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CHAPTER THREE
EXACTLYFOURTEENHOURS and nine minutes after it took off from the runway in Idaho, Omar’s Gulfstream jet landed in Dubai with an almost imperceptible shudder.
As it taxied smoothly up the runway, Delphi gazed out of the window at a sky that was darkening as she watched. She wasn’t a nervous flyer, but her fingers trembled against the magazine she had been pretending to read for the last hour of the flight.
Obviously she had known this moment was going to happen. The plane couldn’t keep circling the skies for ever. But now it was here, and the real-time consequences of what she had agreed to back in the States were no longer a distant possibility but an unavoidable certainty.
Not that there was any paperwork, she thought. It was more of a non-verbal agreement.
Remembering those few febrile half-seconds when she and Omar had kissed, she felt her face grow warm. Except it had been less a kiss and more a forced admission of a need that shouldn’t still exist, yet inexplicably did.
Glancing down the cabin to where Omar was sitting, his dark head bent over the screen of his laptop, she felt her pulse stumble. In his arms, time had not just stopped, but reversed. Everything had turned to air—her anger, his frustration, all of it—and there had been just the two of them in the moment, tearing at each other’s clothes.
It had been fierce and thorough. A rolling and impossible longing and a banked, devastating desire.
And then he had pulled away, and it had been like jerking awake from a vivid dream to find yourself asleep in front of the TV. One moment he’d been kissing her, all seductive heat and wild longing, the next he’d been discussing their flight schedule.
It had been in that moment, with his dark eyes moving restlessly across the sun-soaked Idaho fields and the aftershocks of his kiss still pounding through her body like a herd of stampeding mustang, that she’d understood why Omar had kissed her and why he had stopped.
Whatever it had felt like, it had had nothing to do with desire and everything to do with winning. Like a sniper choosing a rifle, he had weaponised their unfinished physical attraction for one another, recognising it as the simplest, most expedient way for him to silence her opposition. Figuratively and literally.
As if he sensed the path of her thoughts, Omar looked up from across the cabin, and with agonising slowness she turned to stare out of the window. Other than a few stiffly polite conversations when the cabin crew were present, they had barely spoken during the flight, and she was dreading having to play the role of his wife more convincingly at the party.
She swallowed—tried to, anyway. Only her throat was suddenly dry, tight.
Her hands gripped the armrests. Maybe she could just refuse to get off the plane. Like a kind of reverse hostage. Only she knew she wouldn’t. And not only because Omar would probably just hoist her over his shoulder and carry her off, kicking and screaming. The truth was that even though she had only met Rashid once before, she felt bad about forgetting his birthday party. It wasn’t his fault that his son had let her down. Or that his birthday had coincided with their marriage imploding.
She glanced furtively over to where Omar was talking to the air stewards.
What were they thinking? Did they wonder why she was sitting at the other end of the plane from her husband?
Her gaze shifted minutely to his open laptop. Not if they had spent any amount of time with their boss, she thought. They would know that work came before everything, including his wife.
Her eyes rested on his back. He had changed clothes during the flight. Now, instead of a suit, he was wearing faded blue jeans and a black T-shirt, just like most of the men who worked at the stables.
Although it was highly improbable that anyone would ever confuse Omar with a groom. You could put an ordinary general-purpose saddle on a thoroughbred, but it wouldn’t stop it being a racehorse, and even in the most casual of clothing Omar radiated an aura of power and the kind of absolute self-assurance that made waiters scuttle across restaurants and women blush and bite their lip.
She bit her own lip, then released it quickly, shoulders tensing against the leather upholstery. It made no sense to look down on the rest of the population for reacting that way. Not when she was just as susceptible as everyone else, leaning into him like a moth helplessly pulled to the light.
At least she wasn’t kidding herself anymore that it was some fairy tale fantasy of love. And it had been a fairy tale, thinking that she could fall in love and be loved and have her happy ever after.
Some happy-ever-after! They hadn’t even made it to their first wedding anniversary.
Watching him sleep, the morning after their wedding, she had felt her love for him like a superpower. It had crackled beneath her skin like electricity, and she had wanted to drag him back to the chapel and make new promises, to go into battle for him, for their marriage.
But months of always coming second to his work had taken its toll. After London, it had been as if some internal energy grid had shut down. She had waited until he went to work one day, packed a small bag, and left.
She leaned her head back against the seat. Occasionally, when she could longer fight it and the pain threatened to overwhelm her, she told herself that having your heart broken was a rite of passage and that it was a ‘good’ pain.
Her gaze snagged on Omar’s flawless profile.
It wasn’t!
She glanced away. But there was no point in thinking about any of that. She couldn’t change the past. All she could do was learn from her mistakes. At least that way she could make those mistakes have some value. Her heart began beating a little faster. Although she wasn’t entirely sure how coming to Dubai as Omar’s wife fitted in with that philosophy...
‘Everything okay?’
Her pulse skipped like a startled rabbit. Omar was standing beside her with the light behind him, his eyes soft and almost black.
