“Lauren? Are you sick?”
“No. I’m fine. The baby’s fine.” He heard her hesitate, the rustle of clothes, and then she cleared her throat. “I was sleeping.”
“But you never miss your yoga class. Did something upset you?”
He felt her amazement, and his own, stretch tautly in the silence, an incandescent flicker in the darkness that he could sense was coming at him. Among all the million things that ran through his brain on a given day, he’d remembered that and hadn’t even known it.
“Lauren?” he prompted again, and this time, he knew what it was that pulsed through him.
Desperation. Panic. As though he was sinking in the middle of the vast, stark Behraati desert, swallowed up by its great jaws like every other ruler had before him. As though after all his struggle, after everything he’d learned from Rashid and everything he’d been forced to learn since being thrust into power, he was somehow still empty-handed.
“It’s early morning here, Zafir.” Clear, cutting, she was in control of herself again. “In New York.”
His breath punched out of him and his hand fisted by his side. A great, big roar began in his chest, crashing everything inside him into pieces, thundering its way out. But he swallowed it away. Like he had always done any emotion, any impulse, anything that would be detrimental to his dream, his rule of Behraat.
“And why, exactly, are you in New York?” He sounded edgy, rough and he didn’t care.
“I left. You and your beloved Behraat.”
He exhaled, his breath stuck in his throat like cut glass, every inch of him shaking, as if he stood cold and naked. As if every ounce of warmth had leeched out of his world, never to return.
“Why?” he still asked. As if it could be some small, mundane reason that had prompted her to flee when his back was turned. As if he had been finally rendered into this weak, pathetic shell of a man who hoped for impossible things.
Everything inside of him clenched tight, waiting for her answer.
“You don’t know, Zafir?”
Now, she sounded like the Lauren he knew. Like the Lauren that had brought such joy and light into his life, the Lauren that had made him think of himself for the first time.
Like the Lauren that somehow kept wrenching parts of him away.
“God, you looked into my eyes, you held me in your arms and you told me this was for our child. While all along…it was to cement your rule of Behraat.” She sounded so angry and yet her voice shuddered. “You…lied about everything.”
“No. What I did was try to do right by everyone. Just like you said. When the opportunity came, I grabbed it with both hands. It was unbearable for me to know my child would not know his or her place, just like me. Untenable for me to walk away from Behraat. Unbearable for me to…
“And then you…you made it all possible. For once in my life, I had a chance to have everything I had ever wanted. And I took it.”
“You’ll always put Behraat first.”
Pushing a hand through his hair, Zafir tried to breathe through the knot in his throat. And for the first time in his cursed life, he asked something for himself.
“Don’t ask me to be someone else, Lauren. Don’t walk away when we have something so good. Do not call it love and then wreck what we have with its weakness and its exalted expectations of sacrifices and grand gestures.
“Don’t ruin it all because it doesn’t fit your vague notion of what love should be.”
* * *
Lauren felt the dark anger in his words like a whip against her skin. “I threw myself into this marriage with everything I had and more. I…” Tears threatened to steal away her words, her very will. “I even told myself that your feelings for me didn’t matter. Not when you…”
“Then come back.”
“But I’ll always wonder what could take you away from me. When Behraat will make you choose over me and our child.
“What new political alliance and promise of power would be the thing that makes you decide it’s worth more than us? It’ll kill me, Zafir.”
“Then you do not know me at all, much less love me. And the kind of reassurance you ask for, it’s not in me to give.” He sounded like the crack of thunder, angry and cruel and final, and it seemed to suck away the breath from her very lungs. “Your vow, your grand declaration…they are nothing but empty words, lines from a fantasy you have of what love should be.
“And I…” it trembled then, his voice and Lauren shivered, “I am the fool that I believed you, that I tortured myself every minute that I didn’t deserve this thing between us…and you, that I hoped at all,” he said in such a tired, empty voice that Lauren could imagine that dullness that would dim his golden gaze, the weight that would pull at his sensuous mouth, the tightness that would descend on those broad shoulders.
Lauren stared at her phone for a full minute before she realized he’d hung up.
And then, she cried. Big, racking sobs that had David inquire outside the door, tears that burned her nose and eyes and throat, shook her body, and hurt her head.
This wouldn’t be the end of it, she knew. Not this argument between them or the last she saw of him. Not the last of the fire he’d made her walk through from the first minute.
Zafir wouldn’t give up on this child they’d created and that wasn’t a bad thing, she told herself, as if that could cleanse away the misery that sat like a boulder on her chest.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
LIFE, OF COURSE, didn’t come to a standstill, just because you got your heart broken, Lauren realized painfully over the next month. Twenty hours after Zafir had ended their call, a real estate agent had arrived with keys for her old apartment and a very betrayed-looking Ahmed after him.
“He banished me here, after berating me and four generations of my ancestors for losing sight of you, over the phone. For letting you leave. And now I’m to guard you here, in this crowded, noisy city. He should have just killed me,” he said, despair high in his voice.
Lauren, feeling emotional and lonely and heartsick for Zafir and anyone remotely related to him, threw her arms around him. Ahmed’s thin frame froze at first, and then slowly he patted her back awkwardly. The expression in his eyes, like deer caught in headlights, made Lauren laugh in the middle of tears.
“I’m sorry, Ahmed,” she’d said and he’d nodded, understanding in his gaze.
With Ahmed’s help, Lauren settled back into her apartment. When she’d asked him where His Royal Highness thought Ahmed was supposed to stay, he’d told her an apartment had been arranged for him, on the same floor of her building.
Before she could even make a list, a delivery service stood at her door, with milk and juice and fruits and steaming hot meals. Since refusing would mean talking to Zafir again, Lauren let herself be pushed.
With Zafir arranging her life to the smallest detail, even a continent away, she felt as if she was in limbo, waiting for some slick, high-powered law firm to start custody proceedings.
A month passed while she played with the idea of going back to work, yet didn’t, a month in which she hid from Alicia, because she couldn’t bear to tell her the truth and make it even more real, a month in which she heard not a word from Zafir.
Even Ahmed, who accompanied her on her long meandering walks through the parks and streets, and compared New York to Behraat incessantly, carefully veered away from anything related to Zafir.
And the more rational and in control of herself she became, the more Lauren went over every look, every word, every touch Zafir and she had shared. Faced her cowardice in running away without even waiting for him to return, forcing him to offer an explanation over the phone.
But he wouldn’t choose her over Behraat. Ever.
Did she want him to, she wondered as winter approached and the days grew shorter and she became less and less sure of herself.
Would that be the same man she had fallen in love with if he did?
Like a toll he had to pay for being loved by her? Was that what her love was—a transaction?
* * *
On another gloomy, chilly day, which made Lauren wish for the sweltering heat of Behraat, not that she would ever admit it to Ahmed, she returned from her evening walk when she saw the sleek, armored limousine idling at the curb in front of her building.
Her pulse racing, she shied her gaze away and made it to her apartment on the first floor. She had pulled a bottle of water from the refrigerator, panic swirling through her, when there was a knock.
Bracing herself, she opened the door.
The bottle fell from her fingers and hit the floor with a swishy sound.
Rashid Al Masood stood there, the corridor shrinking several sizes by his height. That sunken, unhealthy pallor was gone and she felt more than a little awe at his commanding presence, unbalanced and off-kilter at his golden gaze, so much like Zafir’s.
“May I come in?” he said in a papery voice and Lauren, too shocked still, signaled for him to come in. He held out his hand toward a shadow that materialized into a man, took a file from him and then stepped in.
Fear beat a tattoo in her chest as Lauren’s gaze fell on the papers.
Maybe he was here to ensure the termination of their marriage? Maybe he’d already found a new, better suited, bride for Zafir? Maybe…
Stop it, Lauren.