The last of the wedding guests were spilling out into the streets, the celebration continuing even as the palace staff began to clean up after the reception dinner.
The country was happy with its new High Sheikh, and just as happy with his new Sheikha.
Isabella’s family had come. It had been wonderful to see Maximo and Alison, and their beautiful daughter. Her relationship with her brother and his wife was always easy. It had been her parents she’d been dreading. But they had been pleasant—happy, even. Likely because the deal was sealed, the contract fulfilled. Not even she could mess it up now.
Of course she wouldn’t leave. She loved her new country, her new people. Her new husband. Her heart was here, as well as her duty.
Adham had been so handsome, the best looking groom she’d ever seen, in his loose white tunic and linen pants—a compromise between Eastern and Western fashion, as had been her cream wedding gown, with its intricate copper beading and loose, draping fabric that complemented her curves without clinging too much to them.
She had been involved in the design of her dress, which she had appreciated. She wondered if Adham had seen to that.
She closed her eyes, remembering the moment when she had walked down the aisle, when she had seen him and he had seen her for the first time. She had seen it again. That heat, the desire that had been absent from his eyes lately. He had not been able to hide it from her, not then. And when he had taken her hand in his their eyes had met, and she’d been shocked that neither of them were singed by the crack of electricity that had raced through them.
She had been filled with certainty in that moment. Now … now it had faded.
Now that she was in her room again, waiting for her husband. Waiting for her wedding night. She wasn’t even certain he would come. He had been stoic at the wedding, and thanks to Umarahn customs, which did not call for the bride and groom to dance together, hadn’t spent any time with her at the reception.
She wished not for the first time that she could simply read his mind. That she could know everything that went on behind that mask he put up, that wall he kept between himself and the world.
Maybe he was right and there was nothing but more rock beyond it. But maybe there was more. She believed it. She had to.
She sat on the bed, her wedding dress spread out around her. She hadn’t changed because he’d seemed to like the gown so much, but now she was getting hot and itchy after hours wearing the intricate creation.
Another hour went by before she realized Adham wasn’t coming to her.
She wanted to curl up and sob her heart out, to release all of her tears in the privacy of her room so that no one, especially not Adham, would ever know how much anguish she felt in that moment.
Life is simpler if you just ask for what you want.
He’d said that. And he was right. She could stay here and dissolve, give in to her tears, or she could go and get what she wanted. The Isabella who had run away from her brother’s villa would have stayed in her room and wept. She might even have run away again.
But the woman she was now wouldn’t do either of those things. And he was a part of making her who she was now, so he would just have to deal with it.
She opened the door to her room and walked down the hall, her bare feet not making any sound on the cold marble. She had done this before, snuck into his room at night, and then he had taken her body but ignored her love. He wouldn’t ignore it tonight. She wouldn’t let him.
She opened the door without knocking. Adham was standing by the window, his chest bare, the linen pants he’d worn at the wedding slung low on his hips, revealing his perfect body, his chiseled abs, trim waist and lean hips. Her heart bumped against her chest and her body ached with desire.
She shook her head. Later. There would be time for that later.
“Hi,” she said, not knowing what else to say. And as greetings went it was harmless enough.
A breeze came in through the open window, ruffling his dark hair, and her heart clenched tight. She loved him so much.
Earlier, her only thought had been protecting herself, but now she realized something, watching him, looking at the guarded expression on his handsome face. She couldn’t protect herself anymore. Not if she wanted him to open up to her. She had to be willing to lay herself bare to him, to put her own heart on the line, if she wanted him to be able to do the same someday.
“Adham … I love you.”
He jerked back as though she’d struck him. “Bella …”
“No. Don’t. Don’t tell me I don’t, or that I can’t, because I do.”
“Bella, this isn’t what I want from you.”
“It doesn’t matter. It’s the truth. I love you. Because you are the most honorable man I have ever known. Because you taught me what was important in life. Because you took me to Printemps, and took my picture in front of the Eiffel Tower.”
“You don’t know me,” he said roughly. “Not really.”
“I do.”
He turned to her, his expression fierce. He walked toward her, stopping when he was close enough for her to reach out and touch. “Do not make me into some romantic paragon. I’ve killed men, Isabella. It doesn’t matter what the reason was. There is blood on my hands.”
She reached out, took his hand in hers, ran her fingers over his palm. “I don’t see it.”
“I do,” he ground out.
She raised his hand and pressed a kiss to it. “I know that your hands have been gentle with me.”
He pulled away then, the pain in his eyes apparent for a brief moment before he brought the shutters down again. “Stop,” he said, his voice strangled.
“I’m being honest with you because I think it’s important. I love you, Adham.”
“Then I will be honest with you,” he said. “I don’t want you to love me.”
She hadn’t expected that. Not in all of the scenarios she’d played out in her mind had she expected that.
“I don’t believe that. What about this?” She held her hand out to him, showed him her precious ring, the one that had been designed and crafted with such care. “This means something. I know it does.”
He shook his head, his throat moving up and down. “It is just a ring.”
“Not to me. I love you. You can’t kill the love that I have for you. You can’t make it so I don’t feel it.” Strength, love, desire, pain, all rolled through her body. Her heart was pounding fast and hard. “You taught me to be strong. You taught me about the importance of duty. And, I know you didn’t mean to, but you’ve also taught me about love, about desire. So you have to deal with who I am because you were a part of making me. And I’m not backing down. I know you hate it, Adham, but you can’t control the way I feel about you.”
“Go, Isabella.”
“What?”
“Get out. I don’t want your love. I don’t want you.”
Her heart squeezed tight, and her lungs felt caved in, as though she couldn’t breathe. “I …”
And that was when she was sure she saw fear in Adham al bin Sudar’s eyes. Her warrior husband was genuinely afraid. Of her. Of her feelings. Of what they might mean to him, do to him. She remembered what he’d said about his mother—how her love for his father had made her act recklessly, how it had stolen her from him. And she knew he saw anything that had the power to control a person as a weakness.
“You’re afraid, Adham. You’re afraid of what you can’t control, and you know that you can’t tame an emotion as strong as love. You think it makes you weak, but it doesn’t. I’m stronger because I love you. I’m stronger than you are because I’m not afraid, even though it hurts.”
She inclined her head and turned, walking away from him, her heart feeling as though it was slowly cracking, breaking into thousands of tiny pieces.
“Where are you going?” he asked, when she reached the door.
“If you don’t want me here, Adham, I won’t stay.” And she closed the door behind her and went back
to her own room.
Adham’s feet pounded on the desert sand. The night air was cold and dry in his lungs as he tried to force himself into a state of exhaustion that was strong enough to erase the last few moments of his life.
She had said he could not stop her from loving him, but he was certain that he had. The look in her eyes before she’d turned away from him had been so bleak, so desolate, he had felt the pain—her pain—reach into him and grab his heart from his chest.
She had taken it with her. But then, he suspected that Isabella had had his heart long before tonight.
And he had hurt her. He had told her the ring meant nothing. The ring … it was everything. The act of creating the design, of working with the jeweler to come up with the perfect thing for her. He had wanted so badly to remain distant from it, but it had been impossible. So he had poured everything into that design, had hoped it would get those memories, those feelings, out of him.
If anything, they had grown stronger.
He stopped and leaned forward, gripping his shins, trying to catch his breath. He didn’t know how far he’d run, only that he had been desperate to drive every rational thought from his mind. It was impossible, though. No matter how hard he tried, he could only see Isabella.
She was in him. A part of him. What he felt for her was more powerful than anything he could ever remember feeling in his life. And she was right. It did terrify him. To his core.
He had faced down men holding guns, had been forced to make split-second decisions to save his life, had endured torture, and this was more frightening than any of that. To let someone mean so much to him.
Losing his parents—his mother, especially—had been so altering, so destructive to him. If not for Hassan, if not for the fact that he’d been able to pour all of his anger into protecting his brother, his country, he did not know that he would have survived it.
What would happen if he lost Isabella? Did he even know how to give her love? He had spent so many years traveling, working, burying himself in his sense of duty and honor so he didn’t have to deal with real relationships. He didn’t know if he would have any idea of how to open himself up now—not when he’d spent so long shutting himself down.
And she didn’t deserve that. She deserved better than him. She deserved a man who had never been forced to choose between his life and the life of another man. She deserved someone who had not been so scarred by tragedy, both inside and out. Life hadn’t touched her. She was beautiful. Pure and perfect. And being with him … he was afraid he might damage her in some way.
He heard the pounding of rotor blades as a helicopter flew overhead, away from the palace toward the city.
Bella.
What if she had gone? He had told her to go. He had not meant for her to leave, but he had said it. And he had hurt her. But if she left … if she left him.
He let out a fierce growl of desperation and turned back to the palace, running as though the very devil was at his heels, her name pounding in his mind in time with his footfalls.
He could not lose her. He needed her.
His heart thundered in his chest as he ran, each beat putting a crack in the protective stone until it fell away completely, leaving him raw and exposed, vulnerable. And he could feel. He could feel everything. There was no protection, no numbness, no buffer against himself and his emotions.
The pain was intense, the feeling of loss so overwhelming it stole his already shortened breath. And with that there was something else—an emotion that made him feel as though his heart might burst straight from his chest because he didn’t think it could be contained inside him. It was too big, too much.
When he reached the wall of the palace he pressed in the key code and went in through the back door, hurrying quickly inside and moving around through the garden so that he could access one of the entrances near the bedchambers.
He slipped inside into Isabella’s room. It was empty. The bed pristine, untouched. He saw a small dark shape on the center of the bed and he bent down to look at it. It was the ring box. And in it was the ring, along with the wedding band.
Despair gripped him. He had driven her away. He had finally done it. All of the times he had tried to rid himself of her, if not physically then emotionally, and now that he knew he needed her he had finally succeeded.
He needed her. His lovely Bella. His wife. She had shown him so many things, had taught him to see the world with new eyes. With her, things were beautiful again, fresh. He saw hope, goodness, where before he had seen nothing but the evil of the world.
She had said he had helped her become the person she was, that he had helped her grow up. But she had fixed him. Had helped him find redemption. Had pulled him from the mire he had been stuck in, from that dark hopelessness he had grown so accustomed to. He had not even realized how much he needed to be saved.
And still, in the end, he had lost her.
He picked up the box and walked outside, into the gardens. The sun was rising now; golden light shining over the palace walls, mist rising off the small pond that helped provide a cool respite from the midday heat.
He walked along the edge of it, aimless, directionless for the first time in his memory. The pain in his chest was blinding, agonizing. But he felt it.
Then he saw her. Sitting there in the midst of the garden on one of the benches, her hands folded in her lap, her cheeks wet with tears, her shoulders shaking as she sobbed.
The rose-gold light was shining on her, creating a halo around her dark hair, casting an angelic glow on her beautiful face. His wife. His love.
He loved her.
The realization staggered him. Was enough to bring him to his knees.
He walked toward her, and then he did go down on his knees, placing the ring box on the stone bench, taking her small, soft hands in his rough, scarred ones.
“Bella,” he said, feeling his throat tighten, “I thought you’d left me.”
She bit her lip to hold back a sob and shook her head. “No. I told you I wouldn’t.”
“But I said. I should not have said I didn’t want you, Bella. It was a lie.” He brought her hands up to his lips, pressed them against his mouth before speaking again. “And you were right. I was afraid. I was afraid of what loving you would do to me. I was afraid of what touching you would do to me. I thought it was a weakness in me that made me unable to control myself with you. But you are right. Love is not weak. Love is strong. My mother was brave. She did what she felt she had to do. I didn’t see it before. I didn’t understand. I do now. What she felt was beyond rational thought, beyond duty. Love is above any of those things. You helped me see that. Your strength humbles me, Bella. You’re stronger than I am.”
She let out a watery laugh. “No, I’m not. I’m a mess.”
“Your strength inspires me,” he said, raising his hand so that he could cup her cheek. “I feel as though I’m alive again for the first time since my parents died. I hadn’t realized how much of myself I let die with them. Now it’s like … like seeing in color when I had no clue I’d only been seeing in black and white. I love you, Sheikha Isabella Rossi al bin Sudar.”
She laughed, and a tear spilled down her cheek. “That’s a mouthful.”
“Yes, it is, but I love saying it.”
“I love you, Adham. I love you so much. I’m so glad I didn’t check the peephole when you knocked on my hotel room door.”
A hoarse chuckle escaped his lips. “I am too.” He leaned in and pressed a kiss to her lips, and when he pulled away she reached forward and brushed her fingers over his cheek, wiping away moisture he hadn’t realized was there.
“I love you,” he whispered again. Now that he could say it, now that he knew it was true, he would never stop telling her. “I want you to know that if there was no marriage contract you would still be the woman I chose. I am not whole without you. You are my other half. I realize now that I could never have let you marry another man.”
Her eyes widened. “Not ev
en if it violated your duty?”
“Not even if it did. There is nothing greater than my love for you.”
Marriage Made on Paper
Maisey Yates
CHAPTER ONE
LILY FORD wasn’t thrilled to see Gage Forrester standing in her office, leaning over her desk, his large masculine hands clasping the edge, his scent teasing her, making her heart beat at an accelerated pace. She wasn’t thrilled to see Gage, the man who had turned her down, but her body seemed to be on a different wavelength.
“I heard that Jeff Campbell hired your company,” he said, leaning in a little more, his shoulder muscles rolling forward. He certainly didn’t spend all of his time behind a desk in a corporate office. A physique like that didn’t happen by accident. She knew that from personal experience.
It took her four evenings a week in the gym to combat the effects of her mostly sedentary job. But it was important. Image counted for a lot, and it was her job to keep the images of her clients sparkling clean in the public eye. She felt that if her own image wasn’t up to par she would lose her credibility.
“You heard correctly,” she said, leaning back in her chair, trying to put some distance between them. Trying to feel as if she had some measure of control. It was her office, darn it. He had no call coming in here and trying to assume authority.
But then, men like Gage operated that way. They came, they saw, they conquered the female.
Not this female.
“So, are you here to offer me congratulations?” she asked sweetly.
“No, I’m here to offer you a contract.”
That successfully shocked her into silence, which was a rare thing. “You rejected my offer to represent your company, Mr. Forrester.”
“And now I’m extending you an offer.”
She pursed her lips. “Does this have anything to do with the fact that Jeff Campbell is your biggest competitor?”
“I don’t consider him a competitor.” Gage smiled, but in his eyes she could see the glint of steel, the hardness that made him a legend in his industry. You didn’t reach greatness by being soft. She knew it, she respected it. But she didn’t necessarily care for Gage, or his business practices. Generally speaking, she thought that he was somewhat morally bankrupt. But an account with Forrestation Inc. would be a huge boon for her company. The biggest account she’d ever had.
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