He was tormented by what should have been – and what was.
Malik worked late into the night, every night for seven nights after the discovery of her condition. He worked late, even when it wasn’t necessary. And when he didn’t work, he sat in his office, acknowledging he was hiding from this, from her.
After two weeks, despite the lateness of his arrival in his suite of rooms, Sophia was awake.
His first thought, when he entered the apartment and saw her pacing from one side to the other, her skin so pale, her expression serious, was that something was wrong.
“What is it?” Urgency propelled him across the room, his dark eyes rushing over her. “Are you okay?”
“No.” A simple response. “I’m not fine. Malik, what’s going on?”
Caution overtook concern. “What do you mean?”
“I’ve barely seen you in a fortnight, ever since the doctor came and confirmed the pregnancy.” She frowned, and she looked so vulnerable in that moment, so frail and small, his chest thumped. How in the world could she carry his child?
He remembered how she’d been in that moment, her expression showing him everything she’d felt. Her happiness. Her relief. Her gladness. It had been like a sledgehammer in his gut. Where he felt only disappointment that it was the ending of their togetherness, her relief had been palpable.
“I thought you wanted this,” she said, quietly.
“I do.”
She shook her head. “But you don’t. You’re… annoyed. Angry? I can’t work it out. I thought the whole point of this marriage was to get you an heir…”
“It was.” His eyes narrowed, as the simplicity of this situation revealed itself to him. “And now we’ve done that. You’re pregnant.”
Comprehension dawned. He saw the way her brow furrowed and then shifted, her eyes jerking to his and then away. She spun from him, moving towards the balcony, but not stepping out onto it. “So that’s it,” she said thickly. “I’m pregnant and you don’t want to be with me anymore?”
He expelled a sigh of frustration. “You just said it yourself, having a child is the sole purpose of this union.”
She nodded, but it was just a jerk of her head. “So you don’t want me at all, on any level?” She prompted, turning to face him, lifting a hand to his chest. Of course, she must feel the racing of his heart; that must answer her questions.
His eyes hooked to hers. “I want you to be happy,” he said, finally, after a long pause.
“But our marriage really is just a sham, right? You’ve got me pregnant and now you’re done with me? So what, Malik, do you go back to having sex with other women? Sleeping your way around Europe, and I turn a blind eye?”
His gut rolled at the idea.
“Until a year or two passes and we need to have another child? Is that the marriage you envisage for us?”
He shook his head, reaching out and gripping her shoulders, pulling her body closer to his, so close that he wondered at his restraint in not kissing her.
“I promise you here and now, Sharafaha, I will not sleep with another woman so long as we are married.”
She stared up at him, her eyes huge in her delicate face. “So you’re going to abstain from sex altogether?” Her eyes lowered. “I thought…”
“What did you think?” A gravelled request.
“I thought you really wanted me.” She swallowed, her throat moving visibly with the movement. “I thought you wanted me as much as I want you.”
He dropped his hands to his side, seared by her words. “You were not wrong.”
Emboldened, she closed the small gap between them, lifting her hands to his chest. “Then why are you freezing me out like this, Malik?”
He looked away from her, his chest contorting with the force of his feelings. “What choice do I have?”
She pulled a face. “What’s that supposed to mean? I’m your wife…”
“Yes, you’re my wife,” he spat, moving away from her, stalking across the room and pouring himself a measure of whisky. “You’re the wife I stole from my dead brother. The woman who should have been his, who should, right now, be growing his baby in her belly. You’re the woman I’ve spent more than a decade ignoring.” He threw the drink back angrily, his expression tense.
“What do you want from me, Sharafaha? Do you want me to pretend any of this is real? Do you want me to act like I don’t know how little this was either of our first choice? You should be married to him! If he hadn’t died, you’d be his wife now, my sister-in-law. Instead, this is our life, you’re my wife and I’m your husband, and we’re having a child together, but I’m not going to pretend…”
“I’m not asking you to pretend,” she cut into his monologue, her expression pinched, her eyes showing her hurt. “I’m asking you to accept that there’s something real between us.”
His eyes latched to hers and the world opened up, swallowing him into the depths of its fiery belly.
“Something real?” He repeated, his voice deep, the words thick.
“Yes, damn it!” She glared at him, closing the distance. “You’re not Addan, and this isn’t the marriage I had planned for. But that doesn’t mean what we have isn’t good, and isn’t… enough, on its own.”
“Don’t.” He cut her off, the word like ice. “Don’t do this.”
“Do what?” She demanded. “I’ve lost too much in my life not to fight for what matters, Malik.”
“To fight for what?” His eyes narrowed, his expression like steel. “Were it not for his death, you would be my brother’s wife. Every time I have touched you, every time I have wanted you, do you not think I knew how wrong it was? Do you not think I felt that betrayal? He has been deprived of so much. He should be King, not me! He should be right here, watching this new life grow inside of you, feeling elated at the prospect of becoming a father. He should be here!”
“Yes,” she whispered, curving her hands over her stomach, her eyes clouding with grief. “I know that.”
“And if he were,” Malik continued, “You would be happily, blissfully married to him. You would be happy.”
“I am happy. I think we could be happy together.”
“I saw you with him,” Malik snapped. “I know what it looks like when you are happy, and it is not this. You desire me. Our bodies are like fire together. That is all. And it is not enough to make a marriage – not the kind of marriage you want.”
“Because you’re fighting me all the time,” she stamped her foot onto the tiled floor. “You and I are great together, but every time we get close, you shut me out again. You refuse to let me in. What are you so afraid of? Don’t you think you deserve to be happy?”
He swore under his breath and pulled her into his arms, bringing her against his body. “I can’t be happy with you, Sharafaha. Circumstances make it impossible. The more I want you, the more guilt I feel. You are in my blood and my mind and yet I can’t see you without seeing you with him – without seeing the pair of you. And I resent him, Sophia, my own brother, because if he were here – alive and breathing right now – you would have chosen him. You did choose him.”
“He was chosen for me,” she said softly, his words making her spirit stumble a little.
“That’s irrelevant. Given the choice between him and me, you would have always chosen him, wouldn’t you?”
She was so quiet, so still, as if frozen in time, torn between love, loyalty and this life she found herself in.
“Don’t answer,” he growled, giving her a reprieve. “We both know the answer. Addan is the man you want, the man you love, the man you wish you could be with even now. I commend you for how hard you’re trying with me, but there’s no point carrying on with this charade. We married for this purpose and having achieved it, we can dispense with the pretence and go back to our own lives.”
“I loved Addan,” she whispered, turning away from him, swallowing once more, moving towards the edge of the bed and sitting down on it. “I adored him.” Salty tears threatened to
fill her eyes. She blinked, focussing on her brightly coloured toe nails. “There isn’t a day that goes by when I don’t think of him, when I don’t miss him. When I don’t re-read the hundreds of letters he sent me, laugh at them and cry, wishing he were here.”
Malik’s gut twisted, her words only serving to confirm what he already knew, but oh, how they hurt. “And I am sorry for you, that he died and you were forced into this marriage, with me.”
“Stop it,” she muttered. “Stop.”
“What? Being honest? Do you not think it is time for us to have this conversation?”
“Do you think anyone could force me into marriage?” She glared at him. “Do you think I would have done this if I didn’t know it to be right?”
“Right for who, Sophia?”
She shook her head. “For you, for me, for this country…”
“No.” The word was crushing. “Nothing about this is right, and it never has been. It’s madness. I should have forced parliament to revoke your marriage contract, to free you from this obligation.”
“But you didn’t,” her eyes were filled with an emotion he interpreted as hope and it crushed him to see it there. How could she have hope after all they’d been through?
“No.” He crossed his arms over his broad chest. “Damn it, I believed we could do this and that it wouldn’t matter that he had loved you with all his heart. I believed I would forget that you and my brother were a pair for as long as you knew one another.”
“Yes.” Her eyes swept shut for a moment as she appeared to work to steady her breath. “We were. And let me say this: I loved Addan. He was everything to me.” She fixed him with a cool stare, but it was a counterfeit. He could see the fine tremble of her limbs, the pout of her lips, the flush of pink on her skin. “I hardly knew you – you went out of your way to avoid me and I have always been glad, because there was something about you that knocked me completely off-kilter whenever you were nearby. I thought it was dislike but now that I’ve been with you, I see it so much more clearly. Addan was my best friend, but I have wanted you almost as long as I’ve known you, Malik. As a girl, how could I understand what this meant? When you came to Addan’s birthday with that beautiful supermodel, I thought I was annoyed at you. I thought I didn’t like you. But I wanted to claw her eyes out. I looked at the way you were holding her, at the way she touched you, and I ached to feel that, to be in your arms.”
She lifted her eyes to his, and he stood completely still, refusing to believe her, refusing to let her words answer the needs buried deep within him. “This is real, between us.”
He couldn’t let her words soothe him: he couldn’t allow that to be their truth. “Yet if he’d lived, you would never have acted on that. How can I relish my wife’s desire for me, knowing it is because of my brother’s death?”
“I don’t know,” she whispered honestly, because that same question was in her own mind. “Except, you have to try. We both loved Addan; neither of us will ever forget him. But he’s dead, and he wouldn’t want you to live in some kind of self-punishing purgatory for the rest of your life. We’re married now - it’s you and me - and we’re going to be parents.”
Those words pulled at him, offering pleasure and pride when he wanted to feel only duty.
“I want you, Malik. I want you in this bed, making love to me; it’s the only thing here that makes sense. I want you to stop fighting me all the time and start fighting for the life we could share.”
Her words battered his insides. He heard them and tried to listen to them, but always, he saw Addan, he saw his brother’s mangled body contrasted to his happy face when he’d spoken of Sophia, and he knew she would always belong to Addan. That she should always belong to Addan. Even when they felt like they were moving forward, it wasn’t fair and it wasn’t right.
“No.” He pulled himself up to his full height. “You were Addan’s fiancé. You have always been his, Sharafaha, from the first moment you arrived in this country and you stared at him as though he was a piece of you that had been missing all your life. You have always been his and you always will be.”
She let out a small sob, but he didn’t look at her.
“Why can’t I be yours as well?” The question was so soft, he didn’t hear it at first. And then, it slammed through him with the force of a thousand dam walls bursting, drenching him with the tsunami of her expectations, of the life she was suggesting for them.
“Because I don’t want that.” The words ripped him to pieces, and he saw for himself the effect they had on Sophia. He told himself he was glad – if he had to be brutal to get her to understand how he felt then so be it, but watching her crumple like this, watching her strength be battered from the inside out, made his gut clench painfully.
Only, he had to make her understand. Wanting her, choosing to make this marriage real, would mean being glad Addan was dead, and he could never let himself feel that.
He spun away from her, ignoring her pain, shutting her out, just like she’d accused him of.
“If you’d prefer to move back to your suite of rooms, I’ll understand.” The words were cold, as though he didn’t particularly care either way. Then, he swept out of his apartment with no idea of where the hell he was going to go – certain only that he had to get the hell away from all of this as soon as he could.
Only Sophia had always been a fighter, and she followed him. Not immediately. It took her a minute or two to pull herself together, to stop tears from falling down her cheeks, but then, she wrapped a robe around herself quickly and moved out of his suite.
She couldn’t have said what drove her, and why. She moved through the palace on instinct, through the ancient corridors, down the wide marble staircase, and out into the garden that ran towards the desert. She breathed in the acrid sand-filled air, and stared up at the stars, and then she heard it.
A horse.
She turned in time to catch a glimpse of her husband – unmistakably him – mounted on the back of the incredible beast, riding hard and fast.
Without thinking, without preparing, she called out, as loud as she could, “Malik!”
At first, there was nothing, then the horse slowed, the silhouette of darkness she could see, anyway, and began to move towards the palace once more. It took the scrambling steps out of the desert as though they were nothing until Malik was above her, his eyes staring down at her, his expression grim, even in this fine sliver of moonlight.
“Don’t run away,” she said simply. “Don’t tell me to move out of your rooms. Don’t just shut me out.”
He lifted his head, looking towards the horizon. “I had no idea what marriage to you would be like,” he said, finally. “I considered it my duty to marry you, and to take you to bed.”
Heat stirred inside of her.
“I thought I would take little pleasure in it. I presumed it would be perfunctory and dull. I imagined our marriage would be a minor inconvenience I would generally ignore. I had no idea,” he stared at her, “that you would find a way into my blood. That I would want you to beg for me in my bed over and over as a way of knowing it was me you wanted. I had no idea how much I would want to triumph over my brother in this regard, nor how that petty need would tear me up.”
She swallowed, lifting a hand to the horse’s neck, but the horse made a cranky noise and stepped backwards. Apparently the beautiful beast had picked up the emotional discord between Sophia and his master.
“I need to go.”
“Like when you were a teenager and you would run to the desert?” She snapped. “You’re a grown man, and a Sheikh. You cannot run from your responsibilities –,”
He held up a hand to silence her. “My responsibilities go with me, wherever I travel.” He kicked the horse’s sides and the animal backed up further.
“Stay here,” she said angrily. “Stay here and fight for this, Malik. We can make this work.”
His eyes glittered like dark gems in the night sky. “No, sharafaha. We can’t.”
She held her arms to the side with an air of patience that hid the state of suspension her heart had been dropped into. She kept a polite smile on her face when her insides were twisting and tormented by grief and absence.
In the month since they’d argued in the gardens, that moonlit night, she’d seen her husband three times, all at official events.
At first, when he’d left, she’d been furious with him. She’d told herself he’d regret it, that the shock of the pregnancy and the future before them had made him act without thought.
She’d done exactly as he’d said, returning to her own rooms, but she’d been angry. So angry.
And then, after four nights, she’d been lonely, and worried. After six nights, her worry had increased, because she still hadn’t seen Malik. After ten days, she sucked up her pride and asked Awan where her husband was.
Awan had been surprised. The Sheikh was where he always was – in the palace.
Further digging revealed he’d only stayed away one night, before returning.
He wasn’t sleeping in his room.
The first function she’d seen him at, he’d treated her like a stranger. Cordial, polite, touching her minimally, making only the most surface-level enquiries.
She’d been so furious, she’d planned to speak to him afterwards, but he’d had to take the helicopter straight over to another city, for a different function.
It had been the same at their next two engagements.
He looked at her and looked right through her.
“Just a small addition here,” the woman said, running her finger down the side of the dress’s panel. “And no one will notice a thing.”
Sophia nodded, running a hand over her stomach. It was more rounded than she’d expected, so early on. Her sister Arabella had hardly showed in the first few months, but Sophia was already visibly pregnant – to anyone who looked closely – and it was still too early to want to make that announcement.
No doubt the gossip tabloids would speculate regardless – they always were – but Sophia wanted to wait to make a proper announcement.
Sheikhs: Rich, powerful desert kings and the women who bring them to their knees... Page 115