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And she remembered another night, and her head on his shoulder, drinking in that scent, thinking it would never get old, that she would never get enough of it.
‘What’s it like,’ he said suddenly into the silence, ‘when a baby smiles?’
She blinked at the question, wondering where it had come from when this was a man for whom babies didn’t seem to register. ‘It’s like sunshine in a hug,’ she said. ‘It’s like the world lights up and wraps you in love.’
He nodded, but his eyes looked as conflicted as ever, as if he was warring with himself, and she wondered what he’d made of what she’d said or what he’d expected to hear. ‘Good. I would like to see that. I won’t keep you any longer.’ He turned to leave, but he looked so tortured, this man who had the weight of Qajaran on his shoulders, that she couldn’t bear him to go like that, so she touched his forearm.
‘Rashid?’
He looked down at her hand as if it were a foreign object. ‘Yes?’
She pulled herself up, and pressed her lips to his fevered skin, a kiss that was tender and sweet, a kiss designed to soothe rather than inflame. ‘Thank you, for coming by,’ she said, before letting go and drawing back into the relative safety of her suite. ‘Goodnight.’
* * *
He was still too keyed up to sleep. Rashid lingered on the terrace under the soft dark sky lit with its sliver of moon and sprinkle of stars and breathed deeply of the night air, air that came scented with frangipani and the blossom of lemon and lime, the ache in his belly subsided for now, the factions raging inside him finding an uneasy truce.
Only the need remained undiminished.
Need for a woman who gentled away his fears merely by her presence and her own evocative perfume and the press of her lips gentle on his cheek. Need for a woman it had taken every ounce of his self-control not to pull her to him and forcibly satisfy.
The need—and something else he couldn’t quite put his finger on.
* * *
He went to sleep dreaming of Tora and her honeyed voice that played in his mind over and over, so that he woke with it still in his head.
He asked Kareem when they met over breakfast if he knew it, a lullaby about oranges and apricots and fat pigeons. ‘It seems familiar but I cannot work out where I have heard it before.’
Kareem regarded him solemnly, his eyes a little sad. ‘You would have heard it, of course. It is a classic Persian lullaby, very popular, very beautiful. It is a song your mother used to sing to you when you were just a baby.’
Sensation skittered down his spine like spiders’ legs. ‘But my mother died when I was just a few months old. Surely I couldn’t remember that?’
The older man shrugged. ‘Perhaps your father sang it after she was gone. Who can say? But it is something left to you from your parents—a link to your past—something to be treasured.’
He sat back in his chair with his hand to his head. Treasured? For the life of him he couldn’t picture himself with his father, let alone imagine his father singing him a lullaby. He might have believed it once, but not now. It didn’t fit with a man who had hidden himself from his son for thirty years.
Kareem smiled sadly. ‘He loved you, Rashid. I know that it is hard for you to believe, but, for better or for worse, he did what he had to do. As you, his son, have to do.’
Rashid sighed.
His father loved him? Why did he have such a hard time believing it?
* * *
‘So when can I meet her?’ Zoltan asked after a heavy morning going through protocols and affairs of state with Rashid and Kareem and the Council of Elders.
Rashid’s first thought was of Tora. Her kiss had haunted him last night, as he had lain on his bed waiting for sleep to claim him, her kiss and the feel of her smooth fingers on his arm and her wide cognac eyes.
‘Why do you want to meet her?’
‘Well, she is your sister, isn’t she? You don’t have to keep her locked away in a cupboard somewhere. You do let her see the light of day sometimes, don’t you?’
‘Oh, Atiyah,’ he said, struck by Zoltan’s words, because once again Tora had said something similar.
‘Who did you think I meant?’ asked Zoltan, and his friend looked at him as if he thought he was losing it in the desert heat.
Maybe he was. He blinked. ‘I’ll send for her,’ he said easily, because it was a good idea, because it meant he would see Tora again, and after last night’s sweet encounter he yearned to.
But when Atiyah arrived, it was not Tora’s arms that bore her but Yousra’s instead, and he felt a piercing stab of disappointment.
