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He couldn’t make love to her anymore!
Though there was a possibility he couldn’t impregnate her since he hadn’t yet—which he also realized didn’t matter at all—he couldn’t continue making love to her without protection, in case they finally succeeded in creating a child before he resolved everything. And he couldn’t suddenly start using protection, either, not without explaining why.
His only way out was to not make love to her at all. It felt like the most mutilating sentence he’d ever had inflicted on him. But it was a price he had to pay for his mistakes, until he fixed them and told her the truth.
He could only pray to whoever or whatever had answered his first prayer, that when he did, she’d still want him and would give him a second chance.
The second chance his life depended on.
* * *
“Is Numair coming today?”
At Fayza’s eager question, Jen turned from staring numbly at her reflection in her bedroom mirror. She found both her sisters with their heads poking around her suite’s door, their long hair cascading like waterfalls of mahogany and ebony. They were now the one thing that made being back in Zafrana’s royal palace, in Zafrana at all, in this whole life, bearable.
She had one response for them. “No, he isn’t coming.”
And she feared he never would again.
“But we want to ask him if we can have another party on board his jet,” Zeena lamented.
“Can we call him?” Fayza zoomed inside, bombarding her with questions. “We don’t have his phone number. Does he even answer if it’s a number he doesn’t know? Or does he know our numbers? Would you call him for us?”
“Don’t you think we’ve taken enough from Sheikh Numair?”
Jen’s heart squeezed at their father’s weary voice. He now followed the girls into her suite at a much slower pace, as if it hurt to walk.
Forcing a smile, she rose to greet him, and he took her in arms that trembled and kissed the top of her head.
It felt as if her father had grown smaller in the past months, had aged far beyond his sixty-three years. Being helpless to solve his kingdom’s problems, and the shame of having to sacrifice his eldest daughter as their only solution had taken their toll. Even now that it was over, it seemed the ordeal still echoed its distress and defeat inside him. It probably would for the rest of his life.
She pulled back, wanting to soothe him, even when she had nothing but dread and pain inside her own soul, and he looked at her with a world of contrition in his eyes.
“When you first came to me with Numair and told me he’d resolve Zafrana’s debts, I couldn’t believe he’d do that without asking for something eve
n bigger in return. I didn’t even know if he could do it. Then Hassan called everything off, and I knew Numair had fulfilled his promise. A week ago, I got back everything I signed away, just because Numair willed it. Now I find myself in an even bigger debt than what bound me in servitude to Hassan. This time to Numair. The debt of the restoration of your freedom, of our kingdom’s stability and of my dignity. And it’s a debt I have no idea how I will ever repay.”
Swallowing the knot in her throat, she tried to keep the tremors of anguish from her voice. “Numair doesn’t want, or expect, anything in return.”
Numair didn’t want anything anymore. Not from her.
“Are you certain, ya b’nayti?” She winced at how her father called her “my daughter,” as his eyes, so much like hers, probed her in hope. “I thought you were the prize he had his heart set on.”
Unable to utter another word without succumbing to the desolate weeping that had overcome her so many times in the past week, she just shook her head.
That hit her family hard, made them cut their visit short. They’d all come with everything they’d wanted to say or hoped for involving Numair. They’d had their hearts set on Numair ending up with her.
As she’d believed he would. Until that day she’d told him she wasn’t pregnant.
Since that day, he’d been finding excuses not to meet her, and if he had to, he made sure it wasn’t in their place or anywhere private. Every instance of pointed distance had solidified her suspicions. He had been relieved she hadn’t become pregnant, and he wasn’t risking she might become so. But it was far worse than she’d at first thought. It wasn’t the heir he’d changed his mind about.
It was her. He no longer wanted her.
It had taken her seven weeks to fall irrevocably in love with him, to become unable to think how she’d lived before him, or to imagine a life without him. It had taken him the same time to have enough of her.
Who was she fooling? It hadn’t taken her that long to fall for him. She’d done so on sight. Every day since had only driven her deeper into dependence.
And while his desire for her had seemed to intensify, too, it had just come to an abrupt end that day. Ever since, he’d been pretending to still want her, but he escaped any intimacy under a dozen pretexts. He might think he was letting her down gradually, but she couldn’t bear that. If he no longer wanted her, she wanted it over. Now.
