More confused than ever, she breathed, “I slept. Sort of. I—I missed you.”
“And I more than missed you, ya kanzi. But I have to be here the whole day. I have back-to-back practice sessions. If you’re up to it, Jameel will drive you over. You can watch me practice, or you can mingle with the ladies. You don’t have to stay long.”
“I want to watch you. I’ll stay as long as you do, and go home with you.”
“Then—come.”
The way he said that—her nipples stung, her core clenched.
And suddenly, she was angry. Enraged.
She felt like a mouse after a capricious feline had taken turns licking and petting it, then knocking it around. She felt battered and desperate.
And she’d had enough.
“On second thought, I won’t.”
There was a prolonged silence on his end after her sudden change of tone. She could feel tension mushrooming through the ether, sending its electrifying tentacles into her body.
But when he spoke again, his voice betrayed no surprise or irritation. “I thought so, ya ameerati.” His voice dipped into its darkest reaches, like it had only once before when he’d been driving inside her, scalding her with growls of praise and pleasure. “Do get all the rest you can. You’ll need it.”
Then he ended the call.
She felt she’d explode with frustration. She quaked with the force of it, with the urge to storm to the farm, grab and shake him, scream at him, demanding an explanation for his tormenting behavior.
Then the seizure passed. The calm of resolution slowly descended.
She’d take his advice. She’d get all the rest she could. She was going to need it. For the showdown she’d have with him.
She’d have this out with him, even if it was the last straw that would break their marriage. Their non-marriage.
Anything was better than this limbo.
She didn’t rest.
Adham must have known she wouldn’t. Couldn’t.
Not that he cared. He’d come home very late and disappeared somewhere. As usual.
At eight in the morning, she’d been sitting in the grand foyer for two hours, waiting for him to make an appearance. She would intercept him before he pulled another disappearing act.
Then she heard his steps. Her heart clanged in her chest as he approached. Then its beats scattered as they receded. He’d made a detour, entered his study.
She rose on quivering legs. Her breath jammed in her chest as she approached it. She felt as if she was nearing a landmine.
She grilled herself over her stupidity and weakness.
Just get it over with. Once and for all.
She ground her teeth as she turned the handle. Then with one last bolstering gulp of oxygen, she walked in.
She knew he felt her come in, but he didn’t raise his eyes from the dossier he had open before him on his hand-carved, polished mahogany desk.
Well, she was damned if she’d let him ignore her again and continue playing this sadistic game with her.
This ended now.
“Adham.”
It took him several nerve-fraying seconds to raise his eyes at her curtness, his face a study in blankness.
There he was again. The remote stranger he reverted to when they were alone. She suddenly realized they had only been alone for minutes since their wedding. Someone else had almost always been around.
So what was it with the Jekyll-and-Hyde reaction to privacy? Had it been triggered by their wedding ceremony? He sure hadn’t suffered from this affliction before it.
“I’m busy, Sabrina.” His voice was as expressionless as his face. “This can wait.”
Her outrage crested. “No, this can’t wait. You’re not putting me off again.”
He put down his pen, adjusting his pose to that of some one bent on suffering a pest’s interruption with utmost forbearance. “When have I put you off in the first place?”
“Oh, boy.” She huffed a chuckle fueled by all her fury and frustration. “You are a piece of work.”
“I fail to grasp your meaning. It must be a breakdown in communication, originating from our different grasps on the nuances of language.”
“Don’t play the ‘cultural difference’ card. You were educated in the West, and you’ve lived here for big chunks of time since childhood. The only one who has a problem understanding anything is me. But now you’re going to explain. Start by enlightening me about your view of marriage, since it seems it doesn’t coincide with mine.”
The stillness in his body seemed to deepen. “And what is your view of marriage?”
“That of almost everyone on the planet, in any culture. A man and a woman who actually live together.”
“I live with you.”
“You mean you grace whichever residence you happen to install me in with your fleeting presence.”
He gave a slight shrug of one formidable shoulder. “To the world, I do live with you. I come home to you every night.”
“What does the world matter here? I know you don’t. And I demand to know what you’re playing at.”
His body seemed to harden to rock, his face becoming almost inanimate. “I don’t appreciate your tone.”
A frisson of danger arced through her but she ignored it. He could think again if he thought she would be daunted by his dismissal or displeasure. “Well, tough. This is the only tone you’re getting since you refuse to acknowledge my questions. I won’t be brushed aside again until you suddenly remember I’m supposed to be your wife. Only in public, of course.”
His gaze became arctic. Then his baritone drenched her with its pitiless coldness. “If you’re worried this indicates I’m thinking of reneging on our deal, put your mind to rest.”
She dazedly stared at him. “Our deal?”
“Is still in effect. You have no reason to fear I won’t keep my end of the bargain. My father’s edict remains unchanged, and I still need an heir. You know that I already settled your father’s debts, securing the Grant name. And I will, in due course, secure your future.” His gaze panned downward, obscuring his expression, before he looked back up, impaling her on icicles. “But I now realize the source of your anxiety. It seems your father, either due to his rapid deterioration, or because he thought that you knew enough, didn’t inform you of the specifics of the deal he negotiated on your behalf.”
His father’s edict. An heir. Her father’s debts. The Grant name. Her future. It all made no sense.
She heard her own hoarse rasp. “What specifics?”
He rose from his seat. The room felt as if it were shrink ing, as if its walls were closing in on her. “As per the contracts I signed, I’ll run the winery and vineyards until you conceive, then I’ll give you back their rights. When you carry my child to term, I’ll give you the capital and the experts you need to run them. I’ll keep the two hundred acres your father never got around to planting. But since my father’s terms specified that my wife must be pregnant a year after the wedding, and since I’ve already consummated our relationship, I can afford to wait to see if you are already pregnant. In a couple of weeks, if you aren’t, I’ll take you to bed again.” He moved from behind his desk, seeming to vacuum the last wisps of air from her lungs. “Now, if that is all, I have important things to attend to.”
She stood rooted inside the doorway as he advanced on her. She felt as if she was staring at an incoming train.
He brushed against her as he left, leaving her buried under the debris of every belief she’d held dear. About him and her father. About herself.
It had all been a deal.
“I want to know everything, Mr. Saunders.”
“I thought you were aware of the basics, Ms. Gra…” Ethan Saunders, her father’s attorney, halted on the other end of the line. “Excuse me. Princess Aal Ferjani.”
Princess Aal Ferjani. She’d never felt this name applied to her. She’d thought it was because of the state of her marriage. Now she knew it was because
it didn’t apply. And it never would. “Sabrina will do, Mr. Saunders,” she said tightly. “And I want to know more than the basics. I want every detail. There are no legal provisos that stop you from filling me in, are there?”
“When you put it that way, no,” the man said cautiously. “I just got the impression that your father didn’t want to bother you with particulars. I assumed that was why you weren’t present during negotiations or contract signing.”
Wading deeper into the nightmare, needing to hit rock bottom and be done with it, she prodded, “I do need to be bothered with the particulars, Mr. Saunders. My future depends on it.”
There was a protracted silence on the other end. Then he exhaled. “Very well, Sabrina. While you were involved in your graduate studies, your father’s health deteriorated, plunging him into a deep depression. He made catastrophic financial decisions—against my advisement, I must add. They ruined him. It was then that Sheikh Adham moved in. He’d been circling your father’s land, and had tried to purchase it more than once. He knew he could finally acquire the land he’d long coveted with your father no longer in a position to refuse the sale. He had clear plans to close down the winery and plant other crops, while using the rest of the unplanted land as a horse farm.
“But your father was not without his own strategy. He investigated Sheikh Adham in turn, learning of his need to produce an heir within a certain time frame.”
Her heart detonated at the confirmation of her worst fears. “And he offered me to him.”
“You did fulfill all of Sheikh Adham’s requirements, and your father was still an astute enough businessman to know that. You are of impeccable lineage, physical qualities and…reputation.”
Sabrina felt another red-hot lance skewering through her.
So that was why Adham had pretended to want her. He’d been out to assure her purity when he’d taken her for a test drive before deciding to marry her. A test drive he’d hoped would bear his required fruit, that he’d been loath to perform, judging by his aversion to repeating it, except when necessity dictated.
He’d been another of her father’s arranged grooms all along.
But he’d gone far beyond any of them ever had. He’d seduced her to make sure she’d consent to the marriage. The mutually beneficial deal. For her father and for him.
And instead of being an heiress, she was actually indebted to him and would regain her legacy only when she provided him with a child. A child he wanted in order to fulfill his father’s demands.
He’d never wanted to marry her, and felt nothing sincere for her. She was nothing to him.
No. She was worse than nothing. She was an annoyance, a burden. One he probably would get rid of the moment he could.
Mr. Saunders was going on about fine print. She’d heard all she’d wanted to hear, all she couldn’t bear hearing. She didn’t notice when the call ended. She might have hung up on the man.
It was worse than she’d feared. She’d been the only one under the misconception that this was a real marriage. Everyone else knew what it was—another of Adham’s breeding ventures.
She’d been offered and accepted as a desirable mare.
But worse, Adham had believed all along that she was in on the deal.
Rage rose inside her again. She wiped fiercely at the tears.
It didn’t matter what he’d believed. Only one thing mattered. He had to know she wanted no part of his plan, had agreed to none of it. She’d take nothing from him. She’d do anything, give up everything, to prove it.
And if fate should have it that she gave him his coveted heir, it would be on her terms, not his. She’d make sure her child didn’t grow up a pawn in a royal chess game like her—or a heartless, cold-blooded manipulator like him.
Five
Adham swung the mallet with such force he catapulted the ball off the field, sending mud and grass exploding in the air.
How dare she.
Acting the neglected wife. Taking him to task about not fulfilling his marital duties. As if she’d ever wanted more from him than his wealth and status.
But he knew otherwise.
It had all been a tightly woven plot between her and her father. It was why he couldn’t bring himself to touch her again, even though the lust he’d felt from the moment he’d laid eyes on her was intensifying, was corroding his restraint. And damn her, every time he saw her, the wholesomeness of her beauty, which needed no enhancements, overrode his senses. He didn’t even have to see her. He only had to close his eyes to see her stunning honey-tan skin, to feel it beneath his hands, his lips, to imagine the waterfall of glossy mahogany hair sifting between his itching fingers, to remember her mesmerizing chocolate eyes gleaming with passion and her flushed lips trembling with pleasure. He woke up in a cold sweat every night, aching, remembering how her voluptuous body had exuded sensuality out of every pore, a sensuality he’d once thought unconscious. How she had wrapped around him, writhed beneath him. It was almost impossible not to storm her bedroom every night and lose himself inside her again.
Just before he’d met her, he’d been about to tell his father that he’d never take a wife by command like that. Then she’d walked into her father’s hospital room and into his life, and suddenly the idea of marriage was no longer abhorrent to him, becoming all he could think of. The more he’d seen of her, the more he’d become convinced the fates had conspired to bring him his bride, the one woman he could contemplate having children with.
Then he’d taken her. And if he’d had any uncertainties or hesitations about her, her honest and limitless passion, the unprecedented intimacy he’d experienced with her, the unimaginable pleasure, what she’d so explicitly shown and told him had been reciprocated in full, had solidified his resolve, sealed his fate.
The next day, while Sabrina slept in his bed, he’d gone to Thomas Grant, to ask him for her hand in marriage. But the man had spoken first. And Adham had realized.
Grant had targeted him as the best groom for his daughter and the surest way out of his debts. And he’d set Sabrina on him. All her artlessness, her eagerness for his company, her hunger for him had been an undetectable act. And it had worked. Spectacularly.
But Grant had grown desperate in his illness. He’d thought he could no longer afford to let things develop at their own pace, to maintain the illusion of spontaneity. So he’d exposed their plan, laying it out in distasteful terms of give and take.
The wretched man must have been in worse shape than anyone had realized, or else he’d seriously underestimated his daughter’s seductive powers. He’d asked for far less than what Adham had been resolved to offer when he’d thought he was pursuing a marriage built on mutual desire.
Adham had been so enraged, his first reaction was to snatch everything from father and daughter, leaving them with neither land nor deal. But pity for Grant’s desperation had won. Not to mention lust for Sabrina. Even though he’d hated himself for it, he could think of nothing but repeating that night of delirium—and that even more addicting morning after.
Then Grant had died, and Sabrina had been broken up over his death. And although he’d discovered her deception and manipulation, he had recognized her anguish as real. He couldn’t have assuaged his lust for her, no matter how it had gnawed at him. Not even when she’d let him know he could. Especially when she had. He’d been disgusted—with her, with himself—and conflicted about her bereavement, enraged at his decisions, his desires. He’d thought it safest to stay away from her until he regained his sanity and decided how to deal with it all.
But the more he let time pass, the more he realized it had been a grave mistake to marry her. He desired her for real, while she desired him only as a sponsor to maintain her family name and boost her lifestyle. He’d never paid for his pleasures and he’d be damned if he’d start with her. Not even if she was the one woman he craved. Especially since she was.
But he couldn’t even let her go, washing his hands of this sordid mess. He’d trappe
d himself forever.
Men in his family married for life, if at all possible. Even if separation occurred, it remained private, with a solid family front presented, for the sake of all but the couple. Considerations far bigger ruled. The royal family’s traditions, Khumayrah’s veneration of marriage, the Aal Ferjanis’ allies and rivals. A man who wasn’t bound to the wife he’d chosen and the family he’d made with her couldn’t be trusted.
Which brought him to that heir his father had revealed was necessary to help stabilize the currently volatile internal affairs in their kingdom.
For that alone, he couldn’t let anyone suspect that his marriage was a mere business deal. It would be the perfect way for his enemies to slander him.
They had done it to his father, spreading rumors that Adham and his younger sister weren’t his, that his bargained wife had cheated. The repercussions had been far-reaching, and it had taken half of Adham’s life to disprove the lies and wipe clean their stain.
This alone should have stopped him from following in his father’s footsteps. His parents’ marriage had developed into a love match, but this wasn’t his own situation, and he should have factored in that if the conditions of his marriage were exposed, it would affect the royal house and the kingdom’s stability.
So here he was. Trapped into playing the doting, replete groom. And to his fury, his desire for her, having his eyes and hands all over her in public, hadn’t been an act. The act had been the distance he’d forced on them in private, the disinterest and detachment he’d pretended when she’d confronted him.
B’Ellahi, that confrontation. He’d used up his last drop of will holding himself back from pouncing on her, dragging her to the ground and giving her what she’d been indignantly pretending to demand. His mind roiled still with conjectures over why she had.
He again slammed into the same conclusion. That she’d become worried. She hadn’t seen the contracts, and had probably been trying to find out if their terms were worth the act she’d been putting on. After all, she’d made a tremendous effort so far, and hadn’t missed a beat since they’d met.
In Too Deep Page 11