His smile was tersely sarcastic. “I don’t, I assure you. I’m fine. I simply do not wish you to play nursemaid when I’m in this condition.”
Understanding dawned. “You’re embarrassed? You think that seeing you like this might make me perceive you differently? Might make me perceive you as weak? Am I right?”
He didn’t respond immediately.
“I’ve got news for you, Sultan Aki Katabi. You married me. And like it or not, I took our vows seriously. For better or worse.”
He levelled her with a dismissive glare. “That was not in our ceremony. That is a western pledge.”
“So? I believe it.” She reached out and put her hand in his. “Look at what we’ve been through already. What we’ve done together. Do you really think I’m going to wait until you’re back to normal, and then just pick up where we left off? No. That’s not a marriage. It’s a sham.”
“This is a sham,” he muttered, removing her hand. “You married me to save one man from misery, and now you’re trying to save another. You cannot keep sacrificing your own life to save someone else.”
“Jeez. How dramatic are you?” She stood up and pushed fingers that shook slightly through her hair. “I’m not sacrificing anything. I chose this life with my eyes wide open.”
“I don’t believe you,” he said without meeting her eyes. “And I’d like you to leave.”
“Tough.” She put her hands on her hips, delivering him her most no-nonsense stare. “You’re stuck with me.”
“I don’t want to be stuck with you,” he responded through gritted teeth.
“You really want me to go?” Her heart was squeezing in on itself.
“Yes. Go. Go. Go.” He closed his eyes to block her out, and when he opened them again, she had done as he’d said and left. She was gone.
From his room, but not the hospital. Eleanor had no desire to aggravate him while he was in recovery from a serious accident, but nor did she intend to acquiesce to his ridiculous demand. She squared her shoulders and walked slowly back to the private waiting room.
Ryan was sitting, head in hands.
When she entered, he looked up, then stood. “Well? How is he?”
She rolled her eyes. “Annoying.”
He let a terse smile grip his features. “Meaning?”
“Meaning he’s being an insufferable, dense, arrogant jerk. He didn’t want me to stay.”
Ryan frowned. “What did he say?”
“Nothing sensible. Basically, he doesn’t want me waiting around while he’s incapacitated. He seems to think I’m here out of a sense of obligation.”
Ryan nodded slowly. “Why are you here?”
“Excuse me?” She looped her finger inside her necklace.
“You love him?”
Eleanor startled, her eyes crashing back to Ryan’s. “What?”
“You love him.”
Her cheeks flushed pink beneath her tan. “I know it must seem crazy.” There was, after all, no sense denying it. Ryan had seen her completely lose her mind earlier that day. It had been an effective demonstration of how she felt about her husband. “I mean, our marriage was little more than a dynastic business arrangement. But yeah. Idiot that I am, I fell in love with him. And now he’s got it into his head that I’m only here because I’m some sort of weak-minded, self-sacrificing tragic.” She sat down on one of the waiting room chairs and lifted a thumb to her lips. She bit down on her nail and teased it back and forth.
“I need to speak to some doctors,” she said, as a new sense of purpose took hold. “That surgeon who was here before first. Can you get him, Ryan?”
She was certainly not weak-minded, nor self-sacrificing, and there was nothing tragic about her at all. “Yeah, sure. I’ll send him down to you, but I want to pop in to see Aki now.”
“Listen, Ryan. Don’t talk to him about me. It seems to only make him angry. Also, I want to be the one to break it to him that he’s got my heart, okay?”
“Break it to him? You don’t think he’ll be pleased?”
“No.” She smiled distractedly. “I think he’ll be terrified at the responsibility. I have no intention of telling him how I feel until I know how he feels. And right now, he’s so angry at his broken body that he’s not thinking straight. So just… leave me out of it.”
Ryan nodded, though he wanted to have a stern word with his best friend. “You’re the boss, Ellie.” He moved towards the door and then thought better of it. He crossed back to her and put his hands on her shoulders. “He’s my oldest friend, and I love him like a brother, as I’ve told you. There is no woman on earth that I would have preferred to see him with. No woman on earth who is a better match for his pig-headedness.”
“And mine,” she quipped, lifting her eyes heavenwards.
She stared at the white wall opposite for what felt like hours, before the surgeon finally returned.
“Your highness,” he said hurriedly. “I am extremely sorry to have kept you waiting. I had an eleven year old with a broken elbow. I am the only surgeon qualified to operate on such a complex joint.”
She nodded. “Of course. Please, sit down.”
He sat on the edge of the seat opposite, his handsome, older face set in a line of concentration.
“My husband is not an easy patient,” she said with a small smile. “Not for you, and certainly not for me. I need to know what to expect. How I can make things easier for him at the palace.”
“I can have a therapist advise, of course. And we will have a nursing staff that will live in for the duration of his recuperation.”
“He won’t like that,” she said thoughtfully. “Have two nurses, please; three at most. But have them speak to me before they tend to him. And as for his limitations, please give me more information so that I can work out how to adapt his life to his current state.”
They talked for almost an hour, and at the end of it, Eleanor felt confident that she knew just how to handle her difficult, demanding, glorious lover. He wouldn’t like the way she intended to fuss over him, but he was just going to have to accept it.
She almost laughed when she thought back to a point in time when he’d thought her weak-minded and insipid. How wrong he had been!
Chapter Nine
“I swear, Eleanor, if you do not stop treating me like a patient, broken legs will be the least of my worries.”
She straightened from the task of plumping his pillows, her cheeks flushed. “Has anyone ever told you that you’re incredibly grumpy at times?”
“Grumpy?” He repeated in disbelief. “No. I do not believe that word has ever been applied to me.”
“Perhaps not to your face.” She fluffed another pillow and replaced it at the head of the bed.
“Stop it.” He turned his head so that he could look at her. She was still too slim. Her expression was weary. Her hair, once so beautifully styled, was now pulled into a simple plait. And her eyes no longer shone with the same vibrancy he had once admired. He reached his good hand out and grabbed her fingers, arresting her in the middle of fixing his sheets. “Stop it.” He forced his lips into the memory of a smile. It felt stiff on his face. In the three weeks since the accident, he didn’t think he’d smiled once. “If you must, sit with me. But stop acting like my servant.”
Her heart turned over in her chest, but she did as he said, climbing into the bed and taking up a spot beside him. Even like this, his legs in casts, one arm similarly bound, there was a raw, masculine strength to him that made her bones feel weak.
Her breathing was laboured. From stress? From tension? He looked at her and tried to ignore the pounding sense in his gut. “What did you do today? Besides drive me crazy with all this fussing.”
Her smile was tentative but warm. “I explored.”
“Explored? What did you explore, Emira?”
“I like it when you call me that,” she said with a distracted lift of her lips.
“Emira. What did you explore?”
“The pa
lace.” She sighed contentedly. “Walkway after walkway, galleries, the art. This place is enormous. I don’t know if I’ll ever get to see it all.”
“You will,” he responded confidently.
Eleanor nodded, though her own doubts refused to be silenced. And the more she felt herself falling for him, the larger her doubts loomed. Still, she managed a weak smile.
“Perhaps with you, when you are able to show me your favourite areas.”
He looked down at their hands, laced together, and frowned. “You know, before I married you, I had no concept of what it might do to you. I simply thought that marrying the daughter of the Rabi family would lead to an iron clad stability in the country.” He shook his head. “If I had any idea what it would involve, I would never have asked this of you.”
She nodded. “I believe you.”
“I feel that I must offer you a way out.” He frowned, unsure why he was saying the words that were coming from his lips. “An honourable way to end our marriage.”
“I see.” She lowered her gaze, so that she could study the intricate threading on the trim of the duvet.
He cleared his throat. “It wouldn’t be announced for a while. Perhaps a year or so. But until then, we could live separate lives. No one need know the details.”
She nodded, pretending to consider it. “And I would live in New York, and you would continue to live in Talina.”
“Yes.”
“And my father?”
“Would be free to come and go as he pleases.” He forced himself to look at her. “I am not as ruthless as I attempted to be, azeezi. I truly thought that marrying you would be for the best.”
“I see.”
“My only regret is that I have hurt you.” He lifted his hand and stroked her cheek. “It was not my intention.”
“I know.” She shrugged. “I didn’t come to this marriage expecting it to be perfect.”
“I don’t think you had any idea what to expect,” he muttered angrily, dropping his hand and focussing his attention beyond her. “You were a sheltered child, with a broken heart. I could not have selected a more vulnerable woman as my bride.”
“Vulnerable?” She laughed quietly. “No offense, Aki, but you seem to love casting me as some wan, melodramatic shrinking violet. Nothing you’ve just said is any more true than what you accused me of on the night of our wedding. My heart was not broken by Arnaud’s deception; it was set free. I was not sheltered; I grew up with first-hand experience of the complexities of love, loss, pain and betrayal. My education on matters of hurt was thorough. So do not flatter yourself that you have done anything to me that I cannot handle.”
“Oh, really?” He demanded, shuffling around on the bed so that he could see her better. He winced as his legs connected, but tried to conceal his pain. Though Eleanor saw it, she did not insult him by attempting to provide comfort.
“Let me do this properly, then,” he said with a quiet determination. “Marrying you was the biggest mistake I’ve ever made, and I realise that now even more so than before. Do you remember I once told you that if our places had been reversed, I would not have married you?”
There was a crackly, distant quality to her voice, and she nodded. “You said something about me then having all the power… which would have made you vulnerable.”
“That’s right. But marrying you has made me vulnerable. I didn’t realise that this was a risk, but taking you as a wife has opened me up to feelings I don’t wish to possess. If you stay, I will forever live in fear of you being harmed. I will change my behaviour to protect myself from harm simply because I do not want to put you through anything such as this again. Some people might be able to accept that responsibility, but I am not one of them.”
Her throat was sore with unshed tears. “So because you care for me, you want me to go.”
“I do not want to care for you, Eleanor, and so I will not.”
“And that’s it?” She demanded, her temper finally collapsing under the weight of his words. “You don’t want to have feelings for me and so you switch them off?” She leaned forward, her face only inches from his. “Then I think you’ve mistaken the matter entirely. You do not care for me at all. Not if you can so arrogantly cut me out, just because falling in love with someone is inconvenient.”
“Love?” He responded with a thickness to his voice. “Love?”
“Yes, damn it. Love. What else do you think you’re talking about?”
He sank back against the pillows, bewildered and confused. “This marriage was organised because it made sense. It is not a love match.”
“It wasn’t a love match.” She looked at him uncertainly, but deep down, she knew that she had one chance to stitch her future back together. “At least, not in the normal way. I think that when I met you, I felt a total, overwhelming sense of belonging. Something inside of me seemed to slip into place, and I knew that my fascination and instinct was correct. There was no way I wasn’t going to marry you.”
“It makes no sense. As you heard me say, you are intelligent… fiercely so. You had the world at your feet. Yet you travelled a thousand miles to marry a man you don’t know.”
“I did know you.” She clasped her hands together. “Or, at least, it felt like it. I can’t explain it. Think about this. Why would I have been so upset on our wedding night if I didn’t care for you? Your words cut me to the quick. I have never known such an aching sense of betrayal.”
“I have apologised for that.”
“I have accepted your apology,” she said quickly, cutting him off. “I am only telling you how your words made me feel.”
He shook his head. “It is useless to analyse this. I do not want to expose both of us to this kind of pain. It is a waste of energy. You will distract me, importantly, from the work that I do.”
“Perhaps. And perhaps I will add to your work in ways you can’t even fathom.” Gingerly, she moved over the bed, and came to kneel across him. “There are no guarantees in life. You could have died out there in the desert. And if you had, would you wish that you’d never married me? Or be grateful that we had a small period of time together?”
He made a muttered oath, a sound deep in his throat, as he gave into temptation and ran his hand down her back. “You were my last thought, as I brought the chopper down. Imagining leaving you made me know that death was not an option.”
Triumph flared inside of her. “But now you are pushing me away, and calmly trying to remove me from your life, as though I’m a pair of shoes that you bought in the wrong size.”
“You are. That is just what you are. I need a wife who will make things easier for me. Not complicate my existence with constant challenges and a body that drives me to distraction.”
She smiled impishly. “How… insipid… such a woman sounds.”
He made another sound of frustration and tilted his head forward. “I have berated you and insulted you, and still you want to remain with me. I can’t understand you, Emira.”
“I love you.” She put her hands on his chest and teased his muscles. “You are arrogant, and you are bombastic, and you are sometimes rude and grumpy, but you are also kind and thoughtful and good, and strong, and an incredible lover, and I would be effectively cutting myself in two if I walked away from this marriage.”
His face was troubled. “You would get over me. As you have got over Arnaud.”
“Oh, bloody Arnaud. Why do you even bring him up? It was meeting you that made me realise how little I really cared for him. Our so called ‘love’ was the most civilised, boring, predictable and safe emotion I’ve ever known. That’s not love. It’s not even life.” She leaned forward and pressed her lips to his, enjoying the way he was kept captive beneath her by his casts. “Love is like a galaxy in a jar, without a lid. A burst of stars and milky ways and black holes – there is pain and there is loss but there is also indescribable delight.” She moved her mouth to his cheek, and then his ear. “Don’t you feel the potential between us? Don�
��t you feel the energy? The special force that only we can generate?”
He took in a deep breath. It was as though he was walking off a precipice, and he knew there was no safety net. No guarantee. “Yes. I feel it.”
“So what the heck are you thinking? To be trying to push me away?”
“You are, perhaps, not the one who is weak. Fear of all that you’ve just described has made me weak. I have never known love before. I have never expected to know it. As a child, I was raised to know that my marriage would be a matter of business and honor, rather than a match made for affection. To think that I can have both has made me doubt my own sanity over the past two months. Is this true? Is what you feel real? And is what I feel real?”
“I can’t speak for you,” she said, reaching down and placing her hands beneath his shirt, so that she could connect with his bare skin. “But I’ve never known anything more real than what I feel when I’m with you. Until I met you, I was marking time. Coming to Talina, and living as your wife, is when my future began.”
He shook his head from side to side. “I can’t even make love to you as I would wish. I’m not a man at present. I wish you would wait, until my bones have mended, to have this conversation.”
“But why? Your body will mend. And I don’t want to go another day without you understanding me. Without you comprehending what’s in my heart.” She chewed down on her lip. “Do you remember what you said to Ryan? That night in your study?”
He closed his eyes and felt shame wash over him. “Don’t think of it again, I beg you.”
She nodded quietly, but continued. “You thought it was a sign of stupidity that I hadn’t spoken a single word to you at our first meeting.”
“Do not repeat what I thought back to me. I deeply regret that you heard me behaving like such a terrible, spoiled bastard.”
She grinned. “Oh, you were completely wrong. But you’ve admitted as much and so I forgive you.” Her smile was dazzling and filled with cheek. “But the reason I didn’t speak to you, when I first met you, Aki, is that I was struck completely mute. And I just wanted to listen to you. It took all my powers of concentration to not fall off my chair! My goodness. You walked into our home like a living deity. I have never known such instant, overwhelming attraction.”
Sheikhs: Rich, powerful desert kings and the women who bring them to their knees... Page 73
