Something moved across her face—defiance, a challenge. Her spine locked, her mouth settling into a stubborn line that he detested. “And if I did?”
He gripped the armrests of the chaise, perverse fury filling his veins. “I have no wish to see you and your lover parade through my palace.”
She leaped from her seat as though propelled toward him by a desert storm. She bent toward him, bringing her face close to his, her gaze blazing with resolve. An expression he had never seen on her before—a reckless willfulness, danced in it. And he felt the strangest little thrill gripping his insides. “I thought I didn’t have to choose between my career and personal life.”
She was taunting him, she was relearning what effect she had on him and testing it. And yet, he rose to meet it.
He clasped her cheek. “Do not pretend to misunderstand me or be so reckless as to challenge me, Nikhat.
“You are the woman I loved once, the woman I chose for my future queen, the woman I wanted to give birth to the future heir of Dahaar. Everything’s changed in eight years, hasn’t it? But the thought of you with another man, the image of any man possessing your body, staking his claim on you, it will always reduce me into a savage that would make my marauding ancestors proud.
“What I consider mine once, I would not share it, even in thought. So unless you want to add to my long list of sins, Nikhat, tuck your lover away until I leave.”
He pushed himself to his knees with a savage force that sent a shock wave through his leg. He could not bear to look at her, he could not bear to look inside himself. He had thought after all these years, after everything that had happened, there was nothing left in him that would react to her, and yet, there still was.
He had wrought destruction on himself, on his family, he was directly responsible for the death of his sister and for the atrocities his brother had suffered, because of how broken, how reckless he had become when Nikhat had left him.
“I was engaged three years ago, to a colleague,” she said behind him, and he halted. The very thought crept into his head and taunted him.
That she was telling him this was not to assuage his pride or to balance the scales between them. That she was offering a piece of truth was something else. Something that stole into him with an insidious inevitability that filled ice in his veins. But he would not accept it, he could not go down that path ever again, and certainly not with her. “But it didn’t work out.”
“Why not?” he said, the question falling from his lips before he could stop it.
She shrugged, and he instinctively knew whatever she was going to say was not the truth. “He broke it off a week before the wedding, changed his mind about what he wanted in life.” Pain streaked across her gaze. “I am not…made for relationships.”
Without waiting for a response, she left him in the garden, his mind roiling with every little word she had spoken.
You have no idea what I have faced, what I still face, to be standing in front of you without shattering into a million pieces.
Maybe he didn’t and, for once, Azeez was thankful for his ignorance. Because the rate at which they were going, it wouldn’t be long before they ripped each other to pieces.
With a self-preservation instinct that had kept him alive until now, he realized he didn’t want to face any more truths.
CHAPTER SIX
SHE HAD NOT come for two days.
Two long days that Azeez had spent wondering why he cared and then eviscerating himself for the fact that he did. First he had had to check if Princess Zohra was in good health.
She was fine, the Princess had informed him with a ferocious glint in her eyes, obviously surprised that he had cared enough to check for himself.
But there was something about riling the fierce princess that loosened the chain of guilt around his neck. She had not only glared at him but had also had the temerity to warn him that Nikhat was under her protection.
Before informing him finally that Nikhat hadn’t seemed well yesterday morning. And the thought of Nikhat all alone in the palace, because he was sure she wouldn’t have asked anyone for help, had finally dragged him out of his suite.
He stood outside her suite now, staring at the dark wooden door with its intricate designs. They had finally settled down into a sort of routine.
He visited the hammam in the morning, followed by a strenuous bout of physiotherapy—in which the madwoman drove him like the very devil intent on punishing him for all his sins. Sometimes she would stay and have lunch with him. They ate in silence—not completely awkward. But not pleasant, either, as though they were still reeling from the words they had thrown at each other two days before.