Bending at her waist, she placed her hands on his shoulders. His skin was like raw velvet under her hands. “Azeez, it’s time to leave.”
He leaned his chin on his hands, his coal-black eyes glittering with a thousand emotions in the flickering candlelight. The razor-sharp angles of his cheekbones, the strong jawline—he was a visual feast. “You have to help me up.”
There was no smile on his face, but there was no bitterness, either. She wondered if he came to the same conclusion as she did.
Nodding, she pushed her sleeves back and tucked her hands under his shoulders. His muscled arms anchored around her waist, he rose up, leaning on his left side. The scent of him enveloped her, the sweat from his body mingling with hers, and he slowly slid off the marble.
She averted her gaze as he pulled on another fresh pair of loose cotton trousers. She flicked the light on and walked back to him before her courage deserted her.
“I want to see it, Azeez,” she spoke in a rushed whisper. The cavernous room amplified their voices, enveloping them together.
“Not the best time to see it, latifa. Steam tends to do things to it,” he said with a sinful curve of his mouth.
“What?” Heat scorched her cheeks as his meaning sunk in. “I’m not talking about your…your…”
“Yes, Dr. Zakhari? What precisely are you not talking about?” Challenge glinted in his words, his mouth tugged up at the corners.
That glimpse of his old roguish humor—it sent a blast of longing through her.
She had graduated with honors in her class. She was an ob-gyn, yes, but she had seen naked men before. And she wasn’t going to let the Prince of Dahaar reduce her into a blushing twit. “Your penis, okay? That’s not what I want to see. And you know what? I can also say sex, vagina, erection and—”
He threw his head back and laughed. A rich, powerful, hearty sound that brought prickling tears to her eyes, and the most painful tightness to her chest. She wanted to hear it again and again, see the flash of his teeth, feel the warmth of it steal into her. To forever be the one who made him laugh like that.
The corners of her own mouth tugged up.
“It is like you are a different woman, Nikhat. More fun, daring…” His gaze gleamed with an inferno of emotion. “Whatever it is that you…did in New York really agrees with you.”
The unspoken question sizzled in the silence. But she didn’t take his bait this time.
“I want to see your wound.”
His laughter died. “There’s nothing you can do for it.”
Her bare feet almost slipped on the floor and she grabbed him for support. She grasped his forearms tight, refusing to let him move. “I prefer to be the person making the judgment. And as arrogant and all-knowing as you are, I’m the one with a medical degree here.”
His fingers tightened on her arms, the thin cotton of her caftan no barrier to his touch. His eyes ate her up. “But I’m the Prince. I’m the one with all the power. I make the rules between us, Nikhat. I decide what I will use you for and what I won’t. You seem to be under a fantastic delusion that you’re as important to me as you were eight years ago. You are not. It is only your history with my family, your usefulness to me, that has you standing here. Don’t mistake it as anything else.”
The breath-stealing arrogance in his words bounced off her. But the fact that he belittled her presence here…she couldn’t tolerate it.
In a perverse little twist, she wanted him to acknowledge that she was here because she was the girl he had known once, the girl he had loved once. The need for that acknowledgment burned through her even as she realized that it was dangerous.
She was standing on a precipice, and all she wanted to do was jump. “You will not steal the little I have. You’ve no idea what I have faced, what I still face, to be standing here in front of you without shattering into a million pieces.”
His mouth, enticingly close to hers, hardened, the intensity of his focus a fierce little thing. “Why are you pushing me, Nikhat? Why does it matter what I think after all these years? And whatever you have faced, it was all your own doing. You chose this path, don’t ask for understanding now.”
“You think me heartless, you think it is easy for me being near you, seeing you in pain.” She blinked at how easily the wound she closed could open again. “It is not. Every minute I spend in this palace hurts me just as much as it hurts you.”
A dark smile curved his mouth and she held her breath at the stark beauty of it. He pushed a tendril of her hair behind her ear, then clasped her jaw, the rough ridges of his fingers and palm chafing against her skin. She shivered, every inch of her body focused on the minute contact. “After everything I have done, everything I have brought on myself—” his gaze caressed her eyes, her nose, her mouth, a dark fire in it “—you would think that wouldn’t have given me the satisfaction it does. But I’ve never been magnanimous or kind or—”