AllFreeNovel
Share Us
But, looking down into her face, he’d known he had no choice. Emotions—big emotions that neither of them knew what to do with—had been roaring inside both of them. He’d known in that moment that Delphi was vulnerable and that he couldn’t exploit that vulnerability.
Remembering how she had fought him, how she had kept trying to pull him closer and how, shockingly, her cheeks had been wet with tears, he felt his chest suddenly tight, as if his ribs were in a vice.
He understood her longing to disappear, to displace those big, unmanageable feelings with something else. Something all-consuming like sex. For hadn’t he felt that way himself? But instead of sex, for him it had been work. Empire-building. His need to catch his father’s magpie gaze chasing him around the globe.
Not that there was any need to tell Delphi that. She needed support from him—not some two-bit excuse for the behaviour that had left her feeling so diminished and abandoned.
He stared across the sand school. Delphi was wearing that dress, the one from Idaho, paired with jodhpur boots. With her tousled short hair, she looked nothing like the woman sheathed in gold who last night had shone brightest in a room full of beautiful people.
A pulse of guilt beat through his veins. She’d looked like a child playing dress-up. And in some ways she was still a child. A scared, confused little girl, orphaned before she understood the meaning of the word, and then left in a terrifying state of limbo while a judge decided her fate. And, yes, Dan had got custody of her in the end, but like with Alima the damage had been done, he thought, his gaze moving between Delphi and the small grey mare.
For a moment he battled to keep his breathing steady. And now there was more damage. A lost baby. A broken marriage. A husband who’d made promises he had failed to keep. He knew that sex would have briefly blotted out the pain, but what about afterwards?
That was the reason he had stopped them going further.
That and the fact that, whatever he told himself, told her, he wasn’t ready for it to be their last time.
Ducking between the rails, he made his way towards her. ‘So, what do you think?’
She turned, and the look on her face was almost too much to bear.
‘I’m guessing her last owner was giving her mixed messages and punishing her when she got confused. When any horse gets confused, particularly one this young, it panics and tries to save itself. Hence the bolting and the bucking.’
She moved out of sight behind the horse, and he shifted position, moving just casually enough that it wouldn’t seem as if he was following her. But he was.
‘Do you think she can get past this? Can she learn to trust again?’
He watched the pulse hammering against the delicate skin of Delphi’s throat.
‘That’s up to you.’ Her voice was scratchy when she answered, and her fingers twitched against Alima’s shoulder as if she couldn’t control them. ‘She won’t hold on to the bad if you don’t.’
The breeze was lifting the sand around her feet now. Reaching out, he rested his hand on the mare’s shoulder, a hair’s breadth from hers. ‘And what about us? Could we do the same?’ he asked softly. ‘Follow her example?’
A bird swooped over their heads into the eaves of the barn and Alima jerked her head. He swore silently as Delphi moved her hand to soothe the horse.
‘I don’t know,’ she said at last.
Her voice was bruised-sounding, as it had been last night, and as Alima shifted to nuzzle the side of Delphi’s face he wondered if the mare had heard it too.
‘But I do.’ He ran his hands over Alima’s smooth neck. It was that or place them on Delphi’s shoulders, and he sensed it might be better to wait a moment before taking that next step. ‘Look, I know I took things for granted before.’ He took a breath, his mind a swirl of guilt and grief. ‘And what happened in London was terrible. But what we have is too special to just throw away.’
She bit into her lip. ‘Divorce isn’t about throwing things away, Omar. It’s about acceptance and change.’
‘And so is marriage,’ he countered. ‘Maybe it took all this for me to realise that, but now that I have, I can change. I am changing. I was trying to change. That’s why I bought this place.’
She stared at him in silence, and he felt a flicker of panic. After last night he had thought that something had shifted between them, but now he could feel the past hanging over them like a mourning veil. He needed to make her understand that things would be different. That he could be different.
‘I used to come up here with my older brothers to ride and climb and swim in the wadis.’ It was here that he had felt closest to them, for they too had been dwarfed by the mountains. ‘I’d been looking for somewhere to buy for some time, and then I saw this and it was perfect.’
There was a small silence; he made himself wait.
‘Perfect for what?’ she said finally.
‘For us. For you. The Lulua is fine for overnight stays, but I wanted to give you a place where we could come, and it would be just the two of us and the mountains and the sky.’
More than just the two of them.
After years when the future had been a blank spot in his mind’s eye, blotted out by the weight of expectation in the present, he had planned for a family.
