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Sarah nodded, and now, out of absolute hunger, and to keep herself busy, she pressed the spoon into a serve of fried rice. The fragrance was immediately bursting with memories. It was a meal they’d shared so often she hadn’t dared order from the Thai restaurant since. Not that she could have afforded to.
“You must have met her father very soon afterwards.”
Sarah’s cheeks flushed as she thought of Marshall. Well, that was true. She’d met him about a month after Syed had left. Cameron had come home, so beautifully happy-seeming. How could Sarah have known how different the truth was from appearances?
She nodded.
The lie had been easy to utter at first. Now?
“I see.”
Only how could he? Did he imagine she’d met another man? Fallen in love? Lust? Into his bed? As if Syed could be so easily usurped. Memories of their time together were still burned across her flesh, indenting her life as the winds shaped the sands of the desert.
“And you?” She murmured, her heart twisting with pain. “I guess you went home and buried yourself in your harem?”
Visualising him with another woman had been the worst. At times, when she’d ached for him so badly she’d thought she would weaken and try to make contact, she had imagined him making love to a glamorous consort; a woman of his own country. She’d imagined the way his body would move with another, and it had turned her stomach away from hope, and the magic of what she’d thought they shared.
“Harem?” His smile was genuine. “I have no such thing.”
She rolled her eyes. “And yet this doesn’t mean there was a shortage of women.”
He stared at her for a long minute. “There were other women,” he acknowledged shortly.
Her intake of breath surprised them both. Her, because she had thought her emotions better placed to handle this admittance, and his because she had no right to feel anything. She had laid with another man. Borne him a baby. A miniature version of herself, right down to the eyes that sparkled like stars and the hair that glowed as gold.
“So? What are you doing here then?”
“There have been women in my bed. None like you.”
“Gee, thanks,” she muttered, refusing to let that please her in any way.
“And since your husband died?”
Her eyes were enormous. The truth sat before her like a glistening diamond. Obviously, the simplest path was to tell him the whole sordid mess. But Sarah had protected Lexi from the truth for a long time. There’d be a time for honesty but it wasn’t now, while Lexi was only four years old. And somehow telling Syed, while tempting, felt dangerous and wrong. She kept her answer brief, even when her soul wanted to break down and pour everything out to him. “He wasn’t my husband.”
Syed’s nod was slow and relief, unmistakable, slashed over his face. “Did you love him?”
Sarah rested her fork in her bowl and placed her hands in her lap. “What is this?”
“Rice,” he said, deliberately misunderstanding.
Sarah shook her head. “You’re in the States for business? Pleasure? And you thought, ‘why not see what Sarah’s doing?’. Or maybe you haven’t had sex in a while and you remember me being incredibly easy,” her cheeks flushed beet-red as she thought of how she’d been about to surrender herself to him not half an hour earlier. “Is that it? You were passing and felt like a roll in the hay?”
“I was not passing,” he said slowly. “I came here specifically to see you.”
“Why?” She demanded, her eyes spitting angrily.
He stared back, not standing down from the challenge in her expression. “Because I have a proposition for you,” he said, slowly, clearly, so that her blood had time to gush through her, impatient for answers.
“I’m not interested,” she promised, forking some of the rice into her mouth out of habit.
“Spend the night with me.”
Her fork clattered to the table with an almighty noise. She froze, though, not worrying about Lexi, not worrying about anything except how the hell to process his suggestion.
“What did you say?”
“Just one night,” he said slowly, seeing it as the only night he’d need to convince her of what they had. That even after five years, they were unchanged, their needs unmet unless they were together.
