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Nate searched her face and finally, exhaling heavily, turned to the other man. ‘I’m sorry, mate, but perhaps you’d better give us a moment.’
At first it looked as if Khaled would refuse. The muscles in his jaw working, he stared at Nate. But then, with a last anguished look at Lily, he spun away and left the room.
She crumpled in relief.
‘Baby Sis, what the hell’s going on?’
‘Oh, Nate,’ she wailed, ‘I’ve been such a fool.’
The requested ‘moment’ stretched into four long, tortuous days. Days when Khaled thought he might actually lose his mind.
He’d barely kept it together during those terrible hours after the shooting, in the agonising wait while Lily was in surgery to remove two bullets. She’d taken one to the shoulder; another had collapsed her lung. Later, while she lay unconscious, he’d sat with her, holding her hand, willing her to come back to him.
But this waiting was a whole new level of torment.
She was recovering well, her doctors said. She was young and strong and responding to treatment as they would wish. There would be no lasting damage.
Physically.
Her state of mind was another matter. After what she’d been through that would take longer to be restored. His Highness would need to be patient.
Patient? He was practically wearing a hole in the floor outside her room.
Lily was being cared for in the same private wing of the hospital where his father was recuperating. After refusing point-blank to leave, Khaled had been given an adjacent guest suite, complete with office facilities. But he was barely in it. Sleep was fleeting. Neither could he work. Nothing held his focus.
Right now, all he cared about in the world was on the other side of that closed door.
And refusing to have anything to do with him.
Could he blame her? Hadn’t he done the same as all those who’d gone before? Put her needs second to his with that shameful offer he could hardly bear to think of now.
The truth was, he’d panicked. With his father perhaps on his deathbed, and his enemies closing in, a dynastic marriage had seemed his only option. And taking Lily as his mistress had seemed the only way to keep her in his life.
What did he have now?
In his most desolate moments, may God forgive him, he’d been glad they’d been so careless as to make love without protection. She’d be irrevocably bound to him if she carried his child.
After being told she did not, he’d felt as if she were slipping even further away. As lost to him as if she’d died at his feet on the palace floor. Like Faisal. Gone for good.
How was he to bear it?
Nate remained the only visitor she’d see. He’d dashed from the marshes as soon as he’d heard Lily had been injured. Hours later had come news about the theft. The real culprit was unmasked. Had confessed, actually.
Lily had been right all along. The secretary was responsible. Penny had been secretly in love with George since she’d worked for him years earlier, and the bastard had played on that, persuading her to do his dirty work.
After the attempted coup, Penny had come to her senses and walked into a police station to confess all.
She’d done it for love, she’d said. The same reason Lily had thrown herself between a prince and his would-be assassin. Even though she’d believed her love wasn’t reciprocated.
‘You don’t really want me.’
Those barely whispered words as she’d lain bleeding in his arms had been a lance through his heart. Would he ever get the chance to put things right?
For now, he’d done everything it was in his power to do. All that was left to him was to watch the back and forth of her medical staff—and wait.
On the afternoon of the fourth day the doctors pronounced her to be progressing well enough to go home and continue her convalescence there.
Home? Khaled thought, slumped in a chair. Where was that to be?
