CHAPTER ONE
FLOPPINGBACKAGAINST the scratchy hospital pillow, Delphi gritted her teeth. How much longer was she going to have to sit here?
She had no idea how long she had been waiting. Hospitals were like casinos. The longer you stayed, the harder it was to keep track of time. Annoyingly, her phone had run out of juice soon after she’d arrived, but Carole, the nurse who’d iced her bruised wrist, had looked at her as if she had grown horns when she’d asked if she could charge it.
Breathe, she told herself firmly.
Forcing her shoulders to relax, she inhaled in through her nose slowly, held her breath, counting to seven, and then exhaled through her mouth. She was supposed to make a whooshing sound, like a child blowing out the candles on a birthday cake, but she didn’t want to think about her birthday right now. If she did, then she would think about Dan and her brothers and the ranch—
A wave of homesickness rolled through her, and she sat up straight, ignoring the jolt to her wrist. Carole had left the orange floral curtains slightly open and she stared through the gap.
It was the Fourth of July. She would have thought today of all days the hospital would be like a ghost town. That everyone would be meeting up with family and friends to eat charred burgers and their great-grandma’s special potato salad.
But there were so many people milling around it might as well be that casino she’d thought about.
When she’d mentioned this to Dr Kelly, the doctor who had examined her, he’d rolled his eyes.
‘It might be all burgers and potato salad for you, young lady, but this is the ER’s busiest twenty-four hours of the year. You name it. We get it. Food poisoning. Dehydration. Sunstroke. Firework-related injuries,’ he’d listed grumpily as he’d peered into her eyes with his ophthalmoscope. ‘And, of course, my favourite.’ He’d scowled at her. ‘Drink-driving accidents.’
‘I didn’t drink anything,’ she’d protested. ‘Nothing alcoholic, anyway.’
Which was true. Nor had she eaten at the barbecue either. Maybe if she had she wouldn’t be here. It was low blood sugar that had made her sway forward like that, only nobody had listened to her. Then, of course, she’d had to go and wince when they took her pulse.
The corners of her mouth twisted. If only she had eaten something—a mouthful of potato salad, a slice of watermelon. But she hadn’t been hungry. Truthfully, she hadn’t had much of an appetite for weeks now—
Her thoughts shunted into one another, just as the pick-up had shunted her hours earlier, and in one of those strange distortions of time that kept happening on and off when she wasn’t policing her brain she was back in London, reliving those few fraught seconds when she had finally accepted the truth. That happy endings happened to other people. Not to her.
She hadn’t realised at the time, but that was the moment her marriage—that uncharacteristically optimistic...no, make that reckless leap of faith into the unknown—had ended not with a bang, or even a whimper, but a tut.
A lump built in her throat, so that it hurt to breathe.
It had been such a tiny sound—the smallest click of tongue against teeth. But it was the smallness of it that had hurt the most. As if that was all she was worthy of. As if that was all he had to give her.
Only she didn’t want to think about that now. Actually, she didn’t want to think about him—her beautiful, cool-headed, cold-hearted husband—ever.
But, just as in their marriage, what she wanted was irrelevant.
Omar was always there—inside her head. A near-constant presence, jolting her awake from her dreams. Sliding into her thoughts with the same smoothness with which he had once slid into her eager, twitching body.
Heart accelerating, she stared through the gap in the curtains to where he stood on the other side of the ER, his dark head bent over the coffee machine, broad shoulders flexing beneath his blue shirt. She stilled instinctively as the dark head turned towards her. But of course it wasn’t Omar. It was just her mind playing tricks on her.
He was miles away, chasing down a deal. He probably hadn’t even paused to give a thought to his wife—his soon-to-be ex-wife. Her shoulders stiffened and she felt a twinge of pain—not in her wrist, which was the only part of her injured in the shunt, but in her heart.
It wasn’t fair. Over the years she had trained herself to tread lightly through life, not to get attached to anywhere or anyone, and in the past it had never been a problem for her to walk away and keep on walking.
But it had hurt unbearably to leave Omar. As much as if she had cut off an arm. Or a hand. Her gaze dropped to the bare finger on her left hand. The only reason she had managed to do so was because to have stayed would have been an act of wilful self-destruction.
Except it was not that straightforward. As she knew only too well from her parents’ very public and much-hyped affair and even more hyped tragic deaths, such acts were like black holes, swallowing those closest and sucking them into the darkness.
Like her father, and Dan, her brothers... She knew how hurt they would be when they found out that her marriage was over.
Angrily, she blanked her mind.
This was her fault. It should be her pain. And, however much it hurt, she was better off right now facing it alone.
And clearly Omar thought so too.
In the days following her leaving she had half thought, half hoped he would come after her. But Omar was no needy man-child like her biological father, Dylan. On the contrary, Omar Al Majid was emphatically, arrogantly male, from the top of his sculpted head to the soles of his handmade shoes and every place in between.