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CHAPTER TWO
The words pounded around the house, reverberating in her ears, hammering inside her fevered blood.
Be mine. He’d said that the night they’d first made love. No, not made love. Had sex. The night she’d surrendered her virginity to a man she’d already handed her heart to.
She turned away from him blindly, her fingertips trailing the wall-papered hallway as she moved deeper into her house, needing a seat before she fell sideways.
The lounge was not as he remembered it.
Her beautiful photographs still hung on the walls, as captivating and haunting now as they had been then. But the shelves, once overflowing with heavy books on art and cameras, were now overtaken with bright children’s books. There were toys too, grouped into baskets that sat lined up by a wall. There was a small table with two chairs where her own dining table had used to sit, and the sofa, once cream with artful black cushions, was covered now in an array of bright throws.
Syed couldn’t immediately put his finger on it, but there was something displeasing about the room.
Something wrong.
He turned to face her, and his displeasure grew. She was like a wraith. So slender, so small, her face pinched, her eyes wary.
What had happened to her? She was a shadow of the woman he had known.
His eyes were raking over her with a clinical detachment. There was nothing heated nor sensual in the appraisal; it was simply a cataloguing of her changes.
And she knew what they were. She imagined what he must be seeing. She saw it, too. She rested her palms on the back of the sofa, realising belatedly that to sit down would only serve to increase the disparity in their sizes. “I don’t understand,” she said finally.
His eyes narrowed. “Have you eaten?”
She’d had Lexi’s leftover beans; a few spoons full. She shook her head. “I was going to make toast.” As soon as she’d said the words, she regretted them. For the look of disdain on his face, and for the fact that she was answering his questions as though he had a right to ask them!
He had no rights! No rights when it came to her life! He had chosen that path for them, and she needed to make him stick to it.
His voice, his language, words she didn’t understand, that she’d only heard him speak once or twice, filled the room. She shifted her attention back to him as he spoke into his cell phone, then disconnected the call in what seemed to be an abrupt manner.
“I have ordered dinner,” he said, his English flavoured with the shadows of his native language.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” she replied, exasperated.
“You haven’t eaten. Toast is not suitable for dinner. And I am hungry.”
When was he ever not? The instantaneous thought filled her with barbed annoyance. The memories were so thick in her mind. Shouldn’t they have gone by now? Five years was a very long time.
“Then get your dinner sent somewhere else,” she snapped. “Your highness.” She added the title for good measure. They both knew the betrayal that lurked beneath the innocuous words.
How had she failed to see that he was different? That he wasn’t a mere mortal, a man of flesh and blood? How had she missed all the tell-tale signs that Syed Al’Eba had been raised by Kings. That he was a King from an ancient land, and an ancient bloodline. Call me Si, he’d said, and naively, she’d assumed it was a shortening of something far more pedestrian, like Simon. In the weeks they’d been together, living as a single symbiotic being, she had never once questioned his story. A man who had buried his mother, who was driving across America to find a way to accept the overwhelming loss.
That part might have been true, but he wasn’t just a man. He was a King, driving a five hundred thousand dollar armour-plated Jeep. She should have realised. But she hadn’t. And it was only when he left that she understood the truth, for his royal title had been embossed in the paper he’d written his note on.
“We will eat together.”
Her eyes drew together. “Is that a command?”
He tilted his head forward. “We must speak.”
“Are you kidding me?” She lowered her voice with effort; her heart rate was far more difficult to control. “You don’t just get to appear at my doorstep after five years saying we need to talk.” She sucked in an angry breath.
Five years! Had it really been so long?
“I also said that I want you,” he reminded her silkily, ignoring her objections as though they didn’t matter.
“Sex?” Sarah repeated, her eyes flicking closed, her pulse thready. If only she could! The thought of lying with this man and enjoying his body knowing that it would never happen again… the last time they’d slept together, she hadn’t known that it was the end. She hadn’t realised that it would be the last time she’d feel his weight on top of her, feel him stir passion deep within her.
