gave confirmation with a grudging jerk of his chin.
And Saffy just closed her eyes, because all of a sudden she couldn’t bear to look at him when she had excelled at being such a blind, childish fool all the months they had been man and wife the first time around. He had reappeared after those apparent military trips, filthy, often visibly bruised and cut, always having lost weight…and not once had she questioned the condition he was in, not once had she suspected that he had been brutally ill-treated while he was away from her and prevented from returning from her. In her little cocoon the very fact he was a prince had made entertaining such a suspicion too incredible to even consider. She had assumed that soldiers led a rough and ready life and that such trips were organised to be as realistic and tough as real warfare. And he had never told her, never once breathed a word of what was being done to him, never once sought her sympathy or support…
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ she asked thickly, tears thickening her throat and creating a huge lump there.
‘I didn’t want to upset you. There was nothing you could have done to stop it. Omar was correct. I should never have brought you to Maraban. Our father was a madman and he was out of control, incapable of accepting any form of opposition. It was all or nothing and once I defied him he was determined to break me.’
‘And all over me…all because you married me,’ Saffy muttered, her distress growing by the second as she looked back on her colossally ignorant and oblivious self at the age of eighteen. Little wonder he had ducked her questions, embraced silence, never knowing when he would be with her or torn from her side again.
‘That whole year you were the only thing that kept me going,’ Zahir informed her harshly. ‘Look at me.’
‘No!’ Saffy unfroze finally and flew upright. ‘I have to think about this on my own!’
As she tried to brush past him he closed a hand round a slim forearm. ‘I told you I would tell no more lies or half-truths but I never wanted you to know about that period of my life!’
‘Oh, I know that…Mr Macho-I-suffer-in-silence!’ Saffy condemned chokily, her increasing distress clawing at her control. ‘So when you came back here to me after suffering gross mistreatment and allowed me to shout at you and complain that I was bored and lonely? Just what I need to know to feel like the biggest bitch ever created!’
And, tears streaming down her distraught face, Saffy fled, in need of privacy. How could he do that to her? How could he not have told her? How could he have allowed her to find out all that from his resentful brother? She had known King Fareed wasn’t a pleasant or popular man, but she had had no idea that he was a drug-abusing tyrant capable of torturing his own son if he was disobedient! What an idiot she must have been not to have guessed that something so dreadful was going on! How could she ever forgive herself for that? You were the only thing that kept me going. Why was he still trying to make her feel better by saying that sort of rubbish? He’d been stuck in a virtually sexless marriage while being regularly punished for rebelling against his father’s dictates. And not once had she suspected anything. Was she stupid, utterly stupid, to have been so unseeing?
Saffy took refuge in their new bedroom, which was comfortably removed from the suffocating memories of the older accommodation they had once occasionally shared. She was remembering the condition of Zahir’s back, thinking, although she didn’t want to, of him being whipped, beaten up, hurt and all on her behalf. Zahir with his pride and his intrinsic sense of decency! She ran to the bathroom and heaved but nothing came up and she hugged the vanity unit to stay upright, surveying her tousled reflection with stricken accusing eyes. How could you not know? How could you not see what he was going through?
‘This is why I never wanted you to know. I didn’t want to see you hurt because all of it was my fault…’
Saffy spun round. He stood in the doorway, lean and bronzed and gorgeous in black jeans and a white shirt, so much the guy she loved and admired and cared about. ‘How was it your fault?’ she scissored back at him incredulously.
‘I married you. I brought you back here with me. I placed both of us in a foolish and vulnerable position,’ Zahir stated grimly. ‘I will never forgive myself for that.’
‘You should’ve divorced me the minute the punishments started!’ Saffy launched back at him. ‘How could you be so stubborn that you went through that just for me?’
A faint shadow of a smile that struck her as impossible in the circumstances curved his wide sensual mouth. ‘I loved you…I couldn’t give you up.’
‘I wouldn’t have let you go through that if I’d known! How could you still want me?’ she sobbed in disbelief. ‘I wasn’t even able to give you sex!’
‘The sex was the least of it. Believe me, at the time, consummating our marriage was not my biggest challenge.’ His stunning golden eyes lowered from her shaken face and he held out a hand until she grasped it, allowing him to pull her closer. ‘But I couldn’t seek help or advice for us either. Had anyone known we had those problems my father would have had yet another reason to want you out of my life…’
Saffy dragged in a quivering breath, still reeling from what she had learned. Eyes wet, she pushed her face against his shoulder, drinking in the scent of his sun-warmed flesh, the faint evocative tang that was uniquely his, which made her feel vaguely intoxicated. She was addicted to him, so pathetically addicted. ‘Thank heaven you finally had the sense to divorce me and give the dreadful man what he wanted.’
‘That was probably the one and only unselfish thing I ever did while I was married to you, the only thing I ever did solely for you and not for me,’ Zahir muttered roughly above her down-bent head, his lips brushing across her brow in a calming gesture. ‘I’m not the saint you seem to think. I made appalling errors of judgement.’
Her forehead furrowing, she looked up at him ‘Such as?’
‘Bringing you into Maraban five years ago,’ he specified. ‘Three months after Omar’s death, I found out that he had been murdered…’
‘What?’ Shattered by that statement, she stared up at him.
‘One of the generals told me the truth because the most senior army personnel were becoming nervous about my father’s reign of terror. Omar was beaten up by my father’s henchmen and he died from a head injury. The car crash was simply a cover-up. It was then that I realised that my father really had gone beyond the hope of return,’ Zahir revealed rawly.
‘Oh…my…word,’ Saffy framed sickly. ‘Are you sure?’
‘One hundred per cent.’ Zahir compressed his lips. ‘That’s when I appreciated that keeping you in Maraban was sheer insanity when my father wanted rid of you. I didn’t have the power to protect you. I was putting your life at risk by refusing to divorce you. I was making you a target in my father’s eyes. I’m ashamed it took Omar’s death to make me accept that if I couldn’t keep you safe, I had to let you go…
Saffy’s heart was beating very loudly in her eardrums and she drifted dizzily away from him on weak legs to drop heavily down on a sofa in the corner of their room. ‘So, that’s why the divorce came out of nowhere at me. You honestly thought I was in danger. Why didn’t you tell me the truth then, Zahir?’
‘The truth would have terrified you and I was ashamed that I could not even keep myself safe, never mind my wife. But that was also the moment that, in losing you, my father finally lost
