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Something inside her snapped. ‘You deceived me. You made me think that we were a team...a partnership. Before you, I managed my life on my own and I was fine with that. I didn’t want or need anyone. But you kept on pushing me to trust you, to talk to you. You made me need you. And then you were never there. You told me that I only ever had to ask for help, but when I did you let me down.’
‘And I’m sorry for that.’
‘You have every possible apology at your fingertips. The conditional, the phantom, the déjà vu, the get-off-my-back. All equally meaningless.’
‘Oh, but running away when things get hard is straight out of the marriage playbook?’
Hard.The word punched the breath out of her lungs. ‘This is getting us nowhere.’
‘Because you’re giving up.’
‘And you won’t—or can’t let me. Because you’ve obsessed with winning. And if something or someone—like me—challenges you, then it just cements that desire to win.’ Her voice was rising, and she let it. ‘That’s why you married me and why you came to the hospital. That’s why you’ve dragged me out here, to the middle of nowhere. But you’ve wasted your time and mine bringing me here, because I will never have anything to say to you.’
There was a taut silence. ‘You think?’ he said finally. ‘“Never” might be beyond even you.’ He stared down at her, the overhead lights carving shadows beneath his cheekbones. ‘And if you’re thinking about running away—don’t. There’s no point. It’s a twenty-eight-hour hike across the dunes to the city.’
She could feel her heart banging high and hard somewhere beneath her ribs. ‘Sounds like a dream compared to spending another minute with you.’
His eyes narrowed, but he didn’t rise to her words. Instead, he seemed to expand the space, and anger and panic and misery and exhaustion reared inside her like the four horsemen of the apocalypse, and she slammed her open palms against his chest.
‘Get out. Go on. Get out.’
She breathed in sharply as his hands caught her wrists, and for what felt like several lifetimes she struggled against him as he stood staring down at her, deliberate and unflinching. Then, without saying a word, he let go of her, turned, and stalked out of the room, closing the door softly behind him.
Heart still pounding, she waited for the click of a key, but he didn’t lock the door.
But then he didn’t need to.
Suddenly, as if she had been running too fast, her legs started to shake. She sat down on the bed, staring blindly around the room. Large and square with pale walls and whisper-light muslin curtains, its only colour came from a huge Persian rug.
It was beautiful.
A quick, violent tremor rippled through her as she remembered Omar saying this place had been a fortress. Now it was a prison—the most beautiful, elegant prison in the world. And she was locked in here with her pain, trapped with her anger, and her misery, and a man who hated her almost as much as she hated herself.
Stalking away from Delphi’s beautiful, pale, defiant face, Omar walked straight past his own room. There was no point going to bed. He wasn’t going to sleep. He needed space...he needed air—
He needed to go back in time.
Back to before he had decided to take up Dan’s invitation to play polo at the Amersham. Back to when Delphi Wright Howard had been just a name in the ether.
Breathing out unsteadily, he ran lightly up a narrow staircase and pushed open a door. His heartbeat juddering through his bones, he stared up into the inky blackness of the sky, his brain automatically joining up the stars to form constellations.
If only it was as easy to make sense of his wife.
But she was out of reach as Orion’s belt.
What if she’d stayed pregnant? What then?
He thought back to the small, warm weight of Khalid in his arms, then switched effortlessly to an image of Delphi, gazing down not at Khalid but at another dark-eyed, soft-skinned baby.
It was too much to bear. It was easier to focus on how she had left him in the dark. To fix on the anger and pain of being the last to know when he should have been the first.
He glanced up at the sky, his chest aching. The moon was still watching him, just as it had been back in the city.
‘Thanks for the help,’ he muttered.
But he couldn’t blame the moon. Delphi was a force of nature in her own right.
And he was an Emirati, he thought with a stab of pride. His people had conquered nature to build a city that was the envy of the world. Surely he could conquer one woman?
Feeling calmer, he made his way back downstairs. The building was still and quiet, but as he walked past Delphi’s closed bedroom door his footsteps faltered. He thought he had heard a noise...faint like the whispering sand on the dunes.
It must be the wind.
He thought back to the still, night air, his chest tightening.
It wasn’t the wind.
He opened the door, his breath knotting in his throat as the shadows darted across the room. On the bed, still in her beautiful dress, Delphi was moaning in her sleep, her face creased in distress, her hands clutching the bedspread.
