EPILOGUE
SAFIYAHSTEPPEDINTOthe room and pulled up abruptly, seeing Karim alone by the window. It had been a risk, arranging this meeting, but one she’d believed worth taking.
Karim was a changed man—happy and positive and oh-so-loving, unafraid to express his emotions. Especially since their daughter Amira’s birth. He doted on their little girl, while his relationship with Tarek grew stronger by the day. And with Safiyah he was everything she’d ever longed for.
But she knew the past cast long shadows. She couldn’t change Karim’s loveless childhood, but she hoped at least to ease the pain of his not knowing his parents. Which was why she’d tracked down the man Karim’s mother had run away to. The man who might be Karim’s father.
Seeing her husband’s preternatural stillness, the air of barely contained energy vibrating from those broad shoulders, she guessed the meeting hadn’t gone well.
Her hopes nosedived.
‘You’re alone?’
He swung to face her and her heart rocked against her ribcage when she read his expression. In a rush she closed in on him, wrapping her arms tight around his powerful frame.
‘I’m sorry, Karim. I thought—’
‘I know what you thought, habibti.’ His mouth crooked up at one corner in a tight smile. ‘That it was time I made peace with the man who might be my father. And you were right.’
He gathered her in, then turned to look out the window. There, just emerging from the palace, was a rangy figure, shoulders straight and gait familiar. He paused, as if sensing their regard, and looked over his shoulder. Karim inclined his head and the man reciprocated, then walked away.
‘Yet he’s leaving?’
Was it crazy to have hoped the two might begin to build a tenuous relationship?
‘No, just stretching his legs. We both need a little time to process things. He’s accepted my offer to stay in the palace for a visit. To meet the family.’
No mistaking the pride in Karim’s voice.
‘He has?’ Safiyah stared up at her husband, stunned.
His half-smile broadened into a grin that made her heart flutter. ‘What you mean is you’re stunned I invited him to stay. But then heismy father.’
‘Oh, Iknewit! You have the same walk…and the angle of your jaw…’ She paused, searching his face. ‘And you’re all right with that?’
Karim raked a hand through his hair. ‘They didn’t know about me.’
‘Sorry?’
Safiyah looked up at him with those lustrous eyes and he pulled her even closer. It had been a morning of revelations and powerful emotion. He found he needed the concrete reality of his darling wife to anchor him.
‘When my mother ran away with him she had no idea that I was his son. He swears that if they’d realised she’d never have left me with the Sheikh.’
Karim believed him. His father wasn’t what he’d expected. A proud yet gentle man, he was a schoolteacher in a remote mountain valley, devoted to the children he looked on as his own, never knowing till recently he had a son.
‘He and my mother were deeply in love, but her family ignored that and arranged her marriage with the Sheikh. A lowly trainee schoolteacher wasn’t considered good enough for her. They were only together once before the wedding—one night of secret passion before a loveless marriage.’
Karim’s thoughts strayed inevitably to Safiyah’s dutiful marriage to Abbas. How desperate must she have felt, knowing there was no escape, giving herself as a convenient wife?
Safiyah had given him a whole new perspective on his mother. A new sympathy for a woman caught in an unwanted, unhappy marriage.
‘When I was born my mother believed I was the Sheikh’s son.’ Karim drew a slow breath. ‘According to my father…’ He paused on the word, testing its newness but liking it. ‘She finally left the Sheikh because her marriage broke down. Emotional abuse turned into physical abuse and she feared for her safety. But she always believed he wouldn’t lay a hand on me or Ashraf as his precious heirs.’
‘Oh, Karim…’ Safiyah gripped him tight.
‘My father didn’t even know she’d run away from the palace till she came to him and they fled together over the border. They only had a year together before she died.’
‘That’s so sad.’