Marriage Behind the Façade

No, he’d been dissolute long before Sydney came along. He’d indulged every appetite, every whim. It had been great fun.

At first.

But in the last couple of years, the more he’d pushed the envelope, the emptier he’d felt.

And she seemed to fill that emptiness somehow.

“I’m going to need internet access,” she said, cutting through his thoughts. “I have work to do while I’m here.”

“There is Wi-Fi,” he told her. “I will have someone give you the password.”

“Thank you.” Her fingers drummed against the side of the cup. He heard her draw breath, as if she was planning to speak, but she said nothing. Several more times she tried, until he finally speared her with a look, pinning her into place.

“Say it, habibti.”

She was looking at him with those big grey eyes, her long lashes sweeping to her cheeks and back up again as she let her doubts war with her desire to speak.

Then she bit her lip, and he forced himself not to turn away. Forced himself to deal with the slice of pain that shafted into him, the flood of desire that pooled low in his groin.

He would conquer this ridiculous need.

She was a woman, like any other. She was not special, or different. She possessed nothing that he couldn’t obtain elsewhere. Whatever pull she had on him, whatever imagined void she seemed to fill … she was not irreplaceable. No woman was. He knew that better than most.

Her expression changed by degrees, turned fierce, and he knew she’d made up her mind. He relished her fierceness. It was far better than wide-eyed defeat.

“I want to know why you never brought me here,” she burst out, gesturing at him, her hand encompassing his entire body as she swept it up and down. “This is who you are—the clothes, the desert—but you never let me see it.”

She leaned toward him then, her eyes stormy. “Did I embarrass you that much?”

There, she’d said it. She’d finally put voice to the pain that had been nagging her since the moment she’d arrived and seen him dressed in traditional clothing. This was who he was. This was his life, his heritage, and he’d never allowed her to be a part of it.

She knew why, but she wanted to hear him say it. She wanted him to admit to her that he’d regretted taking her for his wife. Her heart thundered, her pulse throbbed and her breath razored in and out of her chest. She needed to hear him say it.

To her face this time.

Not that she was in any danger of forgetting, of succumbing to his considerable charm, but she wanted the pain front and center so long as she was here. If she kept it there, it would act as a shield.

He’d removed the headdress between the time she’d seen him earlier and now. His dark hair was wavy, thick, and she remembered threading her hands into it, pulling his mouth down to hers as she lay beneath him in their bed.

Her heart turned over at the thought. Warmth gathered in her belly. A knot of something she dared not name tightened in her core.

No. Those memories had nothing to do with now.

“You did not embarrass me.” Malik’s handsome face was carefully blank, and though the words were what she wanted to hear, she did not believe them. He was too stoic, too detached. “We would have come here eventually.”

“Eventually,” she repeated, unable to keep the bitterness from her voice. He would not tell her the truth, even now. Had she truly expected it?

“What do you wish me to say, Sydney?” he demanded. “It was not foremost on my mind, I have to admit. I was more concerned with how long I had to wait until the next time I could get you naked.”

Sydney set the coffee cup down, grateful that she didn’t clang it into the saucer. “Why can’t you just admit the truth?”

His dark eyes flashed, his expression hardening. “Why don’t you tell me what this truth is and stop beating around the bush, as you Americans say?”

“You know what it is. You just won’t say it.”

He got to his feet, gazed down at her with that cool disdain she’d come to hate. He’d always shut down whenever she’d pressed him about anything. And she’d been so blinded by love that she hadn’t seen it for the warning sign it was.

“If this is how you plan to spend the next forty days, we will never be divorced,” he said.

She lifted her chin. She’d never really confronted him about anything. They hadn’t been together long enough to truly argue, and she wasn’t a confrontational person. But she was feeling so frustrated, so disoriented being here with him now, and she was fed up. Fed up with hiding behind a mask, with worrying that she didn’t fit in or that she was embarrassing to those she cared about. She’d been trying to fit in since she was a child, and she was suddenly unwilling to do it with him for even a moment longer.

“Why is it suddenly my fault? Why am I the one causing the problem? You’re the one who can’t admit to the truth.”

“I don’t do drama, Sydney,” he growled. “Either say what you so desperately want to say, or be quiet.”

Fury roiled in her belly like a living thing. She pushed her chair back and stood, unwilling to allow him to stare down at her. Or to stare down at her from so great a height, she amended, since he was still taller than she was.

Fine, he wanted to hear it, she was not holding back a moment longer. She’d already held back for far too long. Time hadn’t eased the pain, but it had at least allowed her to come to terms with it.

“I think you were ashamed of me,” she accused him. “And I think you didn’t want to bring me here because you regretted marrying me.”

His laugh was bitter. “And this is why you left me? Why you walked out in the middle of the night? Because of your own insecurities?”

“I left a note,” she said, and felt suddenly ridiculous. A note? She’d packed her suitcase and fled because she’d been hurt, confused and suddenly so unsure of herself. She’d needed time to think, time to process everything. She’d never thought, never believed for a moment, that an entire year would pass without any communication from him. She’d been impulsive, reckless.