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He’d been so consumed in his worries and efforts to put things right, he’d made things catastrophically worse. He hadn’t even thought how his evasions would seem to her, but she’d found them so inexplicable, so hurtful, she’d reached the worst possible conclusion.
Before he could think of anything to say, she strode past him, heading toward where Najeeb was seated.
He pounced to stop her. “Where are you going?”
The spasm of pain that twisted her face almost tore his heart apart. “I said not to worry. I won’t try to stay or to impose on you. I’ll just get some stuff I need. You can send the rest later. Or just throw it away.”
He wanted to blurt out a thousand protests, but only one thing made it out of the churning mess in his mind. “This is your place.”
Her forlorn expression deepened, widening the wound her pain had gouged in his being. “I only considered it mine when I thought you were, too, when we were together. But you’re not, and we won’t be again. Tomorrow I’ll send you the papers reverting the ownership to you.” She tried to move again, and his hand tightened convulsively on her arm with horror at the terrible things she believed. And suspicion blossomed like an ink stain in her eyes. “You have someone inside?”
Shocked all over again at her horrific assumption, more evidence of how disastrously he’d messed up, he could only stare at her helplessly.
And everything in her eyes died. It felt far worse than anything he’d endured in captivity, seeing that look in her eyes.
“Jenan, please...”
Tears arrowed down her cheeks, drowning her words and his. “I never expected you to love me as I loved you. I only ever wanted you to be honest with me.”
Hearing her for the first time say she loved him—only for her to make it in the past tense—was unbearable. Like knowing he could have saved someone’s life, and out of his own negligence, he’d arrived just moments too late.
This time he didn’t let her resist him, but crushed her in his arms. “Jenan, Jenan, what have I done to you, to us? I damaged your trust in me so much you think I have a woman in there?” A tear splashed over his chest, corroding its way through to his heart as she shook all over and struggled to escape his embrace. He crushed her to him harder, groaned between feverish kisses all over her face. “Everything you think is the absolute opposite of the truth. It agonizes me to know I made you think it. But it’s true I don’t love you like you love me.” At her lurching sob, he squeezed her tighter, as if he’d merge her into his body. “After all I’ve suffered in my life, I love you far more than you can ever love me.”
This time when she struggled, it was to look up.
Her eyes looked so fragile and inflamed she had to have been weeping long before she’d come. But that dreadful grief was giving way to hope. His heart swelled with impending relief only to shrivel the next second.
“It’s true he doesn’t have a woman in there. The secrets he’s been hiding are far, far worse than that.”
Both he and Jenan swung around at the dark drawl.
Numair’s arms loosened around Jenan with dismay, letting her go as her face went slack with surprise. “Najeeb.”
He couldn’t have them both here now. It might cause a chain reaction he wouldn’t be able to control.
Numair turned urgently to Jenan. “I do have secrets, but they have nothing to do with us, with what I feel for you. I also have reasons for the way I’ve been behaving, and I’ll explain everything, only later. Please, ya habibati, just go now, let me conclude this with Najeeb and trust that everything I do is for you, for us.”
As Jenan’s eyes softened with such relief and tension left her body, Najeeb’s harsh sarcasm washed over them once more, stiffening her all over again.
“Your powers of manipulation border on magic, don’t they, Numair?” Najeeb’s steps were measured, his face as hard as stone, his eyes simmering with rage. Then he turned his gaze to Jenan. “When I heard your anguish as I approached, I thought he’d told you everything.” His gaze swung back to Numair. “But then I realized you were still playing her. What I felt the moment I saw you was right. There are far darker things to you, and colder, more terrible motives to your being with her than even I feared. But you realized I was on to you, and you poured on the pretense, conned me like you conned her from the start.”
“I might have hidden some truths—”
“Some truths?” Najeeb scoffed. “You hid every truth. All the time we’ve been dealing with a total fabrication.”
“This is the real me. I only had to settle things with you first before I told her everything.”
“About that.” Najeeb flicked him a contemptuous look. “I sat in there wondering why you revealed your truth now, and I realized it’s because you’ve reached the point in your meticulous plans when it suited you to do so, when you were ready to strike. But when you looked so shaken by Jenan’s arrival, and so anxiously asked me to stay inside, I realized this was one thing you didn’t account for. For us to meet at this delicate point, exposing everything to her prematurely. According to your plans, she would have been the last to know the truth, right? When it was too late for her to do anything about it.”
Unable to act on his rising dread and aggression, Numair said, “You have this all wrong, Najeeb.”
Until this moment, Jenan had been mutely gaping at them. Now she came between them, her voice a brittle tremolo. “What plans? What truth?”
Before Numair could try to mollify her again, Najeeb ended any hope for containing this disaster.
“That his name isn’t Numair, but ironically, a synonym of that, what I’m sure he meant. It’s Fahad. Fahad Aal Ghaanem.”
After seconds of nonreaction, the widening of Jenan’s eyes said that she recognized the name. The confusion that flooded them right after said she couldn’t process, or believe, the connotations of that name.
