had never really been.
‘That she was Tariq’s paid companion,’ Kasia finally managed.
The ache in his chest became more pronounced when he realised how hard Kasia was trying to spare his feelings. Feelings that no longer existed. Or hadn’t until he’d taken her virginity all those weeks ago and triggered a reaction he’d found hard to explain.
‘A whore, you mean?’ he said flatly.
‘I wouldn’t use that term,’ Kasia replied fiercely.
‘Why not, if it is the truth?’ He was baiting her now, and he knew it, because the truth about his mother was more complex. But he couldn’t help wondering how Kasia would have reacted to his heritage if his mother had been the whore everyone had convinced him she was? Would Kasia have judged him, too? And his mother? Or was her sweetness, her innocence as real as it appeared?
‘Because it’s a cruel and derogatory term and it doesn’t take into account why women are often forced to make those choices,’ she said without hesitation, the passionate defence making the ache in his chest worse.
Apparently she was as sweet as she appeared.
He wondered how different his life might have been if he had met Kasia before the lies about his birth—and the degradation he had suffered because of them—had forced him to grow up far too soon and had hardened him into the cynic he was today? He rubbed his knuckles over his chest, determined to take the foolish ache away. They could not turn back the clock. Maybe he had become the man he was today—hard, cynical, immune to love—based on a lie, but he had no desire to change who he was.
‘Perhaps it is good, then, she was not so much of a whore after all,’ he said, deciding to tell Kasia the truth. ‘Or not until after she became pregnant with me.’
‘I don’t…I don’t understand,’ she said. ‘But I thought she died when you were born?’