Darker Side of Desire & the Sheikh's Pregnant Prisoner(38)
Huma had left a week after he had. With a hug and something muttered in Arabic that Lauren couldn’t understand to her question about Zafir.
“Did she tell you that I had been worried?”
“Yes.”
She bolted from the chaise, fury finally, mercifully coming to her rescue. All this could have been avoided. It could have all ended in New York just as he’d intended.
She turned back to him, one last question gnawing at her gut.
Leave it alone, Lauren, a part of her whispered, the part that preferred to cling to delusion.
No.
Knowing the bitter, eviscerating truth was better than driving herself crazy for years to come with speculation. She’d learned early on, with her parents’ indifference, that hope was toxic, gnawing away at one’s self.
“Were you ever going to call, Zafir?”
Silence stretched between them, its cruel fingers shredding her patched up nerves.
“Leave,” she whispered.
He turned her around, his fingers gripping her tight. “It was a decision I made. But I did…regret the necessity of making it. It doesn’t mean I didn’t think about you in these last few weeks.” Arrogant features softened. “Stay in Behraat for a while, as my guest.”
She stared at him, her mouth hanging open for several seconds. They were mere words but she could already feel herself softening, traitorous desire whispering sweet temptations in her ears.
It seemed nothing had changed in how she reacted to his magnetic presence. After everything she had gone through in the past few weeks, she was ashamed to feel the thrum of excitement his words incited.
“No,” she forced the word out.
He trapped her again. Rock-hard thighs pressed into hers. Molten gaze hovered over her mouth and a low hum began to vibrate over her skin. “Why not?”
She licked her lips and straightened, fisting her hands. It was either that or touch him. God, how she wanted to run her fingers over his sensual mouth, lean into him and relish the heat of his body.
His hands crept into her hair and tugged her closer, his long fingers encircling her nape. Awareness shot through her like a surge of current. “You’re a workaholic and haven’t taken a vacation in forever. Besides, I’ve missed our Friday, what did you call them, movie and…make out sessions.”
“You’re serious?” she said.
He didn’t answer her question, only pulled her closer. It went straight to her head, making her light-headed with longing, shooting need to the apex of her thighs, drenching her in liquid heat.
How she wanted to close her eyes and let him take her to ecstasy once again. How she wanted to delude herself that physical pleasure was intimacy…that lust was caring…that she mattered and not just as a willing woman.
Fears and insecurities she had repressed for so long festered in that void. And she detested herself for feeling so much. “I can’t. In fact, if I never lay eyes on you again after tonight, it’ll be too soon for me.”
A vein fluttered at his temple, his grip tight in her hair. Her pulse hammered, her insides feeling as though she had taken a vertical leap.
“You’re a liar.” His mouth hovered mere inches from her, his breath brushed her skin in a featherlight touch, teasing. “Do you have any idea how I long to possess you again? How much I need you, Lauren?” His gaze came alive, his words low and husky. “And if I kiss your luscious mouth, can you honestly say you’ll stop me? Can you deny us both the pleasure we want so much?”
Lauren shook her head, knowing everything she felt was reflected in her eyes. A grim satisfaction shadowed over his face, its razor edge mocking her feeble defenses.
“No. I’ll admit that I’ll enjoy the sex as much as you do. I’ll go as far as to say you’re the best lay I’ve ever had,” she said, hungry to see his smooth charade fracture.
Thunder danced in his gaze, his razor-sharp cheekbones streaked with color. Even as he knew that she had had one lover before him, a boyfriend in college who had been more into his military career than into her.
“The best lay you’ve ever had?” he inquired silkily, the force of his anger all the more fierce for the leash with which he reined it.
“Yes,” she said, tilting her chin up with a recklessness she was far from feeling. “You’re extremely skilled and generous when it comes to sex.”
Reducing their affair to the crudest terms was the only thing that would save her. From him and herself.
“But I have to resist the attraction, the lure of self-delusion this time. Your power and the ruthlessness with which you wield it, the reckless indifference it affords you of other’s feelings, especially someone like me who’s all too willing to fall into your bed…
“How long before you decide that you’ve had enough of me, before you decide I don’t belong in your world? How long before, once again, you walk out of my bed in the middle of the night and have one of your guards throw me out without so much as a goodbye?”
An immense stillness came over him. Her breath hitching in her throat, Lauren waited. For something—for refusal, for anger, anything that refuted her accusation.
But nothing came.
His silence plunged her deep into a vortex of painful memories.
Discarded in the name of ambition and lofty goals, picked back up with no thought to her feelings, and discarded again. She couldn’t count the number of times her parents had hurt her.
The insecurity, the fear that she didn’t somehow measure up, her resolution to make no demands—a vicious circle of pain that stole every ounce of joy from her. That’s what she would bring upon herself if she succumbed.
Stepping back from him when every inch of her thrummed to be with him, it was the hardest thing she had ever done.
Her heart stuttered anew at the dark beauty of the man.
God, he was the father of her child, the first man who had made her feel so much…the first man for whom she had forgotten herself. And she…she had to walk away.
“If you truly respect me, leave now, Zafir. Let me leave Behraat.”
Even now, a fragment of hope flickered inside her, waiting for him to persuade her otherwise.
He stepped back, slowly, irrevocably and Lauren’s knees gave out under her.
“As you wish, Lauren.” That dark gaze swept over her face with a thoroughly hungry appraisal before he turned and marched out of the suite.
Without looking back once.
Lauren sank against the bed, struggling to pull air into her lungs, squeezing her eyes to keep the wet heat at bay.
She would never amount to more than a willing woman to Zafir. And maybe she had been okay with that status quo in New York, but not anymore.
Not when it was her child’s well-being in question.
A playful giggle echoed somewhere and she turned toward the balcony looking out onto the vast courtyard below. A boy, somewhere between five and nine—she couldn’t tell any closer than that—ran on the cobbled stones, his dark hair shining under the light of bronze torches, a mischievous smile on his face, chased by a man around the fountain.
The man let him run around two more circles before he caught up with him and slung him on his shoulder.
She felt as if a fist was squeezing her heart as she realized the magnitude of her decision.
Zafir was the ruler of a nation, a man who had a long list of priorities in which she didn’t feature, a man who could set aside everything else quite ruthlessly when it came to Behraat. And she and her child would only be complications in that path.
After what she had suffered at her parents’ hands, she would never put her child through it.
* * *
It had been the longest week of Lauren’s life. She felt as though she was sitting on shifting sands with no tether.
More than once, she had picked up the phone, eager to blurt out the news to Zafir. She just wasn’t programmed to lie or hide the truth as she was doing.
Zafir refused to let her go back to the hotel, so she spent her days locked up in the palace. Scared of weakening, she cut herself off from everything. And when life intruded, it only brought a truth that crystallized her decision.
Having learned that Lauren was the sheikh’s scandalous female guest, Huma had come calling. Hugged Lauren and chattered on and on about how decent life was in Behraat now, about how she had enrolled herself in a women’s college to study nursing.
“Just like you,” Huma had whispered with a proud smile.
And in the same innocent way she did everything else, she informed Lauren of the rumors about the sheikh’s upcoming wedding and the celebrations that would ensue.
Nausea filled her throat as Huma continued merrily.
Childhood friends, reunited after several years, daughter of a High Council member, born to be a sheikha and so on…
The excruciating doubts she had had about hiding the pregnancy from him, the conflict that had eroded her from within, everything evaporated at the bitter news.
Not even a little regret pricked her as she packed that night.
Her child would be secondary to neither duty nor a new bride in his father’s life. She would make sure of that.
CHAPTER FIVE
LAUREN STARED AROUND the terminal, the beautiful architecture of the private airport building filling her with awe. The same soaring circular ceilings, grand archways and a colorfully hued marble stretched as far as she could see, a far cry from the commercial airport she and David had flown into.