AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“No,” he said darkly. “I don’t need more women. I can have a harem if I want to. I am the Sheikh. I can do whatever I want. I... It doesn’t matter.”
“What is it that’s upsetting you?”
“I was in a dungeon. In the darkness. I’m not the one who caused it. Why was I the one who was punished? Why were we punished?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know I...”
“This is when you tell me that Cairo would feel terrible about all of this. Because he’s a good man. He’s your friend.”
“He is my friend. But you’re my fiancé. And I don’t need to defend him. He’s your brother. You love him. That doesn’t mean that you can’t be angry. That doesn’t mean that you can’t feel something about the fact that... That his mistake led to this. He has had sixteen years to have feelings about it. You can have feelings. Why shouldn’t you? Why shouldn’t you have feelings?”
“They mean nothing. They mean nothing. All you can do when you’re prisoner is simply survive. It is all you have.”
“Do you feel like a prisoner? Are you still just a prisoner here?”
He looked away. “None of it matters.”
Oh, how she hated this. The way that they were both bound up here. In duty. In love. Duty for him. Love for her.
“I do not need other women,” he said, his voice suddenly hard. “I need you.”
And she wanted to be enough for him. She wanted to be everything.
She wanted to find a way to restore everything that they had lost. “Then you can have me.”
“Do you not wish to have your dinner?” he asked. There was a vague sneer in his voice, and it surprised her. Riyaz was many things, but rarely unkind. Not to her. And she thought that perhaps this was a reflection of something else.
He’s in pain.
“I don’t need anything but you,” she said. “Believe me. All I need is you.”
He growled, and reached across the space, pulling her from her chair and bringing her over onto his. “Why would I need any other woman when I have you? Most beautiful of women. Whenever I desire. Because you are mine. You are going to be my wife.”
“Yes,” she said. “The wedding is being planned.”
“Yes,” he said, his voice rough.
There was something fractured in him now. Something on the verge of shattering entirely.
And she wanted to hold them together. Desperately.
And she would show him that she was strong enough. She was.
She was not the girl that she had been, afraid. Forced into a life she didn’t want. She was not the woman who had escaped. Who had sought to fit in to her surroundings. Who had tried to blend in seamlessly. This woman who had been so afraid that people would identify that she was different.
But she was happy to be different. She was happy to be herself. Brianna Whitman. A woman strong enough for this man. A woman who could help him navigate the world as he needed to, but let him be who he was when they were together.
“There need be no rules between us,” she said. “Those rules are for dignitaries. Sit how you want. Eat how you want. Be how you want. Be angry if you want to be angry. You never have to hide yourself for me,” she said.
It was an echo of the time they had shared out of the fountain. When passion had welled up between them and he had demanded that they embrace their wildness. But this was something more. Something deeper.
They did not need to perform for one another. Not ever. They did not need to play parts. She was not a foreign diplomat, and he was not a teacher at a boarding school that she was trying to impress. They were for each other. And yes, maybe parts of the world were a prison. Performances that you had to engage in. But the two of them never would be. Not ever.
She tore his shirt open.
“In the dining room?”
“Don’t tell me that’s not what you were thinking,” she said.
