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Now, her gaze met his, but it hurt too much to hold. The look of pity there was the worst thing. She didn’t want him to pity her. She wanted his love.
‘I should never have slept with you in Manhattan. I have been selfish this whole time. I hope one day you will forgive me.’
‘I can forgive you for almost everything,’ she said with a small lift of her chin. ‘Manhattan. The embassy. Our marriage. Those were decisions you made because you felt.’ She pressed a finger into his chest, her eyes like little galaxies. ‘Agreeing to divorce me is because you refuse to feel. I don’t know if I’ll ever get past that.’
‘Damn it, Daisy.’ He dropped his head then, his forehead to hers, his breathing ragged. ‘You ask too much of me.’
‘I ask nothing of you,’ she corrected. ‘Except your heart.’ But he wasn’t going to give it. Daisy could see that. Slowly, she stood, her fingers finding the keys once more, pressing two together. ‘It’s a beautiful instrument. Don’t make the same mistake your father did—don’t shut music from your life once I’m gone.’
Her words chased themselves through his mind for days. They whispered to him overnight, waking him before dawn, they spoke to him at the strangest times. When he was running or working, meeting with foreign politicians. Always that strange parting statement settled around him.
‘Don’t make the same mistake your father did.’
He kept the piano and he went to it often. Every day the sun rose and he went through the motions of his day, just as he had before Daisy. He remained committed to his schedule. He didn’t enter her suite of rooms. Nor did he use their adjoining balcony. But the piano he visited. He sat at the stool once, pressed the keys, remembered her fingers in those exact same places, the passion that ran through her.
And he thought about the life she should have been living, and would have been leading had her own plans not been so thoroughly derailed by those who were all too willing to take what they could from her without a second thought for what Daisy needed.
He’d been right to refuse to complicate their marriage. Right to insist he wouldn’t use her. How much easier that would have been! To pretend there was hope for them. To sleep with her each night, to fold her into his life only so far as he was willing, but all the while remaining steadfastly committed to his duties as ruler of the RKH.
‘Let me help you.’
She didn’t understand the pressures he lived with. He hadn’t been raised to share that burden. Daisy was gone, and he was glad. Not because he wanted her to be anywhere else but because he hoped whatever she thought she felt for him would pass.
Except it wouldn’t.
She wasn’t like that.
She loved him and she always would.
His gut clenched. Guilt cut through him. He turned away from the piano and stalked to his apartment. Malik was there but Sariq dismissed him quickly. ‘Not now.’
Forty sunrises had passed without Daisy. Forty mornings, forty nights, forty days that each seemed to stretch for weeks. Time practically stopped. Only in sleep, when she filled his dreams, did he relax.
He craved sleep. Each day, he longed for it, and all because of Daisy. But it wasn’t enough. Forty days after she left, he felt broken enough by missing her to accept that the solution to their marriage wasn’t so simple. He couldn’t send her away and forget about her.
He wasn’t the same as he’d been before. She’d changed him, and he’d never change back. Everything was different now.
Cursing, he strode from his room. ‘Malik? The helicopter. Immediately.’
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
‘YOU ARE NOT EATING.’
Daisy regarded Zahrah over her water glass. ‘I am.’
‘Not like before,’ Zahrah chided affectionately. ‘When you first came to Haleth you could not get enough of our food.’
Daisy’s smile was thin. She had nothing in common with the woman she’d been then. ‘I’m eating.’
Zahrah compressed her lips but Daisy was saved from an argument she couldn’t be bothered having by the sound of helicopter rotor blades. At the same time, a knock sounded at the door. Zahrah moved to intercept it, and a moment later, returned.
‘His Highness is here.’
Daisy’s pulse was like a tsunami. She curved a hand over her stomach, her eyes flying wide open, her lips parting in surprise. It had been over a month since she’d left the palace. Their last conversation was painfully formal. He’d spoken to her as though she were a stranger.
Why was he here now? She couldn’t bear the idea of another stilted, businesslike interaction.
She stood uneasily, pacing towards the windows where she might get a glimpse of him. But the doors opened and she turned, her flowing turquoise dress blowing in the breeze created by his entrance. And she stood there and stared at him, her face too disobedient to flatten of all expression completely.
