AllFreeNovel
Share Us
It was safer that way.
Certainly he would not be telling a woman he had met just a short while ago.
A woman who could be involved in a threat to the monarchy.
It was easier to believe she might still be responsible, better to think that she might be a threat, because it meant he could more readily keep her at arm’s length.
‘But I’m not letting you walk away,’ he told Maggie. ‘You shall return to the palace with me. I want to speak with Mahmoud and Hazin before I set you free.’
His words doused her like ice. ‘You just did.’
He frowned. ‘I don’t understand what you mean.’
‘You just did set me free, Ilyas. For a little while there I forgot that I was your prisoner, but thanks for reminding me of that fact.’
Making love with him and then lying in bed and talking like lovers while being held in his arms, Maggie had managed to push from her mind the method by which she had arrived there.
Not anymore.
‘I shan’t be forgetting again.’
* * *
Regardless of the means by which she had arrived, it was still hard for her to leave.
Maggie took one last look at the bedded area where she had spent those first, frightening hours and remembered him forcing her to take a drink.
She stepped out to the living area where they had made love.
Now, though, there was anger in the air and it hurt to leave this way.
‘We have to go now.’
Ilyas strode past her and out to the waiting area. Maggie remembered the maidens’ attempts at kindness so she went and thanked them, though Maggie wasn’t sure that they understood in the least what she said.
She and Ilyas sat in silence on the flight back to the palace.
Maggie stared out of the window and wished the desert would never end, but of course it did. The sparse trees became more frequent and then a building appeared and she could see the horses in their fields.
Then another building, and another.
She looked over at Ilyas and wished he would order the helicopter to turn around. Instead, their eyes met and he stared back at her.
He tried to fathom her. She was, quite simply, the most complex woman he had met. The most complex person.
She spoke with both maidens and grieving princes. She danced when she could not. She laughed but never cried, despite the weight of sadness on her shoulders. There was that one tear he had tasted... He couldn’t help remembering the bliss of that time.
Ilyas had never craved closeness. But he had found himself telling Maggie things he usually would not consider revealing.
And for Ilyas that was the most troublesome part of it all.
He had plans in place that not another soul knew, and yet here he sat considering sharing them with her.
No!
He shifted his gaze to a safer place than the green pools of her eyes and looked down at a red line of canyons that indicated they were approaching the palace.
This spectacular air approach was lost to Maggie as she continued to stare at his profile. Those cheeks had once been next to hers while locked in bliss, that mouth she had caressed with her own was set now in a grim line and his features were stern.
