A shaken laugh escaped her. "I'm your ex-girlfriend—-"
"Exactly," Altair said tightly. "You and I were together in the past, and it is the princess now who is both my present and future."
Chapter Sixteen
Dear Mama,
I feel as if someone has been watching me. Someone...who doesn't want to see me happy. I know I should speak of this to the sheikh, but already I feel him drifting away from me, and I don't want to make things worse. He loves me still, but...something's changed again. I can feel him struggling, and I can only pray that he will open up to me about it.
THE PRINCESS DID NOT ask what transpired between Altair and her father. In her innocence, she had thought that by not speaking a word about it, she was proving that she had nothing to hide. And while that might have been the case, she had forgotten that she was hiding something else from the sheikh.
The sheikh had sensed the princess' fears from the moment she felt herself being watched. But because she had not confided to him about it, and her fears had manifested at about the same time Sheikh Mahmud had requested to speak with him, what the sheikh saw in her actions was not innocent...but guilt.
He could not help but liken her actions to an ostrich burying its head in the sand, but instead of having danger to fear, the princess appeared to him like someone who was unable to face the consequences of her past. Her feelings for him had not changed; he could see that easily enough. But just because she loved him now did not mean she had not done something wrong in the past. And just because she loved him still did not mean it would keep her from betraying him in the future.
He wanted to trust her. He was desperate to trust her. But he could not.
When he told Agent 53 there was no future for them, he had been speaking the truth. But what the other woman did not know was that while she had not succeeded in winning Altair back, her words had fared much better, for even until today those words poisoned the sheikh's mind—-
And it was because of her words that the sheikh began to distance himself from the princess.
More days passed, and by now both Altair and Safiya knew that something was wrong. But because Safiya still believed to ask would indicate guilt, and the sheikh saw that the princess still acted as if she was hiding something, the distance between them only continued to grow.
YARA DIDN'T NEED ANYONE to tell her to know that the sheikh and his betrothed's relationship was on the rocks. She had been one of the agents called in to the emergency meeting following Altair's visit to the Sheikh of Farigha, and she had been privately disgusted by Agent 53's attempt to discredit the princess and pass it off as well-meaning concern for the sheikh. Like many of her colleagues, she had known of the other woman's previous relationship with Altair, and because of this, they had also known that the woman's words were nothing but vitriol caused by bitter and jealous resentment.
Yara wished she could speak to Altair about it, but because she also knew how fiercely private Altair was, she decided to do the next best thing. She suggested that the sheikh visit the princess' father again, and the way her cousin readily agreed broke her heart. It was then she realized how desperate Altair was behind his stoic mask; it was then she saw him resembling a man whose world was about to implode. Cracks had appeared everywhere - just too damn fast, and too damn many...that it felt as if the sheikh believed having his world fall into ruin was only a matter of time, and that losing the princess for good was inevitable.
MAHMUD'S MOOD TURNED brooding the moment he saw Altair Al-Atassi walk inside his living room. The bleakness in the younger man's gaze was all too apparent; he had seen that look in his own reflection on the mirror in recent times. It was a look of a man who did not know if he had it in him to save his relationship, and that was how Mahmud felt these days, when thinking of how much he had neglected his own daughter.
In truth, he did not even know if he should try to repair his relationship with Safiya. The more he thought about it, the more convinced he was that his daughter was better off without an old stubborn goat like him.
The royal army commander, however, was another matter. The man might not be perfect, but even Mahmud knew Altair Al-Atassi was as close to it as was humanly possible. He could not have wished for a better son-in-law to care for his daughter, and so...