Self-loathing pounded through him in waves, but not enough to hide the sharp pulse of fear beneath. He had thought to enjoy an hour in her company. But the truth of his hunger for her was far more lethal.
She had somehow become his only way out of a crushing isolation, the one person he sought out instead of running away from, the one person who made him crave normal things even as she brought his darkest fears to the surface.
“If you are saying I came here planning to kiss you—”
“You didn’t but it happened. You find comfort near me.” She shrugged, reducing his earth-shattering need for her into something inconsequential. “I don’t even care that it has nothing to do with me.”
How could she be so alluring and frustrating at the same time, so damn perceptive and thickheaded that he wanted to shake her? He fisted his hands at his sides. He would not touch her again. He had done enough harm. “You think the fact that I am drawn to you has nothing to do with you?”
“I’m beginning to see what a clever, cunning man my father is, beginning to understand what Karim meant,” she said, shaking her head. “If you were a different man, one not plagued by the atrocities you had to endure, you wouldn’t have looked at me, much less married me. But like you said, reality is better if one accepts it. I am beginning to see how miserable I have made myself by not doing that.
“I have been alone for eleven years. I have no friends, no one to lean on, no one to tell me that I am ruining my own happiness.”
She was thinking of the man she had loved and there was nothing he could do to stop it. She moved toward him again and he braced himself. As if she were a knife that could tear into his flesh, a bullet that could lodge under his muscle.
When had this slip of a woman gained so much power over him? How?
She met his gaze, a quiet strength emanating from the very way she held herself. “I have no strength left anymore to be alone, to beat my head against things I cannot change.”
He felt spine-tingling cold. There was no other word for the chill that suddenly permeated him inside out. “Zohra...don’t.”
“I can’t go back to Siyaad as a cast-off wife. I can’t spend the rest of my life among those people...not even for Wasim and Saira. Neither can I turn my back on them. Which means...this life with you is the only option left to me. And I am not going to fight it anymore.”
“You have chosen a hell of a time to stop fighting your fate. Except nothing has changed here,” he said, jabbing his temple.
Her gaze was unrelentingly stubborn. The knot in his gut tightened another notch. “I have seen what you think is your weakness and I have not run away. You do not see me as someone tainted. Isn’t that enough of a start?”
Anger roiled through him, turning his very blood into bitter poison. “You want to be my wife and play happy family? You want to lie down next to me at night when I devolve into nothing but an animal scared of its own shadow? You want to bear the children of a man who is a disgrace on the very name of his ancestors?”
He hated her at that moment, hated that she was not a traditional kind of woman who wouldn’t have dared question his actions, hated that she was a constant reminder of everything he couldn’t have, hated that she dared to call him out on his weakness.
“Do you want to strip the last thread of dignity from me?” he shouted, his throat hoarse.
She pushed at his chest, her lithe form shaking from head to toe. Even in her studied indifference toward their relationship, she had been temptation personified. Now she felt like a powerful sandstorm that could bury him beneath the weight of his own needs and desires.