by Avery Laval
“I do.”
He laughed coldly at her words. “I don’t believe you. I have proof of your affair.”
Marissa knew it was an opportunity, this pause in his diatribe, for her to ask him where he’d gotten his so-called proof, but suddenly she didn’t want to. If he thought she was capable of all that he’d said, then what was the point of trying to make him believe otherwise? What was the point of any of this?
“Go on, please,” she uttered coolly. “This is fascinating.”
“Is it?” he asked. “Are you captivated by the tale of the prince who fell for one of Scheherazade’s stories? Let himself believe that she’d changed her ways and was ready to start a family, to be together as they’d been before, only here, in his country, where he belongs? Because the story takes a tragic turn. Our hero leaves town for just one week, and when he comes back, his aides give him a detailed report of the long, loving conversations between his supposed true love and the very same man she left him for in the first place. Every night. Long into the night. I must imagine this Grant misses you very much, Marissa. Did you happen, at any point in these frequent conversations, to mention my name?”
Feeling her heart turn to ice in a way she’d never before experienced, Marissa tilted her head and shot Khalid the hardest smile she could muster. “As a matter of fact, I did,” she said. “But now that I see what you think of me, I wish we hadn’t wasted so much breath on you.” She turned, ready to make her way into the bedroom, throw everything she could fit into a suitcase, and get home any way she could. She’d just told him she loved him and wanted to have his children, and in response he’d accused her of the most ridiculous, utterly imaginary, insulting nonsense she’d ever heard. She’d be happy never to see him again.
“I’ll be out of your way now, Khalid,” she hissed, about to turn her back on him forever. But just as she did, a tiny voice whispered into her head: Tell him the truth. Let him see what an idiot he’s been, so he knows what he’s lost in you. “But before I go,” she said, advancing slightly back on him, trying to ignore the look of fury and indignation on his face, “I’d like to add a few extra details to your little scenario. I did talk to Grant Blakely several times while you were gone.”
He snorted derisively.
“Along with his wife, Jenna. They tried to convince me to leave you, that you would hurt me again. I said that I needed to stay and tell you the truth about my love for you. Every call ended the same way. They said, We love you. I said, I love you, too. Someday, I hope you have such loving friends.”
She reached on the floor and picked up a piece of clothing, jamming it into her suitcase. She couldn’t even stand to look at him anymore.
“And then, every day, your assistant, Amid, made me feel like you wanted me to leave. That I was in the way. That it was inappropriate for me to be here. But I persevered. I bet it was Amid who told you I was talking to some man at night.”
She glanced up at him when she said that, and the shocked look on his face told her she’d guessed right. “He did! You’re so gullible. Can’t you see he’s been pitting you against me?” She jammed more clothes into her suitcase. She was almost packed. “I love you Khalid, but I also love myself. And I deserve someone who is rooting for us to be together—not looking for any excuse for us to be apart.”
Khalid stared at her, speechless.
“Honestly. All it took was one lie from Amid for you to think I’d marry you under false pretenses and, what, embezzle state funds? Good-bye, Khalid.” She threw her eyes over his body one last time—one long last look—and then strode from the bedroom texting Jana as she left.
It was time to move on. She had her closure. At long last.
12
At midnight, the port of Rifaisa was a very different place. The docks themselves were dead and dark, as drained of their life as Khalid was feeling as he walked them. But thirty feet away, the waterfront restaurants spilled over with vivacious people, and from afar, the sight of them laughing and embracing each other merrily as they tumbled out of the establishments, full of good food and friendship, seemed like lemon juice over a wound. He was glad to be shouting distance away from them, and gladder still when he made it to his destination, the royal yacht where he could, he hoped, hide away for at least one night. He hoped one night would be long enough to summon his composure and come to terms with the fact that he was an utter moron.
At the end of the gangway, he saw one of the shipyard guards he liked especially well pacing the deck of the ship and thanked the heavens for small favors. Khalid waved and pushed aside the heavy black hood he’d worn to the port. For a moment the man looked confused; then he snapped into action as he recognized Khalid and extended the gangway out to the docks, deftly landing it right at Khalid’s feet. “Sir,” the guard called out, but Khalid waved his arms in front of him to shut him up. Quickly jogging onto the ship, he put his finger to his lips in the universal sign of coercion and whispered, “I’m on the lam from my staff,” in English.
The guard made a confused face, and Khalid laughed in spite of his dark mood at his own attempt to use American slang in such a situation. “My apologies,” he added in Arabic, then explained as best he could that he didn’t want any company or attention at the moment. If only there was a word in English or Arabic that summed up what an idiot he was. But truly, his level of regret at the moment was beyond the bounds of language.
He thought through every word she’d said for the tenth time. Her words made sense—more sense than Amid’s lies, which he’d eaten up with a spoon.
But she’d been so distant three years ago, and he’d been far too ready to accept that it was because she’d found someone else when he’d seen that tabloid. He knew how often women had been pushed on him since his arrival in Rifaisa, and he couldn’t help but think her situation was no different. He was no longer an attractive match for her, considering he lived on the other side of the world, miles from the family she cherished so much. And the nation he ruled was smack-dab in the middle of a part of the world few Americans could begin to understand. Why would Marissa, an independent woman with all kinds of dreams, want to move here and put up with all the drastic changes he’d endured?
Except, maybe she would have moved, if he’d given her half a chance. Pacing the deck that stretched around the ship’s bow, where he could see nothing but dark sky and darker sea, he remembered how he’d reacted when she’d told him about the baby she’d lost. All he could think about was the pain that she’d caused him by hiding his child from him. But now he could see it from her perspective. And he could see how much grief she would have suffered after the miscarriage. It hurt that she hadn’t been able to tell him what she’d been going through back then, but he supposed he deserved to be hurt after the way he’d acted, ready to believe the worst of her.
And then his mind went back, as it had every two minutes over the last two hours, to what she’d told him just before his outburst. She had said she loved him.
She loved him.
Correction: She had loved him—before he’d shown her in no uncertain terms that he was a buffoon and a jackass. After that, the love in her eyes had gone out like a snuffed candle, and only fury had remained. And maybe disappointment, too. In all the time he’d known her, he’d never heard her talk to anyone in that cold tone she’d used tonight. Frankly, he hadn’t known she was capable of such reproach. Maybe no one had earned it before now. How he hated that he had been the first.
Khalid sagged with exhaustion. Knowing rest was not an option, not while his head raged with every choice he’d made, every chance he’d missed to be with her, he made his way up two sets of stairs and took a seat on the sundeck where a bimini just slightly obstructed the 360-degree views. From here he imagined he could make out the dim lights of the rear side of the palace, set high on a man-made hill above the port, and he imagined she might still be there. Or she might not. He realized that his instruction to Jana to set her up in his jet upon his return still st
ood and that Marissa would not hesitate now to use it. Maybe she was already making her way to the airport. For a moment, he felt envious. If there were some possible way for him to escape his unhappiness by plane at the moment, he would have been eager to do so. He couldn’t stand being alone with the realization of what he’d done.
And there was nothing he could do about it now. He had no excuse to keep her here anymore. For at once he realized that an excuse was all that broken condom had been. A reason to be near her again despite all his mental bargaining and justifications. He had told himself all sorts of stories, but ultimately, hadn’t he just wanted another moment with the woman who made him feel so incredibly understood? The woman who, he now realized, he’d failed to understand in return.
Too restless to sit, he stood up and started yet another pacing path around the edge of the deck. What about him had made him so willing to believe the worst in her, made him almost want—though it made no sense—to believe she could abandon him as carelessly as his father and mother had in his own infancy? It was almost as if he was forcing her into doing exactly what he’d always thought she’d do, what he’d always thought everyone would do. Leave.
With a start, Khalid noticed he was squeezing the back of a captain’s chair as if it were his own neck he were wringing. The urge to pick something up in his clenched hands and throw it to the ground, to take some sort of release in the sight of anything shattering across the deck, was stronger than he could understand. He was always clasping onto things, he saw, as if he expected them to slip through his fingers. He’d grabbed onto Marissa with both hands, and in so doing, he’d squeezed the love out of her heart. Love, that, as she’d pointed out, had never gone away, no matter the distance between them. Until now.
As if trying to startle him out of his dark thoughts, Khalid’s phone began to vibrate relentlessly in his pants pocket. He pushed his robe out of the way and answered it without even identifying the caller first, so happy to have any excuse not to follow his emotions down this rabbit hole any further. “Yes?” he barked.
“Sir.” Jana’s voice cut through the line. “I wanted to let you know, sir, that Ms. Madden is departing for the airport.” Jana’s voice was quiet and resigned, and Khalid realized at once that she, too, had come to enjoy having Marissa around.
“Very well. See that she has a very comfortable and safe trip home, please.” He clicked his phone off, not wanting to risk hearing any more questions buried behind Jana’s perfectly polite announcements. There, he thought, was the one perk of being royalty. Permission to hang up on people when one was in a terrible mood and didn’t want to hear about how he’d driven the woman he loved as far away as she could go.
But then, that was exactly what he should be listening to, he thought with a start. She was heading for the airport, a destination maybe a half hour from the palace in this light evening traffic. He could make it there in twenty if he left this very second. He could be there, waiting, when she arrived, ready to tell her what she deserved to hear. She’d leave anyway, he knew it as sure as he knew what he had to do. But he would tell her anyway. Tell her he loved her. Let her know, at least, that he always had.
Jana was Marissa’s driver that night. It was late, and the palace was not as bustling with staff as usual. And when they were ready to leave, Khalid’s regular driver was nowhere to be found, though he’d been sitting in front of the palace at the ready just ten minutes earlier. No matter. Marissa was happy to have Jana in the car with her, glad to be able to give the kindest person she’d known in her brief time here a proper good-bye. But the route they were taking to the airport was so circuitous that for a moment she wondered if Jana actually knew the way.
As she waited and waited for them to make what she’d assumed would be an easy journey, she stared out the window at the winding roads and sparse traffic and wondered how her trip to Rifaisa had gone so terribly wrong. It was almost as if it had been preordained to end this way, ever since she’d walked into her apartment that terrible day three years ago and found Khalid’s grandfather sitting on her sofa. Or had she set this chain of events into motion when she’d failed to tell her lover about her pregnancy?
No, she realized with a sinking heart. Their lives had been set on this path even earlier, when Khalid had been abandoned for the first time and had come to believe that that was how people treated the ones they loved. If that hadn’t been in his mind already, lurking, ready to spring up when least expected, then he’d never have leapt to the conclusions he had. He’d have never believed some trashy tabloid—a magazine that her brothers must have kept from her while she was recovering, bless their protective souls—more than he believed his own judgment or experience. He would never have believed that she’d kept a pregnancy from him to hurt him rather than help him.
But he’d done all of those things. He’d let his own distorted life-view get in the way, and now that the shock of it had worn off, Marissa felt idiotic for not seeing it coming sooner.
Oh, she’d known he was damaged, known he’d always had trouble trusting her. He’d always longed for a family while at the same time not truly believing in the concept. But she’d never truly accepted how deep his wounds went. And as a result, she’d let herself believe he could learn how to trust her—she had believed he already had.
But she’d been wrong. All along he’d been assuming she was someone totally different from who she actually was. He believed she was the kind of woman who could forget a man she loved in a month. Who would steal a man’s child from him. Who would marry a man while loving another—at that thought, she snorted.
“Is everything okay, Ms. Madden?” Jana asked.
“Yes, of course.” Marissa needed to keep her ruminating silent.
Marissa knew that, despite his idiocy, she would never forget Khalid, even over a lifetime. For despite his failings, despite his darkened opinion of her and everyone else who claimed to care about him, she loved him. She’d loved him before, of course, but what they’d had over the last few weeks was something so much more than that first blush of love they’d had back then. Now she was a grown woman, a woman who knew what it was like to lose something you wanted more than anything in the world and still go on. And he was a man who had the weight of a nation on his shoulders and yet could still take her by the hand and make her believe in second chances.
But third chances? No.
In the distance she saw the unmistakable sight of lit-up runways and pulsing strobes that told her she was about to be gone from his life forever. In a matter of minutes she’d be on a plane—his plane, sure, but without him on it—bound for Cairo, and in about 18 hours she’d be back home, in a taxi, headed for her family, with whom she could once again nurse her wounds and get on with her life. She’d done it once. She just hoped her heart could survive this second blow.
Jana pulled their car up to the front gate. “Sorry for the delay,” she said smoothly as she unbuckled her seat belt and slid out of the car. Marissa followed her rushed steps to the private entrance where, she assumed, Khalid’s jet awaited, all while trying to take in Rifaisa, a country she’d become so attached to, one last time. In a fog of sadness she passed through the glass doors, Jana speaking quickly in Arabic to everyone they met and then shuttling her to the jetway. It was not until Marissa climbed the stairs to the plane and began to take in the now familiar sight of the beautiful private jet that she realized why Jana had been hurrying her so.
For there, pacing like a pent-up panther, was Khalid, dressed in a dark robe and looking every bit the desert prince he’d become. Even now, after he’d broken her heart for the second time, the sight of him sent shivers racing across her skin. He was walking a hole in the aisle until he saw her, and then he moved quickly to where she stood and grabbed her by the shoulders, saying nothing at all, only locking eyes with her. For a moment she let herself look hard into those eyes, his dark irises like a well she could fall into and never find the bottom of. In his eyes she saw the passion they’d
shared, the nights he’d come to her, and then more. That day in the gulf at Dubai, how he’d hypnotized her with a touch, then taken her there, in the water, where she felt weightless and light. Her heart began to thump harder in her chest, and she was glad he wasn’t speaking because she wasn’t sure she’d have been able to hear him. For a moment she was back there letting the waves and his embrace rock her up and down.
Then she came to her senses, thought of everything he’d said to her just a few hours earlier, and stepped back, out of his reach, crossing her arms in front of her. “What are you doing here?” she asked coldly, surprised that she could fake that much disinterest.
“I came to apologize,” he said, his voice gruff, hardly what Marissa thought of as an apologetic tone. “I don’t want you to go.” He still held her shoulders, though his arms were stretched across the gulf of distance between their bodies.
She tried unsuccessfully to wriggle loose. “I don’t think there’s anything you can say that will make me stay,” she said, using first one hand, and then the other, to physically peel his fingers off of her and escape his touch. She turned away from him, as if she could make him vanish with her mind, but then her curiosity got the better of her and she turned back. “I want to go home, Khalid. Please, let me go.”
Khalid looked down, dropping his hands to his side. Then he dropped to one knee. “What if I asked you to marry me?”
Marissa froze. She had not expected him to say that. “What?” she choked out.
“Marry me, Marissa,” he said again, while she stared at him shocked. “Move here and become my wife.” Somehow it sounded more like a command than a proposal.
Her heartbeat moved into a new sprinting rhythm. “No,” she said as solidly as she could muster. “And let me tell you why. Firstly, I don’t appreciate being ordered around. And secondly, I don’t want to marry a man who doesn’t trust me.” She set her hands on her hips, wondering where she’d found the strength to do the right thing, and proud of herself at the same time.
