“If I weren’t a...sentimental fool who jumped on a plane, we wouldn’t have seen each other again...ever. You made a deliberate choice to walk out of my life that night. Don’t act as though you care now.”
Her legs quaked beneath her when she meant to move away from him. She felt light-headed.
His arms forming a steel cage, Zafir picked her up instantly and laid her down on the settee. His forehead wreathed in concern as he studied her face. “Ya Allah, you were about to faint again. What the hell is going on with you, Lauren?”
She had let herself get upset by his gifts this morning and barely touched her lunch. No wonder she felt so weak, so vulnerable. She couldn’t do this again and again. She couldn’t let her child pay the price for her weakness.
Moving back on the chaise, she wrapped her hands around her legs. “I’m just hungry,” she whispered. He immediately picked up the intercom and ordered enough food to feed an army.
When he reached for her, she shook her head. “Leave, before the staff arrives.”
“Why?”
“Because you’ve already given them enough to gossip about. I would like to not become another dirty spectacle of your palace, Zafir.”
His jaw tight, he glared at her. “You are awful at taking care of yourself. I will wait until I’m sure you’re not going to collapse again,” he said, the frustrated anger in his voice snaring her again.
After everything that had happened that day, it was the last thing she wanted to hear. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“You had the most virulent flu two weeks before I left, remember? And it’s obvious you’ve not recovered from it. When Huma found you on the bathroom floor and called me, you looked like you were about to die. I literally carried you to the clinic. And here you are again looking like a ghost. What have you been doing, starving yourself?”
Shying her gaze away from him, Lauren drank a glass of ice-cold water.
She had been worried over him. But there was no point in reiterating what a fool she had been.
Instead, her thoughts moved to that evening he had taken her to the clinic. For a week, he and Huma had taken shifts, nursing her back to health, not leaving her alone even for a few minutes. By the time her friend Alicia had heard about her illness and arrived with chicken soup, Lauren had been halfway to recovering.
And when she had gotten better, he had come to her that evening, and dismissed Huma, a wild light in his eyes...
It was the last time she had seen him, the only time he had actually stayed over at her apartment in two months...
Her gaze flew open, her stomach twisting at the final nail in the coffin.
Zafir laid his hand on her forehead, frowning. “Do you feel faint again?”
She shook her head, dislodging his hand. “Huma knew, didn’t she?”
A stillness crept into his face. “Knew what?”
“She knew about us...that we were...” she forced the words out, killing any tender thought she had ever indulged in, “having sex?”
His expression became distasteful. “I do not discuss my sex life with Huma. But yes.”
“Did she also know you were leaving the next morning?”
He looked as though he was weighing his response and she wondered why when he had given her the absolute truth earlier. “Huma’s the daughter of an old friend whose life was in danger here. She was under my care in New York. I had to tell her that I was leaving, that I had made plans for her.”
Huma had left a week after he had. With a hug and something muttered in Arabic that Lauren couldn’t understand to her question about Zafir.
“Did she tell you that I had been worried?”
“Yes.”
She bolted from the chaise, fury finally, mercifully coming to her rescue. All this could have been avoided. It could have all ended in New York just as he’d intended.
She turned back to him, one last question gnawing at her gut.
Leave it alone, Lauren, a part of her whispered, the part that preferred to cling to delusion.
No.
Knowing the bitter, eviscerating truth was better than driving herself crazy for years to come with speculation. She’d learned early on, with her parents’ indifference, that hope was toxic, gnawing away at one’s self.
“Were you ever going to call, Zafir?”
Silence stretched between them, its cruel fingers shredding her patched up nerves.
“Leave,” she whispered.
He turned her around, his fingers gripping her tight. “It was a decision I made. But I did...regret the necessity of making it. It doesn’t mean I didn’t think about you in these last few weeks.” Arrogant features softened. “Stay in Behraat for a while, as my guest.”