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“Have you...checked?”
Numair’s quiet question felt like a slap of icy water across her heated body and fantasies.
There wasn’t any use wondering what he was asking about. His meaning was totally clear. And her instant mortification had an equally known origin.
For she hadn’t checked.
She’d been avoiding doing so. She hadn’t wanted to make sure if she was pregnant, even now that her period was late. He might have insisted that wanting her had come first, and still did, but she feared that becoming pregnant would destroy their intimacy, not solidify it.
She also believed he’d insisted on marriage early on in order to give his heir the legitimacy she now suspected he’d never had. He’d always avoided talking much about his past, but she was now convinced the facts he made known were nothing but a fabrication, that he’d never had a family, and that his childhood had been too terrible to share.
She wanted to do anything at all to make it up to him, to give him everything he wanted and needed, yet she couldn’t bear that he’d marry her for any other reason but for her.
And there was another concern. Though he’d been deluging her in his passion and consideration, she still felt him holding back...so much. Not knowing what he was hiding of himself, of his past, she couldn’t chart the future.
That was why she dreaded changing the present. And her pregnancy would blow that up big-time.
Instead of saying she hadn’t checked, she said, “There’s nothing yet.”
And it was as if a dagger drove into her heart.
That flare in his eyes. That convulsive squeeze of her shoulders. That shudder that emanated from his body and reverberated in her own.
He was relieved.
That she wasn’t pregnant.
The magnitude of his relief had almost rocked him off his feet. If he hadn’t grabbed her shoulders so hard, she thought he might have even slumped to his knees.
His reaction was so startling, so incongruous with everything she’d believed up till this point, about him and about what he wanted. She felt beyond shocked.
And there was only one explanation she could find.
He’d changed his mind.
He no longer wanted to have an heir.
Not from her.
* * *
Numair didn’t know how it was possible, after all he’d done in his life, that he’d deserved a second chance.
Yet he’d somehow gotten it.
Jenan wasn’t pregnant yet.
The news had almost buckled his knees when bullets had failed to do so. Relief still so enervated him, he hadn’t been able to do anything since she’d left for Zafrana’s royal palace an hour ago.
This development bought him the most precious commodity—time to resolve everything. This way he could let it be her choice to give him a child after she knew everything about him, and everything that had brought him into her life. He wanted nothing but for her to have the dignity, the freedom and self-determination to decide to be with him, to share her life and child with him, after full disclosure.
This was everything he wanted now. He no longer cared about taking over Zafrana’s throne or even Saraya’s. He no longer even cared about punishing his uncle or avenging his father or himself. All the ugliness and horrors and suffering suddenly felt as though they had happened in someone else’s past, someone he no longer was.
He was now a new man, a man who loved Jenan with all the heart she’d created inside him. He cared only that she forgave him his initial deception and gave him her trust, her love, forever. Nothing else but her mattered.
As for resolving the other matters he’d come here for, his plans had radically changed. He still had to depose Hassan, as this was no longer just about him, but because he couldn’t let such a criminal continue ruling his homeland. He now just had to find a way that wouldn’t hurt or disgrace the rest of Hassan’s family...and his own. Then he’d be able to confess everything to Jenan.
Suddenly, another realization burst in his mind.
