THE TRUE KING OF DAHAAR(32)
Whether he wanted to face it when his life was already in such turmoil, he didn’t know. “When have I ever asked you for anything but the truth? You’re successful, you’re beautiful, and as your father mentioned, you’re not bound by Dahaaran traditions or customs. So why are you still single?”
She wrapped her arms around herself, her shoulders unsteady.
His heart slammed hard against his rib cage. “Or do you have a boyfriend tucked away somewhere, Dr. Zakhari, just waiting for your signal to show up?”
Something moved across her face—defiance, a challenge. Her spine locked, her mouth settling into a stubborn line that he detested. “And if I did?”
He gripped the armrests of the chaise, perverse fury filling his veins. “I have no wish to see you and your lover parade through my palace.”
She leaped from her seat as though propelled toward him by a desert storm. She bent toward him, bringing her face close to his, her gaze blazing with resolve. An expression he had never seen on her before—a reckless willfulness, danced in it. And he felt the strangest little thrill gripping his insides. “I thought I didn’t have to choose between my career and personal life.”
She was taunting him, she was relearning what effect she had on him and testing it. And yet, he rose to meet it.
He clasped her cheek. “Do not pretend to misunderstand me or be so reckless as to challenge me, Nikhat.
“You are the woman I loved once, the woman I chose for my future queen, the woman I wanted to give birth to the future heir of Dahaar. Everything’s changed in eight years, hasn’t it? But the thought of you with another man, the image of any man possessing your body, staking his claim on you, it will always reduce me into a savage that would make my marauding ancestors proud.
“What I consider mine once, I would not share it, even in thought. So unless you want to add to my long list of sins, Nikhat, tuck your lover away until I leave.”
He pushed himself to his knees with a savage force that sent a shock wave through his leg. He could not bear to look at her, he could not bear to look inside himself. He had thought after all these years, after everything that had happened, there was nothing left in him that would react to her, and yet, there still was.
He had wrought destruction on himself, on his family, he was directly responsible for the death of his sister and for the atrocities his brother had suffered, because of how broken, how reckless he had become when Nikhat had left him.
“I was engaged three years ago, to a colleague,” she said behind him, and he halted. The very thought crept into his head and taunted him.
That she was telling him this was not to assuage his pride or to balance the scales between them. That she was offering a piece of truth was something else. Something that stole into him with an insidious inevitability that filled ice in his veins. But he would not accept it, he could not go down that path ever again, and certainly not with her. “But it didn’t work out.”
“Why not?” he said, the question falling from his lips before he could stop it.
She shrugged, and he instinctively knew whatever she was going to say was not the truth. “He broke it off a week before the wedding, changed his mind about what he wanted in life.” Pain streaked across her gaze. “I am not…made for relationships.”
Without waiting for a response, she left him in the garden, his mind roiling with every little word she had spoken.
You have no idea what I have faced, what I still face, to be standing in front of you without shattering into a million pieces.