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All my love
C xox
KASIA RE-READ THE handwritten letter, which had arrived that morning, for the sixth time in as many minutes. Tears stung her eyes and dripped onto the photo Cat had sent of her five-year-old daughter. Kaliah’s wide grin showed off her missing front tooth as she sat on her new pony.
Kasia wiped the moisture off her cheeks and stuffed the letter back into its envelope. Then, with trembling fingers, pinned the print of Kaliah and her pony onto the board above her desk.
Raif had been seriously ill for three weeks because of her. He’d only just recovered. How would she ever forgive herself?
Guilt and nausea roiled in her stomach, making the fatigue that had been dragging her down for a week weigh on her shoulders like a slab of concrete.
Placing the letter in the top drawer of the desk, she fished out the cardboard box she’d bought from the chemist’s yesterday.
She turned the pregnancy testing kit over in her hands and read the instructions. Again.
She couldn’t put it off any longer. Cat’s letter and the devastating news about Raif’s illness and recovery was a sign. A sign she had to start taking responsibility for her actions. She was convinced her symptoms were psychosomatic—even though he hadn’t pulled out during their lovemaking, she had been at the very beginning of her cycle. And her period was only two days overdue, which wasn’t that unusual for her.
This obsession with her so-called symptoms—the mild nausea, the tender breasts, the emotional roller-coaster, the bone-deep fatigue that had hit every evening for a week—was some weird psychological hangover from her time in the desert, which she hadn’t been able to get out of her head.
Every night she dreamed of him. Not just the vivid erotic dreams that woke her up sweaty and unfulfilled, her skin prickling with sensation, her heart thundering, her clitoris slick and swollen from the far-too-real memory of his tongue stroking her to orgasm. But also the much more unsettling visions of him when they had ridden together through the storm, when he’d cried out in his sleep and the harsh frown of disbelief on his face as she’d galloped away from him.
And now Cat’s letter had made all those symptoms that much more pronounced.
Something had happened to her at the oasis, something profound and life-changing that went beyond the sex. Something she wasn’t going to be able to come to terms with until she made absolutely sure, once and for all, that she wasn’t pregnant with Raif Kasim Ali Kholadi Khan’s child.
Emotion caused a lump to form in her throat as she walked into the small en suite bathroom of her room in the hall of residence.
After unwrapping the test stick, it took her several agonising minutes to manage to pee on it. She placed it on the vanity unit and washed her hands, then sat on the toilet seat and set the stopwatch on her smartphone to the required two minutes to get the result.
Which turned in to the longest two minutes of her entire life.
The questions she didn’t want to answer that were roaring around in her head were almost as deafening as the sandstorm she and Raif had survived all those weeks ago.
She should have done this yesterday when she’d bought the test. Why hadn’t she? Was it because she didn’t want to have a pregnancy confirmed, or the much more disturbing thought that she did? Why would she want to be pregnant by a man she barely knew? A man who appeared to comprehensively lack the sensibilities she had always dreamed of finding in a life partner? Was she really that needy and lonely and insecure that she yearned to have a child, whatever the circumstances of its birth?
But the combination of anticipation and dread tangling with the nausea in her stomach didn’t feel as if it was just a result of her long-held desire that one day she wanted to be a mother. No, these complex urges were not generic or anonymous, but intrinsically linked to Raif and the intense time they had shared together, every single moment of which she kept reliving.
Her phone buzzed and she shrieked.
Okay, it’s official—you are actually going insane.
But when she looked at the stopwatch she realised her two minutes weren’t up yet. Instead, a message had appeared on the phone screen from the sponsorship team at Devereaux College. She frowned as she read the message.
Ms Salah,
We’ve received a request that you attend a black-tie reception tonight in London at eight p.m.
The guest of honour Mr R Khan—a billionaire businessman from your home region, I understand—is thinking of funding a scholarship programme at Devereaux. We would very much appreciate it if you would agree to attend this event so that you can discuss your current research with him. We are hopeful that a scholarship programme of this nature, if agreed, will help fund your PhD.
A car will be made available to transport you to London.
Regards
Alice Evershot
Devereaux Scholarship Team
The request was not at all what she needed right now. But she would have to attend the event tonight and make a good impression—any chance of getting her PhD funded was not something she could afford to pass up.
