AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘I just, the way you speak about him, I presumed you thought the world of your father.’
‘He was an exceptional ruler. I admired him greatly. I feel his absence every day.’ Sariq’s gaze moved, returning to the desert beyond them. ‘He loved only one person, his whole life. My mother. When she died, he lost a part of himself with her and he learned a valuable lesson.’
‘What lesson?’
‘That love leads to hurt.’
‘Not always.’
‘Really?’ He lifted one brow, his scepticism obvious. ‘You can say this after your own experience? Your father? Your husband?’
She bit down on her lip, wondering at his perspective.
‘Dance with me?’
She blinked, looking around them. ‘Here?’
‘Why not?’
She was about to point out the absence of music, but she didn’t. Because her heart was creating a beat in her ears, and it was all she needed. Wordlessly, she nodded, so he brought his arms around her waist, shaping her body to his.
They moved without speaking for several moments, but his revelations were playing through her mind. ‘I think,’ she murmured softly, ‘that you don’t know your own heart.’
He didn’t respond, but that didn’t matter. Deep in her own thoughts, she continued. ‘Losing someone you love hurts. Betrayal hurts. But I don’t think knowing there’s a risk of that inures you to caring for another person. You think your father didn’t love you? That you didn’t love him? I think that’s biologically impossible.’
‘Your father didn’t love you,’ he pointed out after a beat had passed.
‘Well, my dad’s a somewhat deficient human. And anyway, he did love me. He just loved himself more.’ She shook her head. ‘Your father pushed you away because he was scared of being hurt again—because he knew that he loved you so much hurt was inevitable, if anything were to happen to you.’
He stroked her back in such a way that made it hard to hold onto a single ribbon of thought.
‘Being afraid doesn’t mea
n an absence of affection.’
‘You’re a romantic.’ His words were murmured across her hair, teasing and light, pulling at her.
Was she? Daisy had never considered this to be the case. ‘I think I’m more realist than romantic.’
‘Not going by what you’ve just said.’
‘Love is a reality of the human condition. You can’t deny it’s within you. You can’t close yourself off to it. You loved your father and he died. The night we met, you weren’t simply mourning a leader. You were grieving for the loss of your dad—something that goes beyond position and title. He was your father—the man who gave you life.’
Sariq stilled for a moment and then began to move, his steps drawing her towards the middle of the marble floor. ‘It’s different.’
‘How? Why?’
He expelled a sigh. ‘A royal child isn’t... I was his heir. Not only his son. My purpose was always the continuation of the family.’
‘You make it sound as though you were property rather than a person.’
‘I was required.’
Daisy considered that a moment. ‘Just like our child is “required”?’
A slight pause. ‘Yes.’
The confirmation knotted her stomach in a way that was unpleasant. ‘And so you won’t love our child?’
