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‘This was part of the old Silk Road,’ Omar said, leading her through the throngs of shoppers. ‘Goods from all over the world have been coming through here for centuries. For a few decades Dubai was Deira.’
As they wandered down one alley after another, Delphi found herself falling under his spell again. She loved the sound of his voice, the strength of it. Most of all, she loved the fact that there was no agenda, no pressure to move on—and she was finding out things about him. Stupid, small things that glowed in her mind like the jewelled necklaces in the gold market.
‘What is it?’ she asked.
They had stopped to drink coconut water at a stall, and Omar had been gazing down at the green coconut in his hand. Now he looked up at her, smiling, and the sudden softness in his face pierced her heart.
‘I used to come here with Hamdan when I was very young,’ he told her. ‘He’d pick me up after school and get the driver to drop us off. I remember being so excited by how they chopped off the end of the coconut with a huge knife.’ He shook his head. ‘I’d forgotten all about that.’
She smiled. ‘Why did Hamdan pick you up from school?’
Omar stared past her into the bustling market. ‘He didn’t always. But my dad worked away a lot, and when he travels, he likes to have his wives with him. Hamdan was married by the time I was six, so I’d go and stay with him and his wife.’
Delphi stared at him, replaying not only his words, but what Jalila had said at the party. ‘You said “when he travels”, but he doesn’t still travel for work, does he?’
His face stiffened a little. ‘Sometimes. He gets a lot out of it.’ He pulled her against him. ‘Now, can I tempt you with something a little spicier?’ he said softly.
As his dark eyes rested on her face she felt her heart start to hammer inside her chest. She was almost desperate to feel his mouth against hers. ‘I thought you’d never ask...’
The spice market was huge and open air, but the alleys leading to and from it were so thick with scent she could practically taste it on her tongue. There were bulging sacks of dried black limes, barberries, rose petals and rosemary.
Delphi rubbed some of the familiar needle-like leaves between her fingers. ‘I thought this was more of a Mediterranean flavour.’
‘They do use it in cooking, but it’s also medicinal. My mother uses it for dizziness. Olive leaves... They’re supposed to be good for the heart.’
She met his gaze, her own heart hammering. ‘And what about all those?’ she asked quickly, gesturing to the photo-op-worthy miniature cone-shaped mountains of heaped spices.
‘That’s sumac, ginger, cinnamon, ras-el-hanout and saffron. You have to be careful with saffron,’ he added. ‘A lot of it is fake. They use dyed cotton or shredded paper. That’s why you should drop it in water before you buy. To see if it loses colour. The darkest is the best,’ Omar said, pointing past her to a teetering burnt orange mound. ‘And the real thing should have a splayed end. Oh, and you have to haggle,’ he added. ‘It’s expected.’
But when he finally paid, she could tell the vendor was delighted. ‘I thought you said you had to haggle,’ she said.
They were eating lunch at one of the waterfront restaurants, where leqaimats—seductively sweet dumplings drizzled with a sticky syrup—had followed a thin pancake filled with buttery tarragon-flavoured scrambled egg topped with shards of black truffle. Now they were sipping coffee.
He shrugged. ‘I don’t need to win at everything.’
Something stirred in her head. A memory of Jalila taking hold of her hands at Rashid’s party and telling her how happy she was to see her brother in love. ‘I know he’s rich and gorgeous, but I also know how intense he can be, how fixated he is on proving himself.’
How fixated he is on proving himself: present tense.
At the party, she had been too stressed to mull over Jalila’s words, and afterwards there had been so much going on. Now, though, she had time to think. But the more she thought, the less they made sense. What did Omar have to prove now? He was wealthy enough to stop working tomorrow and still live a life of unparalleled luxury. And she had seen first-hand the reverence with which other important and successful people treated him.
‘I still want to win. But I know that I have to stop, or it will ruin our future.’ His hand tightened around hers. ‘It almost destroyed our marriage. It’s just hard for me to stop.’
There was a long, weighted silence.
‘Why is it hard?’ she said quietly.
But in her head she was wondering why she didn’t already know the answer to that question. And why she had never thought to ask it before now. But then she had always been too busy resenting Omar, too distracted by her own feelings and thoughts to consider his. She had viewed their life together through the lens of her past, her pain.
But what about his past...his pain?
‘It’s been so long.’ His beautiful mouth twisted. ‘I was so young when it started. I don’t even think it was conscious. I just slipped into it. It didn’t matter when it was just me and my goal. But then I met you, and you made everything disappear. I couldn’t stop thinking about you. I knew you’d been hurt but I thought that if I could get you to trust me, then I could take away your pain.’
‘You did take away my pain.’ She reached out and touched his hand.
He flinched. ‘But I caused you pain too.’ His voice was hoarse. ‘I took you for granted. I told myself that marrying you was enough. That it proved how much I loved you.’
His words made her eyes sting, and she felt a rush of misery. ‘It would have proved it to any normal person. But I was so scared of being let down that I couldn’t let it mean anything.’
