In eight months of lucidity, he had never once felt so alive, felt desire as sharp and focused as now. And he couldn’t easily dismiss this sharp hunger at the sight of her, or view it with distaste.
Her long hair was fanned over his pillow, her mouth pink. Long lashes lent her an air of vulnerable femininity that was missing when her eyes were open. Because she was busy studying, assessing, challenging with that intelligent gaze.
Suddenly, her gaze flew open. It stayed unfocused, muddled with sleep. A slight flush lit her skin with a rosy hue. Her gaze traveled over him lazily. Ayaan felt the force of it down to his toes. For a second, all he could think of was to climb into the bed.
Irritation flickered hot inside him. But he waited silently for the heat of his desire to subside, even as he wondered what had brought that smile to her lush mouth.
Shock flickering through her brown eyes, she shot up and pushed her hair from her face. “Prince Ayaan, what are you doing here?”
He raised a brow at her indignation. “That should be my question. You’re in my bed, in my suite, in my wing again, Princess. If I were the jealous, possessive kind of husband, I would take offense at how often you end up in a man’s bed.”
Pulling herself up against the headboard, she looked around, her gaze wide. It swept over his suite. Pink crept upward from her neck. And the glare in her eyes went to full-blown anger. She half slipped, half jumped from the bed, her movements panic-stricken. “If you had been the normal, entitled, king-of-everything-I-survey kind of man like I had hoped, you would have rejected me and I would be nowhere near this palace or you.”
She turned around and started pulling the cushions and pillows here and there. Bent over the bed like that, she gave him a perfect view of the curve of her bottom draped by nothing but the sheerest silk. The woman was capable of pushing him over the last edge he was already standing on.
He grabbed his robe from the foot of the bed and threw it at her. “Cover yourself and get out of my chamber.”
Zohra clutched the robe out of pure instinct while, she was sure, mortification turned her face bright red. “You think I want to be here, half-naked and incoherent, laid out like a feast for you?”
His silence in the face of her mounting fury chafed at her. She shrugged into the overlarge silk robe, the sleeves doubling over past her hands. “This is all because of your mother and her army of...”
The roaring blaze in Prince Ayaan’s gaze, the concrete set of his jaw curbed her words. He took a menacing step toward her, his mouth flattened with fury. “Do you have no filter between your brain and your mouth, Princess?”
Mortification heated her skin like fire, but Zohra was damned if she left before she cleared his assumption that she wanted to be in his bedroom. “I have been awake since before dawn, going through a million rituals that mean nothing to me. I nearly fell asleep in that monstrous tub of perfumed oil before being led here,” she said, meeting his gaze.
His hands folded at his chest, he stood there like a block of ice, unwavering, unfeeling. As though nothing mattered to him except his imposed isolation from everyone around him, as if his very survival was hinged on it. Frustration and curiosity turned Zohra inside out.
“I have no interest in how you arrived here, Princess. I do not want to see you in my quarters ever again. Is that understood?”
Zohra nodded, her own anger coming to her aid. It was what they had agreed upon for their marriage. But his cutting attitude, as if she polluted the very air around him by breathing it, reminded her of things she never wanted to remember. She lifted her chin, infused steel into her words. “I have no wish to remain here and bear the brunt of your uncivilized behavior. But I have no idea where I am supposed to go.”