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Unlike the previous night, Abby didn’t fall asleep the moment her head hit the pillow—she tossed and turned as her thoughts went around in dizzying circles, bits of conversation from the last couple of days drifting through as her mind disconnected thoughts and images.
Occasionally her eyes would go to the hidden door to Zain’s rooms as she wondered about past times when it had been used for illicit liaisons, about the mistresses and wives of powerful men who had lain in this bed before her, though she was not a mistress...and a wife in name only.
A wife who frequently felt as if she were the only twenty-two-year-old virgin on the planet. It wasn’t deliberate; in her teens she had been the butt of male jokes—too tall, too thin, too gawky...too weird—so she had focused on her books and read about true romance. Not the fumbling sort her contemporaries boasted of enjoying, but grand passions, soulmates.
The irony was that now, even though she was essentially the same person, she had plenty of men lusting after her, to the point that she’d had to adopt an aloof reputation to put them off. The last thing she actually wanted to be was untouchable so Abby had decided she was setting the bar too high, which was the reason she’d taken a chance on Greg, working on the theory that, while he didn’t set her on fire, she recognised the strong possibility that nobody would, and he was so nice—irony didn’t get much darker really.
Maybe it was an evolutionary process and she was a slow starter; she had found unrequited lust now—and frankly she wouldn’t have recommended it to anyone—so maybe one day she might discover what love felt like too...she just hoped it was better than this!
This reflection drove her from her bed. Barefoot, she walked across to the windows. She hadn’t closed the curtains—there was no one to see in, considering her room and the entire private section belonging to Zain was situated in one of the highest of the three towers the palace boasted.
She could see the paved herb garden far below, the fragrance drifting up on the warm night air, the sound from the series of fountains a distant trickle. It was soothing and as she lifted her face towards the warm breeze it caught the folds of the nightdress that she had taken from the selection neatly folded in one of the drawers; soft chiffon silk in a pale shade of blue, it reached mid-calf and gathered under her breasts. One of the ribbon straps slipped as she pushed her hair back from her face.
She froze, one hand pressed to her head, fingers deep in the lush red curls, the other hand on the intricate wrought-iron rail of the Juliet balcony, as a disturbing sound broke the dark silence.
The sound was almost feral...an animal, perhaps, but what sort of animal would be roaming the palace grounds at night? Then the terrible lost sound came again. It was not, she realised, coming from the grounds, but from the room next door and from the throat of a person.
She didn’t think, she just raced to the secret door and rushed through. Like her, Zain had not closed the curtains. The moonlight was streaming into the room, giving the illusion that carved wooden bed in the centre of it was spotlit.
The feral-sounding wail that emerged from the figure in it sent a chill through her blood. Heart pounding, she raced across the room and, climbing onto the bed, crammed forward to kneel beside the hunched figure on his knees, the tangled sheet over his body covering him only to waist level, leaving his head, his heaving shoulders and back exposed to the moonlight. The skin gleamed like oiled gold as every individual muscle tensed, tautly defined like an anatomical diagram displaying the perfection of the human form.
The only sound now, to her relief, was Zain’s laboured dragging in and sighing out of deep, drowning breaths and the heavy thud-thud of her heartbeat as the blood pounded in her ears.
‘Zain...?’
His head lifted fractionally at the sound of her voice. ‘Go back to bed, Abigail,’ he shook out in a muffled, raw voice that pained her ears like nails on a chalk board.
It was good advice and she knew it.
She reached out, hesitating a moment before she touched his shoulder and felt his muscles tense in rejection. Under the slick of sweat his skin felt cold to the touch.
‘Get the hell out!’ he growled.
Logic said she should do just that, but in the same way as her physical response to him was something elemental, the response to his obvious suffering was equally instinctive and strong. It went beyond empathy and easily drowned out the voices of self-preservation in her head.
She tucked her legs underneath her and sat there. ‘Well, you can be as rude as you like, call the guards to cart me off to the dungeon if you want, but I’m not moving until you tell me what the hell was going on—that was no dream, that was...’ She thought of the nerve-shredding sound and shuddered. ‘You might as well talk to me. I’m vastly cheaper than a therapist and my confidentiality is guaranteed.’
After a moment he sighed and flipped over onto his back, eyes closed. In the moonlight the angles and planes on his face took on the aspect of a beautifully carved statue.
The seconds dragged and his silence continued to contrast with the emotions she could feel rolling off him.
She could see the waistband of a pair of boxers just below the crest of his hip bone, his belly flat and ridged, showing each individual muscle with every inhalation. The multi-coloured bruises down one side of his ribcage and upper torso shone through the light triangular dusting of body hair on his chest. His body had a power and beauty that dragged an emotional response from some previously unknown portion of her heart.
‘Go away, Abigail Foster. I am not...safe.’ His smoky blue gaze slid from her face and down her body, betraying the sinful thoughts in his mind.
He closed his eyes as if fighting against a surge of primal possessiveness.
‘I’m not prying... I just want...’ she began, framing her words carefully before stopping and straightening her shoulders. ‘I just want to help and it’s no use trying to scare me. I’m not afraid of you.’
His eyes opened and she nodded, smiling serenely down at him as she realised that she was telling the truth. She never had been afraid of him—even that first time when she had not known if he was one of the good guys, she had felt safe with him.
‘Is it the accident? Is your memory coming back?’
He huffed out a dry laugh. ‘It never went away, cara.’
‘I know you said you didn’t get on with your brother.’ Her lips tightened as she recalled the dead man’s idea of a birthday present. ‘But you were brothers...and I know that people feel guilty when they survive and—’
He lifted a hand and touched a finger to her lips.
