But it was his mouth she had loved first.
A mouth that had defied her expectations and recited poetry and philosophy while his body looked built for wars. The contradictions of this man had been never-ending. Until they had ended. Even that had been a contradiction, for he had made her love him, and then he had left. He had been sad until she’d fixed him all up, and then he’d left.
Without a word of warning or goodbye.
“I asked what you are doing here?” She repeated, making an effort to keep her voice calm even when her temper was spiralling almost out of control.
It was a damned good question, but he was powerless to answer it when his own questions were tripping over themselves. In his mind, Sarah hadn’t changed. Not much, anyway. But the woman in front of him was nothing like he remembered. His eyes narrowed as he catalogued the alteration. The Sarah he had known before had been curvaceous, bordering on plump. All soft and round and perfect to wrap his arms around and hold tight to his body. This woman was reed-thin, beyond even what was considered fashionable. Her hair, once a long, blonde mane that had curled down her back, that he’d curled his fist around and tilted her head back to receive his kisses, had been cropped into an elfin style around her face that only served to emphasise the slash of her cheek bones. Apart from the smattering of freckles over the bridge of her dainty nose, she was unrecognisable.
“I came to see…” The words trailed off, as his eyes sought hers, searching them, studying them.
“You came to see what?” She stroked her hand over the child’s back automatically. He could tell it was a gesture she had performed many times, with a mother’s instinct. She had a child? She had married?
Instant revulsion twisted his gut. “I came to talk,” he said, remembering that he was Sheikh Syed Al’Eba, a man born to command and rule. The words rang with confidence.
“You can’t be serious?” She murmured, stroking Lexi’s hair now, it’s soft, downy curls springy beneath her touch.
Syed drew himself to his full height. “Do I look like I am joking?”
“I haven’t seen you in years, and you turn up on my doorstep wanting to … talk?”
His lips curled in a derisive smile. “It does not look like you have been pining for me in my absence.” He nodded towards Lexi, his implication clear.
It was on the tip of Sarah’s tongue to correct his error. Though the mistake was a natural one to make – they looked alike, and their bond was unmistakable. Sarah had raised Lexi almost from birth.
But she didn’t correct his assumption. Instead, she tightened her grip around Lexi. “I have to get my daughter into bed.” It was hardly a lie. With no living parents, it had been easy to adopt Lexi, and heaven knew Sarah thought of the little girl as her daughter in every way.
“I will wait.”
Sarah’s jaw dropped. “You’ll wait?” She stammered, perplexed and furious at the same time. “You’ll wait?” She repeated, as though saying it might make more sense of his assertion.
“The lounge,” he nodded towards the room behind them.
How many nights they had spent in that small, cosy room? Sarah’s skin prickled with remembered pleasures. Pleasures so long ago relegated to the back of her mind, to the recesses of hope and the graveyard of possibilities. What the hell was he doing in her house?
It was a question that demanded an answer, but not until she’d put Lexi to bed. “There’s a bar around the corner,” she said stiffly. “You can go and wait there, thank you, while I spend time with my daughter.”
Unused to being directed, it brought back a startling revelation.
She hadn’t known of his position in society. When they’d met, he’d been a man, and she’d been a woman, and they had spoken to one another as equals. He had enjoyed seeing her flex her muscles, at one point; watching her dictate her wishes to him.
Then, he had been her equal, and now?
“Fine.” He nodded curtly. “One hour.”
“Two,” she bartered, thinking again of the shower she desperately needed. Especially if she was going to meet this man with anything like her best food forward.
“One,” he said darkly. He flicked a smile at Lexi. “Good night, little star.”
Shivers ran down her spine. Nashin. Starlight. That’s what he’d called her.
The words swirled around them even as he left, closing the door behind him. The term of endearment that had made her feel stellar haunted her for all the minutes of his absence.
In the end, an hour was barely enough time. Sarah raced through bedtime, guiltily thinking of the evening she’d had planned. Lexi was fed a hasty dinner of leftovers, bathed in record time, read only three pages of her favourite book and tucked under the covers with a rushed kiss.
Sarah had just stepped out of the shower, thrown on an outfit, and peeked in to check on Lexi when there was a slightly-restrained knock at the door.
She stroked a hand over Lexi’s curls, tucked Mr Bear into the crook of her arm, and then walked out of the bedroom and down the stairs as though her body wasn’t quivering like a feather on the wind.
As she reached the door, she paused, her hand hovering just above the handle. Why was he here?
Five years ago, she had fallen in love with him. Or lust? Either way, he had buried himself inside of her soul. She’d understood his loss and grief, and she had felt powerful beyond belief to see how their chemistry could chase pain from his mind and heart.
He’d arrived in her life broken by death, and she’d patched him back together.
Then he’d left.
He’d used her. He’d used her sympathies for sex. And when he had felt whole again, he’d crept out of her bed, out of her life, with only a single hand-written note cast on the kitchen table. ‘I have to leave.’
Sarah had heard of people feeling nauseous in anxious circumstances, but the way her stomach was flipping and flopping went beyond simple sickness. She half-thought she might pass out.
Flames of the past licked at the soles of her bare feet. She drew the door inwards on a curse of remembered pain.
Everything she had loved about him slammed into her. She stared at him, his face that she knew every single damned line of, his dark hair, his haunted eyes, and her heart leaped through her body.
He was just the same.
Which was all the more reason to stay away from him. He was the same man who had broken her heart and chosen to leave her without a backwards glance.
She straightened her spine, pouring into it the kind of iron that could only be formed by nights of devastation and emptiness. “Yes?” She stood just inside the door, not moving to allow him inside.
“How are you?”
It was so far from what she’d expected that she let out a short, sharp laugh. Fog drifted from her; the temperature had dropped rapidly in the evening. Was he cold? He who was used to sand-swept desert nights and the sun on his back? She hoped so.
“After five years, that’s what you came here to say?”
“No.”
“So?” She gripped the door more tightly, her fingers seeking strength.
“Who is the child?”
Straight to it, huh? “My daughter.”
A muscle pounded at the base of his jaw. Out of nowhere, she remembered the way it had done that when he’d been tense and searching for the right words. The words to describe how it had felt to have watched his mother die. To have held her hand as life ebbed from her body. And Sarah had listened with no concept that only six months later his words would become a gruesome reality she understood all too well, for having lived the same loss. Not of a mother, but of a sister.
“Her father?” He grunted the question. Could he possibly still feel possessive of her, after all this time, and undoubtedly after countless other women had graced his bed?
“Dead.” A single word. The flat line of hope. She didn’t elaborate. She couldn’t. Not since that hateful day had she been able to contemplate explaining those injuries to another soul.
He nodded again, slowly, his eyes digging through her experiences, reading them as though she were speaking. She looked away. The intrusion was not welcome. He had learned all of her Tells back then. She was pretty sure he still knew them.
“When?”
November nineteenth. She closed her eyes for a second as the date whispered through her. “When Lexi was a month old.”
He scraped his fingers over his stubbled jaw. “She is how old?”
“Four. She’s four.”
His expression shifted as he did the math. “I see.”
He smelled so good. Just like she remembered. In fact, everything about him was as she’d remembered. His thick hair, strong face, hard body. Inwardly she groaned, recalling the pleasure of loving him, of being needed by him.
Until he had no longer needed her. How easy it had been for him to discard her. And how she had suffered in the wake of that rejection.
“Syed?”
He flinched at her use of his name. He had simply been ‘Sy’ to her back then.
“You can’t just come back like this.” She swallowed convulsively. His eyes dropped to the smooth skin of her exposed shoulder. As if of their own volition, his fingers drew to the fabric of her sweater and lifted the collar, where it had fallen low. They brushed her flesh and the contact sent darts of awareness through her.