The Sheikh's Sinful Seduction(55)

                “Please,” Fern said through a tight throat. She needed privacy to straighten out Zafir’s wrong impression.

                * * *

                Fern’s roommate was the homeliest woman Zafir had ever seen. Small and hunched, she had dull brown hair streaked in gray, definitely a home cut, teeth like an old cemetery and beady brown eyes that were deeply set.

                But as she left, she touched Fern’s shoulder with a maternal hand. Fern covered the woman’s gnarled knuckles and the glance the two exchanged was complex. Sheepish and forgiving and reassuring. The kind of unspoken communication women had when they were very close.

                As one of the two doors off the main room closed, Zafir swung his gaze around the flat. It was charming, he supposed, in the way of modest, dated rooms kept tidy and warm. There was an odd collection of photos showing young men and women in graduation caps and gowns, accepting awards, waving from the window of a pilot’s seat and standing at a podium.

                “Who is she?” he asked, still reeling from Fern’s gross insult, not ready to deal with how deeply she had cut him.

                “A teacher. She made me a member of her Shyness Club when I was nine.” Her freckled face tinted. “Zafir, that’s not what I meant. About you being who you are...”

                Her voice trailed off as she twisted her fingers. It would be a wonder if the digits remained attached at the rate she was torturing them.

                He wouldn’t ask what she had meant. Wouldn’t wheedle to understand. He didn’t even want to face her, there was such an agony of rejection coursing through him, but his gaze snagged on the bump of their child swelling her middle. It continued to stun him. His wife had kept to herself in hundreds of ways, including an almost complete retreat when she became heavily pregnant. If she had been in his presence, she had draped herself in oversized garments that hadn’t really let him see evidence of the child she was giving him.

                The heir she had hidden like something unwanted and merely endured because her husband was something unwanted and endured. Lower than her. Not good enough.

                Still deeply scarred by that disdain, he focused instead on the way Fern let her bump sit so prominently in her lap. He itched to set his hands on her. All of her. She was fuller everywhere, from her cheeks to her breasts to her bottom. It suited her.

                Her hair was longer, drying and starting to spring out from its catch at the back of her neck. Her skin was as much a display of cinnamon and cream as ever. She was tempting and as sweet as almonds and honey, he’d thought when he’d stood under the umbrella with her outside. Her scent had mingled with the rain and wind of English storms and struck him as oddly familiar. Heartening.

                Everything about her was the same and more, especially her ability to enthrall him.

                But she hadn’t told him about the baby because of who he was. Didn’t she mean what he was?

                Funny how dozens of women had overlooked his birth and half-caste status, wishing to marry his money and blue blood, but the two females he’d actually proposed to had been unable to get past it.

                Misery lined Fern’s expression. “I meant that a man in your position could have anyone.” Her bottom lip disappeared as she pulled it between her teeth, while her brows crooked and trembled.

                “Anyone except you,” he challenged, fighting the tightness that gripped him.

                Couched hope glimmered in the gray depths of her gaze, but dimmed as he returned her look with one that refused to give anything away.