It didn’t help the entirety of the guests being served in the vast hall had all focused on them. If not for Aslam, if not for Mirah, Amalia would have long happily... Aslam! Damn it, how could she forget why she couldn’t wait to speak to Zayn?
Her gut felt like a hard knot. “Your cousin...how could you let that man leave?”
“I let him leave only from here.”
“It took all these weeks to locate him and you just—”
“I told you I will take care of it.”
“And Aslam continues to be in—”
“Amalia, sit down and calm yourself. You’re drawing far too much attention.”
“Because I am not shutting up about you, the Sheikh of Khaleej, letting a criminal slip out because he’s your family.”
His lips pulled back, a hardness entering his eyes. “No, you’re drawing attention because you’re raising your voice at your fiancé, who is currently surrounded by his guests, some of whom are state dignitaries and a wedding party, and all of whom would like nothing better than to point out that you lack the finesse and sophistication to deal with this in a sensitive and adult manner.”
Amalia swallowed her gasp, his words pinching like sharp needles. It was one thing to hear from Mirah that Zayn’s family, his advisers and the entire world did not think her suitable for the sheikh, quite different when he put it that way.
Dear God, she hadn’t been hoping that something would change in the last few weeks, had she?
She felt like that little girl, confused and yet somehow aware of the painful reality of life. It felt like her heart was punctured inside her chest.
But she had come too far to give up now. “I don’t care what they think about me.”
“I do. Care about what they will say about you.”
“You do?”
“Yes. Your reputation directly affects me.”
Amalia had never felt this desperate struggle inside to be something she was not. Had never dreamt that falling in love would mean finding herself so inadequate to the man she loved. Being with Zayn was cleaving her within. “God forbid the sheikh is perceived as a weak man, a man who did not control his wayward fiancée, as a man who actually paid attention to anything coming out of a woman’s mouth.”
His eyes darkened into hard chips, his mouth a forbidding line. “Amalia, do not turn an age-old prejudice that has nothing to do with us into our fight. Do not turn your parents’ disagreement into ours. I have never treated you with anything less than the respect you deserve. You forget that I’m not your lover, Zayn, all the time. I’m the sheikh and yes, I cannot be seen as not being able to stop my unruly fiancée from turning my sister’s wedding breakfast into a ruckus about the justice system of Khaleej.
“Especially men and women I’ve been trying to appease with this whole charade.”
He was not just angry, Amalia realized, her temper slowly losing its edge. It was more than his usually amused, tolerant annoyance at one of her blunt opinions. This was different.
This felt like withdrawal. Like he was retreating behind that damned mantle of his position. Like he was using her lack of discretion this moment to remind himself how unsuitable she was for him.
She wanted to scream; she wanted to walk away and hide in the privacy of her bedroom. But she did neither. She settled down into the chair he had pulled out for her, a morass of emotions churning through her.
Her stomach slipped to her feet at all the curious faces that were watching her and Zayn. His parents’ disapproval was like a force field even across the hall. No, she wouldn’t feel as if she’d done something wrong just because she had lost her temper a little.
Then she saw Mirah and Farid at the main table and the fear mixed in with shock in Mirah’s face. Shame filled her then. Mirah had been nothing but affectionate and welcoming to Amalia, even as she had realized that Amalia created waves among her family, even as she learned that some of Farid’s family members disapproved of her.
Whether she had a right to be angry or not was moot. This was Mirah’s day, a day she’d been looking forward to for quite a while.
She forced a smile to her lips and pulled her chair closer to Zayn’s. With trembling fingers, she pushed at some imaginary speck on his collar. Filled the nerve-racking silence by telling him the morning she had had with a staff member and her stylist.
If it killed her, she’d not make a spectacle of herself. And him.
“Are you planning to kill me with that uncharacteristic inane chatter?” Zayn interrupted her in a dry voice that scratched against her senses. His thumb drew circles over her wrist, spreading a soft languor through her skin to every inch of her.
“Isn’t that what you wanted?” she asked with fake sweetness.
“For you to act like there’s nothing but cotton wool between your ears?” He sounded distinctly put out. “For you to simper at me with that fake smile and no real warmth in your eyes, no.”
She sighed. “Sometimes I don’t know what you want from me. Except—”
“Except?”
“Except when we’re making...when we’re having sex.”
Something hard glittered in his eyes. Whatever anger she’d seen in his eyes until now, it was nothing like this fiery blaze that set his gaze alight. “You were going to say making love. You changed it to sex. Has your attitude toward that intimacy changed so much? Has it become so casual, then?”
“No, of course not,” she protested hotly. She sighed and hid her face in his arm. How could she be angry with him when she’d provoked him on purpose? When it was this answer that she wanted from him?
When she probed him for answers while she couldn’t tell him how she felt? Her time with him was counting down, mere days now, yet all she wanted was to forget Aslam, or Mirah or their respective positions in life and just be Amalia and Zayn.
The last thing she wanted to be was clingy when it was time to leave, but she wasn’t able to harden her heart, either.
“I’ve never been this confused in my life,” she said into the stretching silence. It was not the complete truth, but it was not a lie. “All I did in the last three weeks was accompany you to all the social events you bid me to, and look at some interesting issues when people courted my interest.
“And yet I’m called opinionated and too forward-thinking. All I was doing was just being—”
“You were just being yourself,” Zayn finished for her, taking her hand in his on top of the table. “That is not your fault, Amalia. You’re right, you did everything that I asked you to do.”
But she was never going to be the right woman for him. In a million years, she could not change herself and become the sort of woman everyone would approve of. Was this how her mother had felt with her father? Had there been no easy way to love her father without changing who she was?
She nodded, feeling a strange gush of tears at the back of her eyes. “How can I not be furious when you let him go?”
“Do you trust me, Amalia?”
Every logical thought said she shouldn’t. It had been eight weeks since she’d walked into his study and except for allowing her to visit Aslam once and now letting the real culprit go, Zayn had done nothing to help her cause.
But every instinct, every irrational impulse that had absorbed everything about the man, screamed yes. “Yes, I do,” Amalia finally whispered. “I think I trusted you from the beginning, Zayn, even when you were blackmailing me.”
He laughed then, a hard, but genuine sound, and Amalia gazed up at him. Once again, they drew the attention of the crowd. But this time she knew it was because they were as mesmerized at the sight of him laughing as she was.
“I owe you an apology for not trusting your word. And that you had to resort to blackmail for what was right.”
His apology, the tenderness in his eyes, sparked a joy inside her. “I liked blackmailing you, Sheikh.”
Wicked amusement lit his gaze. “If my calculation of my cousin’s character is right, he will confess in the next day. After that it will be a matter of days before Aslam is released. Just a matter of hours before you can see him.”
Amalia shivered and instantly he held her close. “I can’t wait to see him, to hug him.”
“He is lucky to have you for his champion. I hope he learns to not throw away his life like this again. There’s so much he could do.”
The wistful note in his voice shook Amalia from within, that glimpse of the dreamer within. “And your cousin? Will he go to jail?”
“I do not know.”
“But we both know that he is culpable. You told me yourself that your policy is harsh against drug offenders.”
“Yes, but it is not in my hands to see his punishment matches his crime. My father or someone high up will interfere, because they will fear the reputation of the royal family, and his sentence will be lesser for that fact.”
“How can you be so calm about that?”
“Nothing can be achieved by raging against things that you cannot change, Amalia. It is a lesson I learned very early in life.”
“So much for making me believe that you’re all powerful,” she snorted, even as she understood what he meant.
If she had learned anything in the last two months, it was how delicately Zayn had to balance his actions with how the populace perceived him.