‘It was supposed to be a surprise. I was going to bring you here on our wedding anniversary. Only then you left.’ His eyes found hers. ‘I understand why. I didn’t then, but I do now. I know I wasn’t there for you. I should have been, but I wasn’t. I let you down. I made assumptions.’
‘Assumptions?’
The sound of her voice made his heart skip a beat. ‘I guess I thought it would be easy to get you to trust me. I knew you’d been hurt in the past, but you trust Dan and your brothers. And I’ve watched you walk into a schooling ring with horses that were dangerous, and you trusted them not to hurt you.’
‘Because they didn’t,’ she said quietly.
‘I know. And I know I did. I messed up. But I thought, after last night... I thought there was a chance. I thought maybe we could... That we might try again. Try and fix things.’
Last year he had given a TED talk, speaking fluently for nearly twenty minutes on the importance of perseverance. In comparison, this was the least eloquent speech he had ever given. But for some reason he couldn’t find the right words, so he held out his hand instead, just as he had watched Delphi do so many times when she worked with a head shy horse.
Heart beating unsteadily, he watched her face, silently willing her to take his hand, and finally, just when he had given up hope, she did.
His fingers tightened around hers.
‘I’ve learnt from my mistakes. I made bad decisions, wrong choices, and I’m going to make better ones.’
‘I made bad decisions too.’ She bit into her lip. ‘I was too scared to let you in, so I pushed you away instead.’
‘And I deserved it. I’m not surprised you left me.’ He hesitated, and then, reaching out, he stroked her cheek. ‘I’ve missed you so much, and from now on things are going to be different. I’m going to change.’
Suddenly he tensed, his chin jerking up like Alima’s had moments earlier—except it wasn’t the shadow of a bird making his nerve-endings quiver but the sound of his phone. Glancing down, he felt his heart begin to race. It was Rashid.
‘What are you doing?’ asked Delphi.
He had pulled his hand free of hers and now it froze in mid-air. What was he doing? For the first time, probably ever, he and Delphi were talking. But, having seen the caller ID, he couldn’t not answer any more than Delphi could ignore a barn full of horses. Besides, it would only take a few minutes.
‘I need to take this. It’s my father. I spoke to my father about settingup a meeting for me with Ali Al-Hadhri.’ He saw Delphi was staring at him blankly. ‘He’s an intermediary for several key media conglomerates in the Middle East—’
‘When?’ She cut him off. ‘When did you speak to your father?’
He frowned. ‘This morning.’
The look on her face felt like a punch to the head.
‘That’s what you were thinking about this morning?’ Her voice was thin and brittle. ‘A business meeting?’
Clenching his jaw, he shook his head. ‘That’s not what I said. My father called me. He suggested the meeting.’
‘And you didn’t think to say that you had more pressing things to discuss? With me?’
She was staring at him as if what he was saying made no sense, and a part of him knew that it didn’t. But the sound of his phone was tugging at his senses like a dog on a leash, so that it was impossible for him to think about anything but answering it.
‘I don’t have a choice, Delphi. You don’t mess around with men like Ali Al-Hadhri. All I need is five minutes...’
He turned away from her angry, pinched face.
As predicted, the call took five minutes. Hanging up, he glanced at his watch. Four, in fact. Although judging by Delphi’s narrow-eyed gaze that was four minutes too long. But it was done now.
He held up his hands in a gesture of apology. ‘Okay, I admit that was bad timing, but that call was a one-off. It won’t happen again—’
‘Are you listening to yourself? How is this you changing?’ Shaking her head, she gave a bitter laugh. ‘You know, when you said you could change, I thought about last night and I believed you. I thought about this fort, and why you bought it and, idiot that I am, I let myself think that you meant what you said. That what we have is special. Only then you took that phone call. We were in the middle of a conversation about getting back together and you broke off to set up a business meeting.’
‘It was four minutes, Delphi. And it was important.’
‘More important than our marriage. That wasn’t a question, by the way. I know that compared with business I am nothing to you. And I know that nothing I do or say will ever change that. Because you can’t change. You won’t stop until you have the biggest media empire in the world. And even that won’t be enough. You’ll probably have to go into space and see if you can set up a cable network on Mars. Omar Al Majid—media master of the universe.’
‘You think that’s why I work? For status and power?’