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Chapter 9
The car swept across the desert, flanked on both sides by four wheel drives, a helicopter buzzing overhead. Millie’s eyes chased the sand dunes in silent wonder, her expression unchanged since they’d left the palace behind and entered the glorious raw beauty of Abu Qara.
Zafar drove with ease, so that after a few hours, Millie turned to him and broke a long, strangely companionable silence. “Do you do this often?”
He turned to face her, his eyes roaming her face slowly before turning back to the front windscreen. “As often as I can.”
“I can see why,” she said with a small exhalation. “It’s so beautiful out here.”
His lips curved in a cynical smile. “Wait until we cross the Qular ridge.”
“What’s that?”
“The edge of the desert,” he said. “We’re almost there.”
Millie frowned, racking her brain for whatever she could remember of Abu Qara’s geography, and drawing a blank. “There’s so much I’m going to have to learn.”
“You will,” he said quietly. “Our child will teach you.”
Her heart skipped a beat. Our child. For the briefest moment, Millie allowed herself to imagine that they were truly going into this as a team, a loving partnership preparing to raise a child together, and she felt a blinding sense of pain for how much she wished that were the case. It came out of nowhere, momentarily knocking her lungs of air. But it was just her childhood making her long for that, a fear of facing the same difficulties her mother had known, when already her situation was so vastly different.
“I used to come out here a lot, as a child,” he said, almost as though the words were dragged from deep within him. She heard the hesitation and wondered about it.
“Did you?”
He turned to face her again, his expression impossible to fathom. “My father would bring me whenever he could, just as his father did him. He used to say —,”
Zafar went quiet and Millie reached over, putting her hand on his knee. After all, it had only been a matter of months since losing the adored Sheikh.
“What did he say?” She prompted, after a moment.
“That the desert was my bloodline and birthright. All of this,” he gestured to the bright blue sky overhead. “He wanted to be sure I felt an affinity to it, just as he did.”
“Like he was testing you?” She said with a wrinkled nose.
“Perhaps.” Zafar’s eyes bore into hers, something serious in their depths.
“And what if you didn’t?”
“I did. Always.”
“I know, but hypothetically?”
“I can’t say.” But the words were laced with ice, so devoid of emotion that somehow she shivered.
“Surely it wouldn’t have made a difference?”
He turned back to the windscreen and began to drive forward again, the cars alongside matching their speed perfectly.
“Zafar?”
His jaw clenched and frustration burst through her. “Why are you ignoring me?”
“I do not have an answer to your question. Only my father could tell you how he felt, and he’s no longer here.”
“But you could guess.”
He didn’t answer.
