Staying in the royal palace just outside the city limits, Saffy had been sentenced to a very boring and hidden existence. As her father-in-law refused to accept her as part of the family and was determined to keep the presence of a Western blonde in the palace a secret, she had not been allowed to go out and about in Maraban and explore freely. Indeed aside of a few stolen shopping expeditions in the company of her widowed sister-in-law, Azel, Saffy had barely gone out at all. Zahir had declared that eventually his father would accept her as his wife but that she would have to be patient. But twelve months living like the invisible woman had convinced Saffy that her marriage had been a major mistake, particularly when things between her and Zahir had gone badly awry as well.
'You're very unhappy here,' Zahir had acknowledged the very last time she saw him during their marriage. 'You've been telling me that you wanted a divorce for the past six months and now I must agree.'
'Just like that you suddenly agree?' Saffy had yelled at him incredulously, shock at his change of heart winging through her in sickening waves as she realised he had clearly had enough of her and their marriage. 'But you swore that you still loved me, that we could work it out...'
'But now I want you to go home to London as soon as it can be arranged. I want to divorce you and set you free,' Zahir had countered as stonily as though she had not spoken.
It was true that for weeks whenever they argued she had hurled the threat of a divorce at him on a fairly frequent basis. But she had never really meant it, had simply been dramatising herself and struggling to make her young husband take her unhappiness seriously. But she had somehow still expected Zahir to continue to refuse to even consider divorce as the answer to their problems. Coming at her out of the blue like that, his volte-face had shocked her and pleading in the face of his clear determination to get rid of her had been more than she could bear. For so long, regardless of their difficulties, she had clung to her conviction that Zahir still loved her no matter what and that what they had together was still worth fighting for. Deprived of that consolation and cruelly rejected by the divorce that swiftly followed, Saffy had been heartbroken and not surprisingly had felt abandoned.
Her older sister, Kat, who had raised her from the age of twelve, had tried to comfort Saffy, pointing out that King Fareed's opposition to their marriage must finally have worn Zahir down while reminding Saffy that neither she nor Zahir had foreseen the very real difficulties that would arise in Saffy's struggle to adapt to life in a different country, far from family and friends. Saffy didn't want to remember how appallingly she had missed Zahir after she left Maraban or how many months had passed before she could enjoy the freedom she had reclaimed and stop thinking about Zahir at least once every minute. She had genuinely loved him and it hurt to appreciate that he had moved on from her so much more easily than she had moved on from him. Maybe he had never really loved her, Saffy conceded painfully. Maybe it had always been about the sex and only the sex. Certainly, given his behaviour in shipping her out to the desert for seduction, that looked like the most viable explanation. It was equally agonising to admit that had she been capable of doing what she had just done with him five years earlier they might still have been together. Or would they have been? Was that just fantasy land? Perhaps all along she had only been a fling in the form of a wife for Zahir.
But didn't she have rather more pressing concerns in the present? What about that contraceptive accident they had had? Saffy tensed, her appetite evaporating in front of the beautiful lunch she had been served as her skin chilled with complete fright at the idea of being faced with an unplanned pregnancy. Once she had believed she would never have children because she wasn't able to have sex or even handle the concept of artificial insemination. Now she knew differently and knew her future had opened up another avenue once barred to her. So, if she did fall pregnant, what would she do about it? She had friends who would rush to request the morning-after pill after such a mishap to ensure that no conception took place, but if against all the odds new life did begin inside her, Saffy registered that she was totally unwilling to consider a termination. In that moment she was suddenly realising with a heart that felt full enough to burst that a baby would mean the sun, the moon and the stars to her and that there was nothing she would cherish more. It might be a disaster as far as her current clients were concerned, but it would only be a short-term one and surely her earning power wouldn't die overnight. She breathed in deep and slow, both terrified and enervated by the risk she was prepared to take with her own body. If conception happened, she decided, it would happen and she would embrace it without regret.
Having dropped off the film of the shoot with the exceedingly relieved production company, Saffy caught the tube back to the two-bedroom apartment she had bought with Cameron. Cameron, a keen cook, was in the kitchen dicing vegetables, but it was the sight of the small brunette perched on the counter chatting nineteen to the dozen to him that startled Saffy.
'Saffy!' Topsy cried, velvety somber eyes full of warmth as she leapt off the counter like a miniature whirlwind and threw herself exuberantly into her much taller sister's arms. At slightly less than four feet eleven inches tall, Topsy was tiny. 'I wish you hadn't been away this week. I wanted to go out with you to celebrate the end of my exams!'
Saffy's eyes stung as she gratefully accepted her youngest sister's affectionate hug. Topsy always wore her feelings on her sleeve. At eighteen years of age, having just finished school, Topsy was much less damaged by their disturbed childhood and more outgoing than her older sisters. She was also exceptionally clever and overflowing with an irrepressible joie de vivre that few could resist. Yet as Saffy studied the younger woman she saw shadows below her eyes and a tension far removed from Topsy's usual laid-back vibe and she wondered what was wrong.
'How did you find out that I was back so quickly?' Saffy prompted.
'She's been phoning here every day...I texted her after you called me from the airport,' Cameron, a tall attractive man with close-cropped dark curls, told her from his position by the state-of-the-art cooker.
'I assumed you'd want to stay on at Kat's with Emmie,' Saffy remarked.
'No, Kat and Mikhail are hosting a big dinner tonight and I wasn't in the mood to play nice with loads of strangers,' Topsy confided with a slightly guilty wince. 'And Emmie has already gone home again.'
Saffy's heart sank at that news because it was obvious to her that once again her twin had chosen to dodge meeting her. Her estranged twin was still avoiding her, Saffy acknowledged unhappily, wounded by Emmie's reluctance to even be in her company. Was she that bad? Was she truly so hateful to her twin? Or was it a simple if unpalatable fact that her past sins were beyond forgiveness?
'Emmie's gone back to Birkside?' she checked, referring to Kat's former home in the Lake District, the farmhouse her elder sister had inherited from her late father.
Kat was the daughter of their mother Odette's first marriage, the twins the daughters of her second marital foray while Topsy was the result of their mother's short-lived liaison with a South American polo player. By the time the twins reached twelve years of age they were a handful and Odette had placed all three girls in foster care. Kat, then in her twenties, had made a home at Birkside for all three of her sisters and Odette had had very little to do with her children since then. In every way that mattered, Kat had become the loving, caring mother her sisters had never really had.
'Should Emmie be on her own up there?' Saffy questioned the younger woman anxiously. 'I mean, it's a lonely house and now that she's pregnant...?'