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‘And I was a total bastard,’ Zarif said softly, carrying her hand to his lips and pressing a kiss to her palm in mute apology for that meeting at the hotel. ‘I was very bitter when you turned me down three years ago. I thought you had deliberately lured me into proposing just for the ego boost of blowing me off.’
Ella was shaken. ‘But I wouldn’t have done that to anyone!’
‘I was bitter,’ Zarif repeated doggedly. ‘Angry, desperately unhappy. I wanted you so much, believed you were about to become my wife and then, suddenly, I couldn’t have you.’
‘You’d have got me with bells on if you’d told me you loved me then. Of course you didn’t appreciate that what you were feeling was love or you wouldn’t have wittered on about Azel,’ she worked out for herself, her lovely face reflective. ‘But maybe on some level after your first marriage you just weren’t ready to make such a major commitment to me and maybe I was still too immature.’
‘I’m trying to make excuses for the way I behaved after you turned me down,’ Zarif confessed grittily. ‘I went off the rails for a while...sex, alcohol.’
Ella quirked a fair brow. ‘Loose women?’
As she studied Zarif he flinched and reddened with embarrassment. ‘All blonde, all blue-eyed. I tried to fantasise every one of them into being you,’ he groaned. ‘My brothers thought it was good for me to live like that for a while and that it would have been foolish of me to get married again so soon and tie myself down.’
‘But what did you think?’ Ella pressed, pained by what he was telling her, although it really wasn’t anything she hadn’t expected when she had seen photos of him in clubs and at parties with glamorous women.
‘I would have exchanged all of the partying for one day married to you. It was sleazy and I’m ashamed of it but for a long time afterwards I blamed you for having set me off on that path by...hurting me.’ He found it so difficult to get that confession of vulnerability past his lips that he almost choked on that word.
Ella hated to think that she had hurt him but then he had hurt her as well and that was what happened when two people didn’t understand each other or their feelings. Slowly she laced her small fingers with his long tense ones, recognising what it had cost his pride to speak as freely as he had done about both the duration of his love and his mistakes, and loving him all the more for that sacrifice. ‘We’re all good at blaming others for our mistakes, and at least I know you’ve satisfied any curiosity you had about that kind of lifestyle. As for the apartment in Dubai—’
Zarif tensed. ‘I’ll sell it. I could never take you there.’
‘So, we draw a line under it and put it all behind us, no more recriminations, no more shame or regrets. Stop beating yourself up about your blunders. It’s the past,’ she emphasised with quiet assurance. ‘We’ll make a wonderful future together for our child.’
‘A future in which you occasionally throw yourself at me again?’ Zarif whispered wickedly.
Ella pushed him flat on the bed. ‘For the last time, I did not throw myself at you!’
‘I loved every second of it,’ her husband admitted shamelessly, shooting her an irreverent grin that lit up his lean, darkly devastating features and made her heart leap inside her chest.
‘When’s your birthday?’ she asked him.
‘That’s months away!’ Zarif groaned as he drew her down and extracted a very long and passionate kiss from her lush mouth.
Supporting herself on one hand, Ella traced teasing fingers along the line of a long, powerful thigh and watched him jerk taut. ‘I’m not sure I could wait that long either. I love you so much, Zarif, but from now on you have to tell me that you love me at least once every day.’
He sat up and peeled off his robe and the shirt beneath in one potent and impatient movement, revealing his golden muscular torso. ‘I love you, habibti.’
Ella felt incredibly powerful when he looked at her with his heart in his beautiful eyes. ‘I love you too.’
* * *
Ella twisted and turned to get a good view of her outfit. Brought as a gift from her mother-in-law, Mariyah, the s
leek sapphire-blue evening gown oozed Italian chic.
‘It looks amazing,’ Cathy told her cheerfully.
Ella turned to smile at her childhood friend. ‘Fine feathers make fine birds.’
‘No, it’s the jaw-dropping sapphire jewels, not the dress, that knocks the eyes out first,’ Soraya teased. ‘But even when you’re in jeans, you look great, Ella. You’ve kept your figure so well.’
But the baby weight had been an uphill challenge to shed, Ella reflected wryly. She had managed it twice, however, and now, and quite unexpectedly, she was going to have to do it again, but that was still a secret. ‘There’s still lumps and bumps in places there didn’t used to be,’ she lamented.
Five years of marriage and two children, Ella mused in wonder, because the time had flown and seemed to speed up with every passing month. Halim had only passed away eighteen months ago and Zarif still missed the older man a great deal. His mother, Mariyah, had gradually become a more frequent visitor, who took great pleasure in her grandchildren.
Given the opportunity, she had talked frankly to Zarif about why she had handed him over so completely to his grandparents. Mariyah had known that she had no father figure to offer her son and had deemed her own father preferable to the risks of Gaetano Ravelli’s potential influence. She had called herself selfish for wanting to pursue a career, which she could never have had in those days had she returned to Vashir, but she had believed it would be even more selfish to deprive Zarif of his heritage and very probably the chance to become King. Mother and son had made their peace and, although they might never be especially close, they were becoming friends and Zarif valued the connection.
Ella’s parents were frequent visitors in common with Zarif’s brothers. Ella and Zarif had seen Jason occasionally when they visited her home but contact had been minimal. Jason had narrowly escaped a jail sentence two years earlier and had been put on probation when he became marginally involved with a pyramid selling scheme that broke the law. Since then Jason had been working in a sales role for a national company and Ella suspected that Zarif had somehow fixed that job for her brother behind the scenes, either because he felt sorry for him or because he felt sorry for the worry and distress Jason caused their parents. In recent times, however, her brother had not been a cause for concern and Ella was starting to dare to hope that he had learned his lesson and was prepared to turn his life around.
