'So, you must have regretted marrying me rather quickly,' Saffy assumed, searching the lean strong features she loved for every passing nuance of expression and sinking down on the edge of the bed where she had often cried her heart out with loneliness.
His handsome mouth hardened. 'I only ever regretted the unnatural lifestyle which our marriage inflicted on you. I had no regrets on my own behalf.'
'That's a kind thing to say but it can't be the way you really felt.'
'I loved you more than life,' Zahir breathed starkly. 'My mistake was in rebelling against my father and bringing you back here to become the equivalent of a hostage. I should have married you and left you in London where you would be safe, but I was too selfish to do that.'
Loved you more than life. The declaration rippled through her like an unexpected benediction, steadying her nerves. 'I loved you too. You weren't selfish. I wouldn't have agreed to being left behind in London.'
'But you didn't know what you were getting into here any more than I did.' Face grave, Zahir compressed his lips. 'Omar had been married five years and he still had no child. Our father was impatient to see the next generation in the family born.'
'That must have put a lot of pressure on Omar and Azel.'
'More on Omar for the lack of fertility was his, not hers but I didn't learn that until shortly before Omar...died.' He spoke that last word with curious emphasis. 'My older brother's secret was that he had discovered he was unable to father a child and he was afraid to tell our father lest he was passed over in the succession stakes in favour of me. Omar was always the ambitious one,' Zahir told her heavily. 'Unfortunately for him, our father had run out of patience. He demanded that Omar either set Azel aside or take a second wife.'
Saffy was shocked. 'And that was the background to our marriage?'
'Our father was doubly enraged when I married you without permission because my marriage to a suitable woman would have been the next step on his agenda.'
'And of course I got in the way of his plans,' Saffy completed. 'Yet you thought he would eventually accept me.'
'I was wrong,' Zahir admitted grittily. 'I was much more naïve than I thought I was about what our father was really like. I never dreamt he would be as vicious with his sons as he was to some of our people. How adolescent was such innocence in a grown man?'
'Everybody wants to think the best of their parents,' Saffy told him with rueful understanding. 'I don't blame you for getting it wrong.'
'The year we were married was the year my father went over the edge. Although I was unaware of it, he had become a regular drug user and suffered from violent rages. From the first day you arrived he wanted me to divorce you...and the sensible act would have been to surrender to greater force, but I was never sensible about you.'
Her heart was beating in what felt uncomfortably like the foot of her throat. 'Greater force?' she queried suspiciously. 'If even half of what Akram suggested happened to you, I have the right to know about it. Were you imprisoned? Tortured? Beaten?'
Zahir stared levelly back at her, not a muscle moving on his bronzed handsome face, his mouth an unsmiling line. 'I could curse Akram, though he spoke out of ignorance. This is a conversation I never wanted to have with you...'
Saffy was trembling. 'You're telling me that your father-your own father-did do that stuff to you?' she prompted sickly. 'That you weren't away on army manoeuvres when you disappeared for weeks on end?'
Zahir gave confirmation with a grudging jerk of his chin.
And Saffy just closed her eyes, because all of a sudden she couldn't bear to look at him when she had excelled at being such a blind, childish fool all the months they had been man and wife the first time around. He had reappeared after those apparent military trips, filthy, often visibly bruised and cut, always having lost weight...and not once had she questioned the condition he was in, not once had she suspected that he had been brutally ill-treated while he was away from her and prevented from returning from her. In her little cocoon the very fact he was a prince had made entertaining such a suspicion too incredible to even consider. She had assumed that soldiers led a rough and ready life and that such trips were organised to be as realistic and tough as real warfare. And he had never told her, never once breathed a word of what was being done to him, never once sought her sympathy or support...
'Why didn't you tell me?' she asked thickly, tears thickening her throat and creating a huge lump there.
'I didn't want to upset you. There was nothing you could have done to stop it. Omar was correct. I should never have brought you to Maraban. Our father was a madman and he was out of control, incapable of accepting any form of opposition. It was all or nothing and once I defied him he was determined to break me.'
'And all over me...all because you married me,' Saffy muttered, her distress growing by the second as she looked back on her colossally ignorant and oblivious self at the age of eighteen. Little wonder he had ducked her questions, embraced silence, never knowing when he would be with her or torn from her side again.
'That whole year you were the only thing that kept me going,' Zahir informed her harshly. 'Look at me.'
'No!' Saffy unfroze finally and flew upright. 'I have to think about this on my own!'
As she tried to brush past him he closed a hand round a slim forearm. 'I told you I would tell no more lies or half-truths but I never wanted you to know about that period of my life!'
'Oh, I know that...Mr Macho-I-suffer-in-silence!' Saffy condemned chokily, her increasing distress clawing at her control. 'So when you came back here to me after suffering gross mistreatment and allowed me to shout at you and complain that I was bored and lonely? Just what I need to know to feel like the biggest bitch ever created!'
And, tears streaming down her distraught face, Saffy fled, in need of privacy. How could he do that to her? How could he not have told her? How could he have allowed her to find out all that from his resentful brother? She had known King Fareed wasn't a pleasant or popular man, but she had had no idea that he was a drug-abusing tyrant capable of torturing his own son if he was disobedient! What an idiot she must have been not to have guessed that something so dreadful was going on! How could she ever forgive herself for that? You were the only thing that kept me going. Why was he still trying to make her feel better by saying that sort of rubbish? He'd been stuck in a virtually sexless marriage while being regularly punished for rebelling against his father's dictates. And not once had she suspected anything. Was she stupid, utterly stupid, to have been so unseeing?
Saffy took refuge in their new bedroom, which was comfortably removed from the suffocating memories of the older accommodation they had once occasionally shared. She was remembering the condition of Zahir's back, thinking, although she didn't want to, of him being whipped, beaten up, hurt and all on her behalf. Zahir with his pride and his intrinsic sense of decency! She ran to the bathroom and heaved but nothing came up and she hugged the vanity unit to stay upright, surveying her tousled reflection with stricken accusing eyes. How could you not know? How could you not see what he was going through?
'This is why I never wanted you to know. I didn't want to see you hurt because all of it was my fault...'
Saffy spun round. He stood in the doorway, lean and bronzed and gorgeous in black jeans and a white shirt, so much the guy she loved and admired and cared about. 'How was it your fault?' she scissored back at him incredulously.
'I married you. I brought you back here with me. I placed both of us in a foolish and vulnerable position,' Zahir stated grimly. 'I will never forgive myself for that.'
'You should've divorced me the minute the punishments started!' Saffy launched back at him. 'How could you be so stubborn that you went through that just for me?'
A faint shadow of a smile that struck her as impossible in the circumstances curved his wide sensual mouth. 'I loved you...I couldn't give you up.'