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“Yes, you attention seeker,” she teased, pushing her worries and hurt from her mind, smiling at him in a way that she hoped would assure him he would be fine. She didn’t want him to be afraid.
“Sheikha.” Her husband’s word was a warning.
She glared at him, then bent down and kissed Malik’s brow. “I’ll come back tomorrow.”
She didn’t see the way Raffa watched the interaction. The way the hint of a frown crossed his face, nor the way his eyes lingered on her body the whole way from the room. At the door, she looked back, but only towards Malik – so she didn’t realise her husband was still watching her.
It was the middle of the night, but Chloe wasn’t tired. She was restless, humming with an energy born of worry and anxiety and doubt and hope. She paced her room for a long time, walking restlessly from one side to the other, before picking up a book at random from the shelves of her room.
It was a book of ancient mythology, translated into English, which made it easier for Chloe to follow the elaborate tales. She lost herself in the story of an eleventh century beast, formed by sand and sunshine, that was as hot as the molten core of the earth itself, a beast that had been left all alone when his mate, a being of stardust and water had been taken into the heavens to float above the earth. The beast wandered the deserts of Ras el Kida, tormenting villages, sacking homes, smiting all that he encountered, purely because he couldn’t live without his mate. All day he raged, but at night, he was still, a huge shape held frozen to the spot, so that he could stand and look to the heavens, hoping to see his mate, hoping for her to see him.
Chloe fell asleep before she could reach the end – the beast’s demise. From the inside out, his heat tore him apart, his malevolence no match for this world.
When Raffa entered her suite hours later, as the sun was beginning to slide over the kingdom, his wife was lying, fully dressed, on the bed, a book on her chest.
Curiosity for what she’d been reading had him moving across the room and lifting it, careful not to disturb her. The ancient text was one he knew well, despite not having read it nor thought of it since childhood. The story was well known in Ras el Kida, and in fact, a pile of ancient rocks just past the Northern way-bearing point of the Aläbi desert was thought to be the ruins of the Beast.
It was a cautionary tale but he didn’t need to learn about the perils of love from children’s stories. He’d had his own front-row seat to that lesson, courtesy of his parents.
“Raffa?” Her eyes pierced him, their blue clarity seeing right into his soul, so he had to work hard to straighten and assume a look of distant unconcern. “What time is it?” She pushed up to sitting and angled her pretty face towards the windows, then looked back at him.
“Dawn,” he murmured, stepping closer and reaching down, touching her hair against his will, his fingers moving of their own accord, finding the blonde lengths and freeing it from the style she’d pinned it into.
“How is he?” She asked, her eyes holding his, the anguish so easily discernible in her expression easily matched by his own heart.
He had thought her cold, at one time. Now, he saw her so much more clearly. There was passion inside of her, so much passion that perhaps the only way she could contain it was to repress it completely.
“He’s weak,” Raffa said, the words lodging in his throat, each a stone in his windpipe. “But doctors are optimistic.”
“Oh, thank God,” she smiled, a smile of such beauty and relief, her love for Malik easy to see. But then, like the sun hiding behind a storm-cloud, she sobered, pulling herself away from him mentally, hiding from him. “Thank you for coming to tell me,” she added after an icy beat had passed.
The ease with which she could shut him out had always fascinated him; now, it angered him. He couldn’t have said why; certainly not because he needed her. He was a man born to be King, he needed no one.
And yet… the removal of her affection, her warmth, was something he definitely railed against.
“You’re reading nursery rhymes?” He asked, the question gruff and yet somehow teasing.
She shrugged, her mode defensive. “Is there something wrong with that?”
He sat on the edge of the bed, and she stiffened in a way he hated. Was she afraid of him? He had been angry the night before. Not with her, with the situation they found themselves in. He’d wanted to protect her from seeing Malik, and yet she’d come to his bedroom anyway, she’d ignored his command, she’d done what she always did: exactly what she wanted.
Or was it what she needed? Her affection for Malik was genuine; had she wanted to see the old man so badly, to assure herself he was okay, to be
there for him if he wasn’t?
“No.” He lifted his hand to her cheek in a gesture of intimacy that surprised them equally. “You were frightened last night.”
“Weren’t you?”
Raffa hadn’t admitted to fear in a long time. “The idea of him not being here is not an easy one to grapple with.”
“It’s the way of things,” Chloe offered softly.
“I know.” Raffa dropped his hand, but to her hip, where his thumb padded across the sheet slowly. His eyes watched the gesture, a frown on his brow. “He’s just always been such a force to be reckoned with.”
“Yes.” She sighed. “I felt the same, with my father. His death was sudden. There was no time to reconcile myself to the fact that it was the end, no time to fix what was broken between us.”
“You wanted to, though?” Raffa inquired.
