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Flames overtook her. ‘Oh, Khalil, you can give it to me. In fact, you already have. What you’ve done just now is incontrovertible proof—not just of your decency, but of your love for me. You care about me—to the point you’d break with your constitution to ensure my happiness. What is that if not love?’
‘Respect,’ he muttered. ‘Fairness.’
Sadness washed over her. She knew she was right, but he was determined to fight her. ‘Are you really so afraid of this?’ she said gently, because now her pain was a shared pain.
‘If I’m afraid, it’s of hurting you. Of seeing you live a lifetime, broken by our marriage. I cannot bear it.’
‘And why do you think that is?’ She allowed the rhetorical question to fall between them, watching him, waiting for him to speak. He didn’t, and the weight of his silence grew heavier and heavier until India sighed, tears stinging her eyes. ‘Is this really what you want?’
He stared at her, a pulse working overtime at his temple. ‘It’s the right thing to do.’
She nodded, a single tear falling down her cheek. She brushed it away quickly. ‘That’s strange, because it feels the opposite of right, doesn’t it?’
She stared at him for a moment, waiting for an answer that didn’t come, and then, on a huge gasp of air, spun away, moving back to the heavy wooden doors. She wrenched them open and startled to see Astrid in a close conversation with Khalil’s parents, across the room. For a moment, she stood perfectly still, pale-faced and frozen to the spot, and then she turned, moving quickly away from them, away from the flower-embellished altar at the head of the room, back to the golden doors that had marked her entrance to the ceremony.
Her breath was burning, coming in shallow spurts, just as it had before, but this was for another reason. She wasn’t panicking now, so much as struggling to get enough oxygen—grief had swollen inside her, forming an organ of sadness, and it had overtaken the space previously occupied by her lungs. Once she’d cleared the room, she broke into a run, lifting the heavy silk skirts of her dress, holding back a sob until she’d rounded the corner. Then, she pressed her back to the wall and gave into her tears, letting them fall unchecked, perfectly aware in that moment she’d never know true happiness again.
He swore to himself as he followed her, ignoring his father’s commands that he stop, his mother’s pleas for him to come back and explain himself. He was aware, vaguely, of Astrid’s hushed tones urging patience and calm, but nothing—no one—could prevent him from going after India. Hell. He’d wanted to fix things for her, to make her happy, and he’d failed miserably.
He cursed again as he came out of the Court Rooms and looked left and right, the empty corridors filling him with a sense of panic and dread that defied logic. He knew she couldn’t leave the palace without his knowledge and consent—a fact that filled his mouth with tart acidity, for what that said about her living conditions this past month. She’d been his virtual prisoner, and still she believed she wanted to marry him?
He thrust his hands onto his hips and looked left once more, but this time, a palace guard caught his eye and with the simplest shift of his head nodded further down the corridor, and around a corner. Khalil stood right where he was for all of two seconds and then moved quickly, his long legs carrying him with haste through the ancient hallways and then to the left.
And when he saw her, his heart ceased to function as he’d known it. It no longer beat, but burst. It was no simple organ in his body, but a creation of something more, something that was intrinsically linked to India. Seeing her in tears immediately pulled at him, so he groaned, striding towards her so fast she didn’t realise he was there until he put his hands beneath her elbows and drew her to him, pressing her sobbing body to his. She was stiff, resisting him at first, and his heart squeezed again, recognising her rejection and knowing it was the least he deserved.
But he moved a hand to her back, stroking her there, each touch lighting a part of him with intuition and understanding—an understanding he would never have found if India had been less courageous, and less wise. She’d been prepared to fight him—to fight for him—even when he’d pushed her away again and again with his stubborn insistence that she meant nothing to him. He couldn’t even imagine how ferociously she would fight for their children!
His heart swelled to overtake his whole body and he pulled away from her just far enough to look into her eyes for several long, vital seconds.
‘You’re right,’ he said finally, moving his hands to cup her face, loving the feel of her there, the goodness and beauty and wisdom and strength that fired through her eyes filling him with all the strength he needed to face the truth. ‘I love you. And the idea of that terrifies me. But a life without you in it scares me so much more—a fact I didn’t fully appreciate until I watched you walk away from me just now. My God, India, how did you do this to me? Somehow, when I was not paying attention, you dug in here and I know now that you will always be there—a part of me. The best part of me.’
Her lips parted and her eyes, awash with sadness, met his. ‘I don’t know why you’re saying this. If it’s because you feel bad, please don’t. I always, always appreciate honesty—’
‘Then I am glad I can finally give that to you. In my defence, I have not been honest with myself either. I fought this so hard. I wanted to keep you in a neat little box, a wife of convenience who would never mean more to me—yes, I hear how absurd and stupid that is, after everything we’ve shared. And it is not, in any way, something I could ever have achieved with you, my darling, beautiful India.’
She blinked, each flutter of her lashes seeming to clear the sadness away. He expelled a breath he hadn’t realised he’d been holding, releasing tension and pent-up angst from deep within his gut. She sparkled once more. But there was still something in the depths of her gaze that held him back. He hadn’t convinced her yet.
‘But this wedding today is still wrong,’ he said gently. ‘I do not want to marry you in a hushed, hurried affair. When—if—we marry, it should be worthy of the love I feel for you.’
Her eyes flashed away from him. ‘I’m not Fatima,’ she said firmly. ‘I don’t want a big wedding. That’s never been what this is about.’
‘Not a big wedding, no, but a wedding that celebrates our love, with our loved ones present. All of them. How can we marry without your brother here, India? Without me even having met someone who is so important to you?’
Her gaze flickered back to his, and his heart soared. He could see that he’d expressed a hesitation she herself felt.
‘But it’s more than that.’ He scanned her face slowly. ‘I do not want to marry you until you believe the truth of my words. When you walk down the aisle towards me, I want you to be floating on air. I want you to glow with happiness and certainty. I want you to glow with the knowledge of my love for you and trust in you.’ He caught her hands in his, lifting them between their bodies. ‘I love you. I have loved you, I think, for as long as I’ve known you, since I first saw you. I knew I wanted to make you mine, but it was so much more than physical. I felt that if I didn’t take you home that night, a part of me would wither into nothingness. And then, that night we shared was like something out of time and reality. It was like a dream. You were unlike any woman I had ever known.’
‘Until the morning...’
‘And I reacted so harshly, because already you had come to mean so much to me. I think, if I was truly honest with myself, I would admit that a part of me had begun to build a fantasy about our future. So when Ethan told me such a vile lie about you, I clung to it, because it was proof of something I’d come to believe—not about you but about love, lies, and about all women.’
‘You were protecting yourself,’ she whispered softly, her heart so gentle even then that she rose to his defence.
‘That doesn’t make it okay. I pride myself on my instincts and, with you, I had it so completely wrong. If you had not conceived the twins, I shudder to think of what I might have lost.’
‘Might have?’ she said with a lifted brow.
‘You have no idea how I had to fight from coming back to New York. I thought about you, India. I thought about you often. You were like a fever in my bloodstream and I have no doubt I would have realised, at some point, that things between us were unresolved. If only I could have realised that I loved you—imagine how much simpler this would have been.’
