She made a distinctly unhappy sound.
“Shh...” He kissed her sweaty brow, the affectionate gesture too natural to be comfortable for a man who knew his time with his love would be measured in days not years. “I need to take care of the condom.”
He made his way to the efficiency-size en suite on unsteady legs.
The mirror showed him a face he’d never seen before, one with eyes far too soft with vulnerability.
He was emir. Not merely a man.
Not a man at all who could afford to crave a woman like he’d learned to hunger for Aaliyah after such a short time.
He needed to find himself and put this other man away. Sayed owed it to his people and to the brother who had died before getting the chance to lead them.
Sayed should have been working strategy the whole plane ride, but he’d spent hours talking with Liyah and then making love.
He had to put distance between them, or he wasn’t going to be able to do what he needed to when the pregnancy test came back negative.
Let her go.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
QUEEN DURRAH ESCORTED Liyah to her quarters in the palace harem herself.
Even the melecha’s personal attention could not mitigate Liyah’s feeling of abandonment upon Sayed’s nearly instant disappearance after their arrival to the palace, however.
Sayed had barely taken the time to introduce her to his esteemed parents before excusing himself to speak to his father privately. The monarchs had been surprisingly gracious, but Sayed’s desertion had stung.
Coming on top of the way he’d been acting since they made love, it was doubly hurtful.
He’d walked into the bathroom a man and came out one hundred percent emir, focused on affairs of state.
Sayed had dressed in silence and then turned to her, his gaze set firmly somewhere beyond her left shoulder. “Nap now. I’ll have the cabin attendant knock on the door in time for you to shower and dress for landing.”
She might have argued if her eyes hadn’t already been drooping, her body seconds from sliding into sleep regardless.
As he’d promised, she’d been alerted in time to shower and dress in clothes miraculously ironed while she’d been napping. However, even though she’d returned to her seat, Sayed had spent the entire descent and landing talking to Yusuf, who had joined them in one of the empty seats across the table.
Then Sayed had been fully occupied the drive to the palace with his smartphone.
Liyah knew he had important issues that had to be dealt with, but that hadn’t diminished her sense of the growing distance between them.
A distance that should never have been bridged in the first place, her brain tried to remind her. Her emotions foolishly balked at that truth.
Liyah had never warred so much within herself as she had since meeting Sayed, not even when she’d been deciding about going to England to meet her biological father.
No matter how unreasonable, how hopeless, how ridiculous, her growing feelings for Sayed were, Liyah could not deny them. However, she had no intention of sharing them with anyone else, especially the man himself.