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She laid a hand on his chest, felt the harsh tattoo of his galloping heartbeat, the spasms of his breathing still too fast and frantic.
He covered her hand with one of his, the connection arching between them. He still needed her, and she wanted to help. To be here for him.
‘Karim, what…what was it about? The nightmare? Do you know?’
He shook his head, his eyes still covered, but he didn’t look at her and she sensed it wasn’t that he didn’t know, but that he didn’t want to know.
‘You were begging someone not to hurt someone else, a woman, I think,’ she managed, knowing she was stepping over that invisible line, again, that barrier that he had erected so deliberately the day before with his note, but refusing to let that stop her. This marriage was more than just a convenience, much more.
She’d left her father to his pain, too scared and insecure to intervene when he’d shut her out repeatedly, and it had been the wrong thing to do. Karim had asked for her help last night and she wanted to give it to him.
‘Perhaps if you talked about it?’ she began.
‘There is nothing to talk about,’ he said, his voice strained. ‘I told you, I don’t know what the damn nightmares are about.’ She could hear the lie in his voice, just as she had with her father, when he had refused to confront the pain.
But was he lying to her, or to himself?
‘Was it…? Was it your mother?’ she asked.
His hand gripped hers as he lifted his arm and swung his head round to stare at her—and she could see the horrifying truth in his expression. The truth Ameera had alluded to, the reason why he had struggled so much when returning to Zafar, and why he had talked with such contempt about his father weeks ago, on the day of the ball.
‘Did he hurt her?’ she asked. ‘More than just emotionally?’
His eyes narrowed and he let go of the hand resting on his chest. ‘I don’t wish to talk about it.’
He whipped the sheet off to climb out of the bed. Heat hit her cheeks at the sight of his naked buttocks, and the evidence, when he turned towards her, that he was fully aroused. The heat gathered in her sex, fast and furious and unbidden as her gaze rose from the hard evidence of his arousal to find him watching her—the answering heat in his eyes as vivid as it was compelling.
‘You should go…’ he said at last. ‘You weren’t supposed to be here,’ he added, confirming what she’d already guessed, the harsh truth like a blow.
‘I know,’ she said.
He nodded. ‘Then you need to leave now… Unless you want a repeat of last night?’
It was a taunt, plain and simple, a dare, a demand she accept what had happened last night had never been about more than the all-consuming hunger that had blindsided them both. That she had no right to any more of him than he was willing to give her. And she had no doubt at all he expected her to be shocked, disgusted—provoked into letting him scare her away, reduce what they had shared to nothing more than desire.
But it didn’t work, because she could still hear the pain in his voice, that strange echo of self-loathing. And she knew what had happened last night hadn’t just been about sex, it had been so much more than that, and now she knew why he had tried so hard to diminish and disguise and control what had been happening between them ever since their first night together…
He was scared of this attraction, as much as she was. And she knew, without a shadow of a doubt, however hard it was to confront him, and however vulnerable it made her, one of them had to stop being a coward and admit what was really happening here.
So instead of denying the passion, she took the initiative he had gifted to her last night, let the emotion as well as the desire spur her on and reached for him.
She stroked a finger down the strident erection, rejoicing in the sense of power and connection when it jerked against her touch. And forced herself to say the words she had been denied during their wedding last night.
‘I do… Want you.’
And so much more.
‘Don’t…’ Karim grasped Orla’s wrist, shocked not just by the fierce passion but also by the brutal tenderness, the unflinching compassion, the unguarded honesty in her gaze—and how much it made him feel.
She knew about what he’d witnessed. How did she know? When until a few seconds ago he hadn’t even known himself?
The meaning of the nightmares had eluded him—each night, though, they had become more real, more vivid… The pitiful sight of a woman’s body curled into a protective ball, the hollow thud of a man’s fists, the terrifying mix of shame and fear and impotent childish rage as he pressed his hands over his ears and cried and begged to make it stop.
But he had been unable to make sense of it, until now. Until Orla.
And now he knew the truth, he was terrified it would break him. The way it had when he was a boy.
‘Don’t say that unless you mean it,’ he managed, his voice raw with need. He would give her the choice. Let her see that he could never give her more than this.
