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As grateful as her father had been to Kamal moments ago, Zane Khan was no one’s fool. She could see his sharp mind shifting into gear. He had to be recalling the acrimonious way she had spoken about Kamal five days ago—and her determination to have nothing to do with him, or his proposal of marriage.
Uh-oh.
While her father was her greatest cheerleader, he was also her biggest defender and protector. She knew a part of him still considered her his little girl—despite all the evidence to the contrary in the past week—and all his gratitude towards Kamal would dry up in a nanosecond if he thought the neighbouring prince had taken advantage of her or the situation.
Think, Liah, think. Time to finally put your fledgling diplomatic skills to the test.
She needed to come up with a way to defuse the growing tension—a white lie that would adequately explain why they had apparently made no attempt to return to civilisation after surviving the storm. Something appropriate and suitably innocuous that didn’t involve her telling her father the truth...that she’d spent last night in Kamal’s bed. But then heat flared across her collarbone, making her brain stall completely, just as Kamal spoke.
‘I did not return her because Kaliah is going to become my wife,’ he said, managing to torch all her good intentions in one fell swoop. ‘We slept together last night and she may be carrying my heir,’ he finished, throwing petrol on the fire and turning an awkward situation into a raging inferno.
Kamal heard Kaliah’s horrified gasp beside him. Her father’s eyes narrowed as his blue eyes—so much like his daughter’s—became chips of ice.
Kamal lifted his chin, more than ready to stand his ground. Khan was a powerful man, both in the Nazar region and the wider world, and Kamal could see he was not happy about this development.
But he’d be damned if he would bow to any man—especially on his own land. He had stopped bowing and scraping and being ready to settle for scraps as a boy of sixteen, when he had finally escaped from Hamid and enlisted in the Zokari army. Maybe he was not of noble birth, but that did not make him a lesser man than Zane Khan. And he was more than happy to prove it to Khan and the small army he had brought with him.
‘You didwhat?’ the Sheikh snarled with barely leashed fury—the fierce gratitude of moments ago apparently obliterated by Kamal’s statement of facts.
So be it.
The man’s gratitude had made him uncomfortable anyway. After all, he considered ithisduty to keep Kaliah safe now, not her father’s.
‘You heard me,’ Kamal shot back.
‘Kamal, stop it!’ Kaliah cried, pushing between the two of them and bracing her hands against his chest. ‘Please, just stop talking, you’re making this so much worse.’
‘I will not stop talking. I am telling the truth,’ he said.
‘Just for the record, did my daughter have a choice in any of this?’ Khan shouted.
‘Are you accusing me of rape?’ Kamal demanded, as his own temper incinerated the last of his control and his fingers tightened into fists.
The Sheikh’s men dismounted to circle them, ready to intervene if Khan requested it. Kamal’s temper flared, the tension on a knife-edge.
He was outnumbered and outflanked. But the fury strangling him refused to subside.
For many years, all he had had was his honour. And Khan had just questioned it.Morethan questioned it.
‘Dad, it’s okay, I had a choice!’ Kaliah’s frantic cries finally pierced through the hot rage rushing in Kamal’s ears. ‘What happened last night was one hundred percent consensual. Kamal would never do something like that.’
Khan’s gaze jerked to his daughter, although the fury still vibrated through his body. And Khan’s men were still watching, ready to do as their sheikh demanded.
But all Kamal could see in that moment was Kaliah.
Her fierce defence of him sent shockwaves through his body. He had not expected it. He would never have believed it would matter so much to him but somehow it did.
‘You don’t need to defend him, Liah,’ her father said, clasping her arms, searching his daughter’s face again to see if she was hurt, the way he had when he had first arrived. ‘If he took advantage of you, or kept you here against your will, that’s on him—not you. And he will pay the consequences. And you’re certainly not obliged to marry him, even if you are pregnant right now, I hope you know that.’
Kaliah’s gaze shifted from her father’s face to Kamal’s. And what he saw in her gaze had the shockwaves turning into something harsher and even more disturbing—releasing a depth of emotion he had never felt before, touching that open wound in his stomach he thought he had cauterised so long ago. The wound that had always been there when he’d been a boy, every time Hamid had taken a belt to him, or he recalled the hazy memories of the man who had left him sitting on the steps of the orphanage as a young child. A man he had convinced himself in the years since must have been his father. The father who hadn’t wanted him.
Kaliah looked so strong in that moment, but the wary knowledge in her gaze spoke volumes.
He braced, prepared for her to tell her father the truth—that hehadbrought her here against her will. That he had kept her here without offering to return her so he could persuade her—by whatever means necessary—to marry him. They had slept together last night because their chemistry was off the charts, but how much of a choice had she really had when he was so much more experienced than she was?
Shame seeped through the layer of fury.
But when she spoke her words only shocked him more and sent furious longing through him which he could not control.
