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His first instinct was to deny that he knew what she was talking about. The next second, he almost groaned.
Why had he panicked like that? How could he even consider lying? It was clear Johara or Shaheen or both had told her, but why, he’d never know. But though it wasn’t his favorite topic or memory, his reluctance to mention it had resulted in this awkward moment. But that was all it was. He’d pay for his omission with some tongue-lashings, and then she’d laugh off his failure to provide full disclosure about this subject as he did everything else, and that would be that.
He caressed her between the perfect orbs of her breasts, worry still squeezing his own heart at the hammering that wasn’t subsiding beneath his palm. “I should have told you.”
He waited with bated breath, anticipating the dawning of devilry, the launch of a session of stripping sarcasm.
Nothing came but a vacant, “Yes. You should have.”
When that remained all she said and that heart beneath his palm slowed down to a sluggish rhythm, he rushed to qualify his moronically deficient answer. “There was nothing to tell, really. Shaheen made the suggestion a couple of weeks before I met you. I told him to forget it, and that was that.”
Another intractable moment of blankness passed before she said, “But Johara set us up that first night. And you must have realized she had. Why didn’t you say something then? Or later? When you started telling me everything?”
All through the past months, unease about this omission had niggled at him. He’d started to tell her many times, only for some vague…dread to hold him back.
“I just feared it might upset you.”
“Why should it have, if it was nothing? It’s not that I think I’m entitled to know everything that ever happened in your life, but this concerned me. I had a right to know.”
He felt his skull starting to tighten around his brain. “With the exception of this one thing, I did tell you everything in my life. And it was because this concerned you that I chose not to mention it. Their nomination, as well-meaning as it was, was just…unworthy of you.”
“But you did act on that nomination. It was why you considered me.”
His skull tightened another notch. “No. No. I didn’t even consider Shaheen’s proposition. Okay, I did, for about two minutes. But that was before I saw you that night. If I thought about it again afterward, it was to marvel at how wrong Shaheen was when he thought you’d agree to marry me based on my potential benefits. There’s no reason to be upset over this, ya kanzi. Johara and Shaheen’s matchmaking had nothing to do with us or the soul-deep friendship and love that grew between us.”
“Would you have considered me to start with if not for my potential benefits?”
“You had none!”
“Ah, but I do. Johara listed them. Stemming from being me and being Zohaydan, as she put it.”
“Why the hell would she tell you something like that? Those pregnancy hormones have been scrambling her brain of late.”
“She was celebrating the fact that it all came together so well for all of us, especially you.”
“I don’t care what she or anyone else thinks. I care about nothing but you. You know that, Kanza.”
She suddenly let go of his gaze, slipped out of his hold. He watched her with a burgeoning sense of helplessness as she got off the bed, then put on her clothes slowly an
d unsteadily.
He rose, too, as if from ten rounds with a heavyweight champion, stuffing himself back into his pants, feeling as if he’d been hurled from the sublime heights of their explosively passionate interlude to the bottom of an abyss.
Suddenly she spoke, in that voice that was hers but no longer hers. Expressionless, empty. Dead. “I was unable to rationalize the way you sought me out in the beginning. It was why I was so terrified of letting you close. I needed a logical explanation, and logic said I was nowhere in your league—nothing that could suit or appeal to you.”
“You’re everything that—”
Her subdued voice drowned the desperation of his interjection. “But I was dying to let you get close, so I pounced on Johara’s claims that you needed a best friend, then did everything to explain to myself how I qualified as that to you. But her new revelations make much more sense why you were with me, why you married me.”
“I was with you because you’re everything I could want. I married you because I love you and can’t live without you.”
“You do appear to love me now.”
“Appear? Damn it, Kanza, how can you even say this?”
“I can because no matter how much you showed me you loved me, I always wondered how you do. What I have that the thousands of women who pursued you don’t.” He again tried to protest the total insanity of her words when lashing pain gripped her face, silencing him more effectively than a skewer in his gut. “When I couldn’t find a reason why, I thought you were responding to the intensity of my emotions for you. I thought it was my desire that ignited yours. I did know you needed a home and I thought you found it in me. But your home has always been Zohayd. You just needed someone to help you go home and to have the family and set down the roots you yearned for your entire life.”
Unable to bear one more word, he swooped down on her, crushed her to him, stormed her face with kisses, scolding her all the while. “Every word you just said is total madness, do you hear me? You are everything I never dreamed to find, everything I despaired I’d never find. I’ve loved you from that first moment you turned and smacked me upside the head with your sarcasm, then proceeded to reignite my will to exist, then taught me the meaning of being alive.”
