He rose suddenly and walked away from the bed. Anna could barely hear the tear of packet above the panting of her breath. He was back with her in seconds and she wrapped her legs around him, hooking him and bringing him close to her. He pulled away from her kiss then. And for one long moment they looked at each other in the shallow darkness where emotions were more tangible than the vague outline of the physical. But she could see his eyes, black and white, intense and demanding. His eyes didn’t just hold promise but delivered it. They made love to her as surely as his body was about to. She felt the connection, intimate, strong and erotic as surely as if he’d penetrated her. She gasped and felt her legs tremble around him.
His gaze didn’t shift from hers as his hands smoothed down her trembling legs, lending them strength as he shifted and lifted them both around her and entered her. She climaxed with his first thrust, which he held there, deep inside her, as she opened her mouth to cry out but his mouth robbed her of sound, muting her ecstasy as her whole body trembled around his. Only when the trembling ceased did he move: rhythmic, unrelenting, moving in and out of her, each movement as intense as the last. It was a claiming. And she wanted to be claimed.
Still he watched her but now she had a sense of his own passion over-riding his need to enjoy her need. She could see it in his eyes, concentrated, his focus shifting from hers into a place of unknown feeling, shifting inside himself as he surrendered to his passion; as he passed his control over to his body and to her body, united in their passion.
She climaxed again, with loud moans of pleasure and Zahir’s finger tracing her lips as they cried out. Only then did Zahir release his own pleasure, quietly, as if a reflection of the inner nature of his climax. As his eyes re-focussed on her she could see that a wall had come down. There was a different quality to his expression. Open, connecting with her on a different level.
He rolled away and as they lay quietly side by side, their bodies slick with sweat, the rapid beat of their hearts beginning to subside, her hand reached for his body, feeling the scar that lay above his heart.
“I’m sorry.” His words came to her so quietly that she felt they must have been her own.
She shifted onto her side, looking at him as he gazed up at the ceiling.
“I’m sorry,” he repeated. “For everything. For losing control that night four years ago; for being so bitter when I discovered who you were; for being so angry with you. I’m also sorry that you couldn’t tell me about Matta but I understand.”
The simplicity of his apology shocked her. But, more than that, she desperately wanted to know how Zahir now felt about Matta, whether her deception had changed his affection for him. But she dared not ask.
“I’ve hated not being able to tell you. It’s a relief for you to know. I feel I’ve been carrying around this huge secret for so long.”
“Tell me, how did Abduallah feel about looking after someone else’s baby?”
“He loved him. Our, situation, was complicated but he understood. And he loved him. He’d never thought he would have a child so Matta seemed like a gift from heaven.”
“Me also. I have wanted a child all my life but felt I could never be a proper father to children, a proper husband to a wife.”
“How could you think that?”
He looked at her then with a thousand years of tiredness in his eyes. “Because,” his hand clasped hers that still lay over his scar, “if I have a heart at all, it is cold; it is dead.”
She shook her head in vehement denial. “No. That’s not true.”
“Anna,” he stroked her hair with a look of tenderness lightening the weariness in his eyes. “It is true. I have killed and been nearly killed. I have taken those lessons to the financial markets and been ruthless in my pursuit of my country’s wealth. These are not the things I would wish a child of mine to do.”
“You said yourself that you did what you had to do.”
He nodded. “And I believed it was my fate not to have children. But now, you have given me a gift more precious than you could know or I could have imagined.”
“And Matta? Tell me, how do you feel about him now?”
“I have no change in my feelings towards him.”
Anna’s heart dropped.
“I couldn’t feel more for him than I do already.”
Anna couldn’t speak. He didn’t use the word “love” but she didn’t care because in his own way he was telling her that he did love Matta. And that meant the world to her. Because she’d been terrified that he would resent this innocent child whose paternity had been kept secret from him.