The sensation was fierce, sharp, after so many years of feeling nothing.
He took a sip of tea and grimaced. His hip was throbbing, the muscles in his thighs and arms shaking from the strenuous stretching after four months of inactivity. “I need something stronger than this.”
“No alcohol, Azeez. Not as long as you want my help.”
He frowned, and yet was unable to stop smiling at the relish with which she said it. “You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”
“Yes. How many women can claim Azeez Al Sharif bows to her every command?”
“None.”
The cake shook in her fingers. Coloring, she put it in her mouth.
She licked a crumb from the corner of her mouth, and another kind of ache shivered in his muscles. He felt incredibly hungry for a taste of her mouth, for a taste he had been denied for so long. And the fact that he hadn’t touched a woman since the attack, the six years of celibacy, had little bearing on his desire for her.
The delicious tightening of his muscles, the coils of heat spreading like wildfire through him, they were all because of the woman who had boldly traced his scars with her hand even as her breath had hitched in her throat.
She was such a mixture of strength and vulnerability, of caring and indifference, every word from her a contradiction to her actions, he felt as if he would never understand her.
For as long as he could remember, she had been the one woman who hadn’t cowed in front of him, who hadn’t thrown herself at him, the one woman who had always spoken her mind, pushed him into broadening his.
Whether it was philosophy they had discussed, or the state of education for women in Dahaara, he had never been the Prince of Dahaar with her. Her answers, her arguments, they had held a piercing honesty that had been as compelling as her artlessness. For all his impulsive and passionate nature, he hadn’t fallen in love with her overnight.
He had fallen in love over a period of ten years, or even more, maybe—slowly, unknowingly, tempered into it like water chipping away the surface of a rock, molding it to its will. One morning, he had woken up in his hotel suite after a night of raucous partying and suddenly wondered what she would say if she saw him then, what words she would use to skewer him, and with a fire in his blood, he had realized he had fallen in love with her, that he had found his future queen, that nothing in the world would stop him from making her his.
Except he hadn’t realized the iron will of the woman herself.
And when she left, she had not just broken his heart or dented his ego, though it had been that, too. She had ripped away a piece of him that had belonged only to her and taken it with her, had left a terrifying emptiness that he’d had no idea how to fill.
Bitter jealousy vented through his veins as he studied her. Because now, now she was even better than before, now she was magnificent, everything he had imagined she would grow into and more.
Age had only refined her beauty, and from the little he remembered of when she had held on to him in the hammam, she was in incredibly good shape. But even better than physical beauty, she had seen the world, she had held her own in a foreign country and she had achieved everything she had set her mind to. And he…he was barely a man.
His curiosity wasn’t going to simmer down quietly. He didn’t even pretend he could control his emotions, or himself, when it came to her. All he could do was limit the damage to himself and her.
This…might have begun with the debilitating need to hurt her, but it wasn’t anymore. In a cruel twist of fate, which didn’t even surprise him, she had become the only way out for him.
“Why didn’t you marry?”
She stilled, her hand midway to her mouth. He saw her fingers shake as she put the last piece of the date cake on the small silver plate. She made a show of wiping her fingers. Buying herself time, he realized. Why? “Are you expecting an honest answer?”
He frowned, trying to make sense of her, of everything he knew about her, of everything she had done eight years ago. Because as much as he wanted to consign it to the back of his mind, the fact that she was here in Dahaar, seeing him through this, it had to mean something.
Whether he wanted to face it when his life was already in such turmoil, he didn’t know. “When have I ever asked you for anything but the truth? You’re successful, you’re beautiful, and as your father mentioned, you’re not bound by Dahaaran traditions or customs. So why are you still single?”
She wrapped her arms around herself, her shoulders unsteady.
His heart slammed hard against his rib cage. “Or do you have a boyfriend tucked away somewhere, Dr. Zakhari, just waiting for your signal to show up?”