One Night with a Seductive Sheikh: The Sheikh's Redemption / Falling for the Sheikh She Shouldn't / The Sheikh and the Surrogate Mum

He went on. “It was a mess, but I thought the passion we shared made up for the drawbacks. I thought you thought that, too. And though I didn’t believe in my ability to make anyone happy, when you claimed to love me, you gave me hope that you saw in me what I didn’t. I thought you’d give me the time I needed to trust myself with the new feelings, the unknown needs, the terrible vulnerability. But you didn’t.”

“Haidar …”

Her plaintive objection faltered. He was right. She hadn’t. It suddenly no longer mattered why she hadn’t. The fact remained.

The flow of his bitterness continued. “All these years, I rationalized your parting words, excused them. Excused you. I told myself that you lashed out when you saw me out of control emotionally for the first time and feared I’d turn morbidly possessive and controlling. I told myself you had every reason to worry with the gross imbalance of power between us. I kept thinking I must have scared you, made you say what you did to ensure I wouldn’t come after you, never stopped imagining how it could have been if I hadn’t. I never accepted that the woman I loved considered me a banal adventure. I never believed, not in my heart, that you never loved me at all.”

Before she could cry that his heart had seen what had been in hers, he went on, “Now I have to accept that you never did. At the first test, you proved it. What you heard me say could have been interpreted in different ways. You chose the worst one. You’d already condemned me based on the word of your declared enemy. You didn’t think me worth the chance to defend myself. All you thought of was how to protect your pride, how to avenge yourself. As if I’d been your enemy all along, not the man you claimed to love.”