“But you didn’t,” her eyes were filled with an emotion he interpreted as hope and it crushed him to see it there. How could she have hope after all they’d been through?
“No.” He crossed his arms over his broad chest. “Damn it, I believed we could do this and that it wouldn’t matter that he had loved you with all his heart. I believed I would forget that you and my brother were a pair for as long as you knew one another.”
“Yes.” Her eyes swept shut for a moment as she appeared to work to steady her breath. “We were. And let me say this: I loved Addan. He was everything to me.” She fixed him with a cool stare, but it was a counterfeit. He could see the fine tremble of her limbs, the pout of her lips, the flush of pink on her skin. “I hardly knew you – you went out of your way to avoid me and I have always been glad, because there was something about you that knocked me completely off-kilter whenever you were nearby. I thought it was dislike but now that I’ve been with you, I see it so much more clearly. Addan was my best friend, but I have wanted you almost as long as I’ve known you, Malik. As a girl, how could I understand what this meant? When you came to Addan’s birthday with that beautiful supermodel, I thought I was annoyed at you. I thought I didn’t like you. But I wanted to claw her eyes out. I looked at the way you were holding her, at the way she touched you, and I ached to feel that, to be in your arms.”
She lifted her eyes to his, and he stood completely still, refusing to believe her, refusing to let her words answer the needs buried deep within him. “This is real, between us.”
He couldn’t let her words soothe him: he couldn’t allow that to be their truth. “Yet if he’d lived, you would never have acted on that. How can I relish my wife’s desire for me, knowing it is because of my brother’s death?”
“I don’t know,” she whispered honestly, because that same question was in her own mind. “Except, you have to try. We both loved Addan; neither of us will ever forget him. But he’s dead, and he wouldn’t want you to live in some kind of self-punishing purgatory for the rest of your life. We’re married now - it’s you and me - and we’re going to be parents.”
Those words pulled at him, offering pleasure and pride when he wanted to feel only duty.
“I want you, Malik. I want you in this bed, making love to me; it’s the only thing here that makes sense. I want you to stop fighting me all the time and start fighting for the life we could share.”
Her words battered his insides. He heard them and tried to listen to them, but always, he saw Addan, he saw his brother’s mangled body contrasted to his happy face when he’d spoken of Sophia, and he knew she would always belong to Addan. That she should always belong to Addan. Even when they felt like they were moving forward, it wasn’t fair and it wasn’t right.
“No.” He pulled himself up to his full height. “You were Addan’s fiancé. You have always been his, Sharafaha, from the first moment you arrived in this country and you stared at him as though he was a piece of you that had been missing all your life. You have always been his and you always will be.”
She let out a small sob, but he didn’t look at her.
“Why can’t I be yours as well?” The question was so soft, he didn’t hear it at first. And then, it slammed through him with the force of a thousand dam walls bursting, drenching him with the tsunami of her expectations, of the life she was suggesting for them.
“Because I don’t want that.” The words ripped him to pieces, and he saw for himself the effect they had on Sophia. He told himself he was glad – if he had to be brutal to get her to understand how he felt then so be it, but watching her crumple like this, watching her strength be battered from the inside out, made his gut clench painfully.
Only, he had to make her understand. Wanting her, choosing to make this marriage real, would mean being glad Addan was dead, and he could never let himself feel that.
He spun away from her, ignoring her pain, shutting her out, just like she’d accused him of.
; “If you’d prefer to move back to your suite of rooms, I’ll understand.” The words were cold, as though he didn’t particularly care either way. Then, he swept out of his apartment with no idea of where the hell he was going to go – certain only that he had to get the hell away from all of this as soon as he could.
Only Sophia had always been a fighter, and she followed him. Not immediately. It took her a minute or two to pull herself together, to stop tears from falling down her cheeks, but then, she wrapped a robe around herself quickly and moved out of his suite.
She couldn’t have said what drove her, and why. She moved through the palace on instinct, through the ancient corridors, down the wide marble staircase, and out into the garden that ran towards the desert. She breathed in the acrid sand-filled air, and stared up at the stars, and then she heard it.
A horse.
She turned in time to catch a glimpse of her husband – unmistakably him – mounted on the back of the incredible beast, riding hard and fast.
Without thinking, without preparing, she called out, as loud as she could, “Malik!”
At first, there was nothing, then the horse slowed, the silhouette of darkness she could see, anyway, and began to move towards the palace once more. It took the scrambling steps out of the desert as though they were nothing until Malik was above her, his eyes staring down at her, his expression grim, even in this fine sliver of moonlight.
“Don’t run away,” she said simply. “Don’t tell me to move out of your rooms. Don’t just shut me out.”
He lifted his head, looking towards the horizon. “I had no idea what marriage to you would be like,” he said, finally. “I considered it my duty to marry you, and to take you to bed.”
Heat stirred inside of her.
“I thought I would take little pleasure in it. I presumed it would be perfunctory and dull. I imagined our marriage would be a minor inconvenience I would generally ignore. I had no idea,” he stared at her, “that you would find a way into my blood. That I would want you to beg for me in my bed over and over as a way of knowing it was me you wanted. I had no idea how much I would want to triumph over my brother in this regard, nor how that petty need would tear me up.”
She swallowed, lifting a hand to the horse’s neck, but the horse made a cranky noise and stepped backwards. Apparently the beautiful beast had picked up the emotional discord between Sophia and his master.
“I need to go.”
“Like when you were a teenager and you would run to the desert?” She snapped. “You’re a grown man, and a Sheikh. You cannot run from your responsibilities –,”