AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘Because it gives me a responsibility I didn’t want. And you shouldn’t want either.’
‘What responsibility?’ she asked, confused now as well as wary. Why should her sexual experience—or lack of it—have anything to do with what they’d just shared?
‘You were untouched, you lied about it, but the consequences are the same. We can’t just get an annulment now.’ His eyes filled with suspicion and arrogance, and denial. ‘If you think you can trick me into intimacy, you’re wrong,’ he said, his gaze flat and so cold it chilled her to the bone.
The words were like blows, the bitter rejection of what they had just shared hitting that tender part of her heart she’d opened to him. To them.
How could she have been so misguided? she wondered. Karim wasn’t a highly strung horse, or a foal just out of its mother’s womb. He was a man, who had a great deal more power and experience than she did and that hadn’t changed. He might have been vulnerable for a moment, but he didn’t want her help.
She couldn’t fix his past any more than she could fix her own. And it had been naïve of her to try.
She gathered what was left of her dignity, while her sex was still throbbing from the urgency of his lovemaking, and scooted off the bed.
‘Where are you going?’ he demanded as she wrapped the sheet around her trembling body and headed towards the bath chamber where the maids had prepared her for his bed last night, without her even realising it. She’d been served up like a sacrificial lamb, and then participated in her own downfall.
You’re such a fool, Orla, when will you ever learn? You can’t fix a person who doesn’t want to be fixed.
‘I’m going to take a bath,’ she said, planning to wash and leave as soon as was humanly possible.
His rejection hurt, she realised, but not as much as her own stupidity, because she could still feel the deep pulse of yearning threatening to shatter her heart.
She crossed the large room, desperate to escape as arousal rippled through her traitorous nerve-endings while he donned a pair of black pants. But as she walked past him, he grasped hold of her upper arm.
‘We’re not finished here. We need to discuss the possible fallout.’
‘What fallout?’ she asked, as she struggled to hold onto the tears she knew she couldn’t shed in front of him without risking the loss of the last thing she had left—her pride.
‘You could be pregnant,’ he said. His gaze strayed to her belly beneath the sheet, the thickness in his voice something she couldn’t interpret. ‘The first time… I didn’t take any precautions.’
She nodded, her cheeks heating at the memory of that tumultuous joining, all the things she’d imbued it with that weren’t real—at least not for him—only damning her foolish heart more.
‘It’s… It’s okay,’ she said. ‘I wear a contraceptive patch. There won’t be any repercussions.’
He frowned, but when she went to tug her arm free, his grip tightened. ‘Why do you use contraception, if I’m the only man you’ve ever had sex with?’ he asked.
The heat in her cheeks ignited to sear her chest at the probing enquiry. The personal nature of the conversation felt far too intimate—which was no doubt as ridiculous as the pain in her heart, which refused to go away, given what they’d just shared, not once, but twice.
‘I used to have very irregular periods and…’ She pushed out a tortured breath. Why was it so hard to talk to him about her menstrual cycle? ‘They were very painful. The doctor recommended the pill to regulate them and help with the pain. It worked but I kept forgetting to take it, so I started using a patch.’
It was probably way too much information. But still his eyes narrowed, and she realised he didn’t trust her. The irony would have been funny if her heart weren’t busy breaking into a million pieces at his cynical expression. How had they come to this?
‘I’m not lying,’ she said. ‘This time.’
Something flickered in his eyes that almost looked like regret, but he let her arm go at last. As she turned to leave, though, his raw voice stopped her, tight with barely concealed fury.
‘If you think you can leave me now, it’s too late.’
She swung round, the shattering pain in her heart threatening to consume her. She hadn’t wanted to leave him, had given herself to him freely, but he’d taken what she offered, and rejected it. And she could see on his face, that hadn’t changed. He was still closed, unyielding, unwilling to bend, unwilling to accept they could have had more.
‘I can’t stay, surely you can see that?’ she said, the battle to hold onto the tears, and keep her voice devoid of the jagged pain now clawing at her throat, making her jaw hurt.
‘This is a real marriage now,’ he said, his expression tense and wary and utterly uncompromising. ‘You don’t have a choice, and neither do I.’
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
‘WHAT DO YOU MEAN, she’s left? Where did she go?’ Karim glared at Orla’s prim, neatly dressed personal assistant, Jamilla. Unlike his other staff, she didn’t flinch instinctively at the sign of his temper, something that for once he found extremely annoying.
He’d given Orla a full six hours to recover from the life-changing events of last night and this morning before having this conversation. But if she thought she was somehow going to avoid the truth by going walkabout in his palace she would soon learn that the power of the King was absolute.
