“You are my wife,” he said forcefully. Then his chest expanded as he drew in a long, deep inhale, his expression closing her out. He indicated the door and the stairs that began right outside them.
Fern deflated as she climbed alongside him, sorry she’d brought up his first wife when it was so obviously a sore subject. Warm feelings would never grow between them if she alienated him.
Rather than open the door to the passage to his bedroom, however, he touched her elbow to draw her into the quarters closest to it.
“This is where Sadira should have slept if not with me.”
Fern had glanced in here when she began her explore. She’d been taken with the round bed and its red quilted headboard and silk canopy that reminded her of their tent in the oasis. The suite had a beautiful modern bathroom along with a sitting room of Ottoman furniture and a private balcony. It was screened even though it only looked over Zafir’s private courtyard and pool. She supposed the small room off the side would have been used for a nursery.
“I said the other day that because she gave me Tariq, I would never speak a bad word about Sadira. I meant that.” He glanced sideways at her while he stood in the door and looked diagonally across the harem to Sadira’s old rooms.
Despite his thobe and gutra and constant air of command, she sensed a kind of despondency in him. Powerlessness.
“She allowed her father to talk her into marrying me for the good of the country. I thought she felt as I did. That it was an advantageous match and that we had enough respect and liking to form the foundation of a strong relationship.”
“I feel like you and I have that,” she felt compelled to say, instantly concerned. “Don’t you?”
His expression flickered across to her with fierce pride. “We have a hell of a lot more than she and I did. One of those things...” His gaze fell to the floor before he turned to face her. His gaze brooked no hesitations or prevarications. “Fern, does it bother you that I’m only half-English?”
Taken aback, she could only say, “No! Of course not. I barely give it any thought.” He was Zafir, so sexy and striking she walked around dumbfounded that he’d ever looked twice at her. “It’s only something I worry about from the side of, you know, the politics. Those things your mother worries about. Obviously it would be nice if the whole world could get over bias and never exclude someone for skin color or other superficial reasons. I kind of wish I wasn’t English. If I was Arab, I could help you instead of being a problem.”
“Don’t wish yourself something you’re not,” he commanded with a twitch of cynicism. “Especially when you can’t change the circumstances of your birth any more than I can. I couldn’t remove the English part of me and Sadira had no use for it. In fact, I have come to believe, she felt soiled by having anything to do with me.”
“What? No!” Fern denied.
He cast her a look that was both disparaging of her naiveté and deeply shadowed by old hurt.
“You really think so?” she asked softly. Cautiously.
He ran a hand down his face. His reluctance to confide was plain in the time it took him to form a response.
“She refused to sleep with me. Barely spoke to me. After she gave me Tariq, she kept to her wing of the palace and, I have come to fear, left her cancer undiagnosed because she saw it as her only escape.”
“That’s— No! But you have divorce here. Don’t you?”