Because, now the mirage was torturing him.
The woman had tears in those beautiful eyes. Her lips whispered his name. Again and again, as though she couldn’t help it, as though her very breath depended on saying his name.
In the mirage, the woman he had once loved more than anything else in life, the woman who had eventually destroyed him, was standing within touching distance. And for a man who had almost died happily, only to discover that he was alive, and a cripple at that, it was still the cruelest punishment to see her standing there, teasing him, tormenting him.
With a cry that never left his throat, he threw the bottle at the mirage, needing it to dissolve, needing the torturous cycle of self-loathing to abate.
Except, unlike all the other times he had done it, the woman flinched. Even as the bottle missed her, shattering as it hit the floor with a sound that fractured the silence.
Her soft gasp hit him hard in the gut, slicing through the drunken haze in his head. Shock waves pulsing through him, he moved as fast as his damaged hip would allow.
His fingers trembled as he extended his hand and touched her cheek. Her skin was as silky soft as he remembered. Bile filled his mouth and he had to suck in a harsh breath to keep it at bay. “Nikhat?”
Fear and self-loathing tangled inside him, his heart slamming hard against his rib cage.
The sheen of liquid in her beautiful dark brown eyes was real. The tremble in those rose-hued lips was real.
Azeez cursed, every muscle in his body freezing into ice. And before he could blink again, she was touching him, devouring him with her steady copper gaze.
She caught his roughened palm between hers, sending a jolt of sensation rioting through his body. It was as though a haze was lifted from his every sense, as though every nerve ending in him had been electrocuted into alertness. “Hello, Azeez.”
He pushed her away from him and jerked back. Leaning against the pillar, he caught his breath, kept his eyes closed, waiting for the dancing spots in front of him to abate. He heard her soft exhale, heard the step she took toward him.
Suddenly, utter fury washed through him, ferociously hot in contrast to the cold that had frozen his very blood just a few minutes ago. “Who dared to let you in here? I might be a cripple but I’m still Prince Azeez bin Rashid Al Sharif of Dahaar. Get out before I throw you out myself.”
Nikhat flinched, the walls she had built around herself denting at his words. But she couldn’t let the bitterness of them seep in and become a part of her. This was not about her. “I have every right to be here, not that I think you’re lucid enough to understand that.”
He didn’t snarl back at her as she expected.
He just stood there, staring at her, and she stared back, eight years of hunger ripping through all her stupid defenses.
Jet-black eyes set deep in his face, and even more now with the dark shadows beneath, gazed at her, a maelstrom of emotions blazing within. His aristocratic nose had a bump to it that hadn’t been there before. It looked as if it had been broken and had never healed right.
And then came the most sensuous, cruelest mouth she had ever seen. Even before the terrorist attack, even before she had left him without looking back, he had had a fierce, dark smile that stole into her very skin and lodged there.
Being at the receiving end of that smile had been like being in the desert at night. When the Prince of Dahaar had looked at you, he demanded every inch of your focus and you gave it to him, willingly.