sounds of his friends. All gone. There had only been that arrested look in his thundercloud gaze, and that faintly dazed expression on his harshly masculine, impossibly beautiful face as they’d locked eyes. And that sweet, addictive pulse, long and low and insistent, in her blood. Her throat. Between her legs.
She’d asked for his drink order and lost herself, then and there.
It was no different now, Lucy realized helplessly. She jerked her gaze away from his body, wishing her own did not ready itself for him so quickly, so thoughtlessly. As if nothing had happened between them at all. As if none of it mattered.
“It’s almost Christmas,” she said instead of responding to him. She pulled the wrap she wore tighter around her, and looked out the window instead of at him. “Only a few days to go now.”
“That generally happens around this time of year,” he agreed, though she told herself his voice was not as cold as it had been before. “It is unavoidable, apparently.”
Lucy heard the derision in his voice, and thought, not for the first time, how little she knew this man who had changed the whole of her life. That should not have made her feel too big for her own skin, and yet it did.
“I love Christmas,” she said softly. She sensed more than saw him drop into the chair closest to her, and then he stretched out his long legs and she could scarcely avoid them. Even so, she kept her eyes trained on her own lap. “Growing up, there wasn’t any money for gifts, so on Christmas morning Mum would tell us stories instead. About how we would be princesses when we were older, how we’d never be cold again and how we would eat whatever we liked in golden palaces, bathed in sun and laughter.” She smiled. “That was my favorite part. Even when there were gifts, I preferred the stories. I used to lie by the fire and imagine they all came true.”
She didn’t know why she’d told him that. Surely she should have learned better by now. He was not at all what she wanted him to be, and she could not understand why she insisted on testing that theory. It never ended well.
“I suppose that your story did come true,” he said after a moment, and there was an odd note in his voice. She looked up and found herself snared in his dark gaze. She caught her breath. He waved a hand at the room surrounding them, the paintings on the walls, the lavish furnishings. But then his cruel mouth crooked into that smirk she recognized too well, and whatever warmth she’d started to feel disappeared. “How enterprising of you.”
“Not at all,” she said, squaring her shoulders against that dry, insinuating tone. Meeting his eyes as if he had no power to hurt her, when they both knew better. But what else did she have? What else could she do? “In the stories my mother told me, the handsome man who inevitably swept me away from my former life was kind.”
His dark gray eyes gleamed, but she still did not look away. Whole hours could have passed. Days. And still he gazed upon her as if he were reading into the most shadowed corners of her soul. Lucy was far too afraid of what he might find there.
Restless and something else, something she was afraid to name, she got to her feet and moved away from him. Distance was good, she thought. Safer. She went and stood by the fire that crackled invitingly in the grate, and welcomed the heat of the flames against her skin. Better to be burned by fire than by Rafi. Burns from a flame healed. The kind of damage Rafi inflicted lasted forever.
“I don’t understand you,” he said quietly, in that cold way of his that sliced into her and made her bones weak. “You play the part of the victim so beautifully, but we both know you are no such thing. And yet you never drop the act, not even when we’re alone.”
It was too much. This never-ending assault. Why had she thought that summoning him here would be better than surviving somehow the long insult of his absence? What could she have been thinking?
She whirled to face him, a storm inside of her, building by the moment and tearing her apart.
“What do you want from me, Rafi?” she begged him. She forgot about pride, about shame. She searched his face, her hands open in supplication. “How long do you plan to punish me? I hardly became pregnant on my own, did I?”
He rose to his feet then, his eyes stark, his mouth a tight line. She thought he paled.
“You dare to throw that lie at me?” he asked, his voice the barest thread of sound. “Now? After you have been exposed?”
“Exposed?” She shook her head, reeling, her heart pounding. She felt sick. “Is that what you call it?”
“The word I prefer is trapped,” Rafi growled, advancing on her. He towered over her, his eyes black. Condemning. “Your claims of pregnancy, which I, a man of honor, could only address in one way. Followed by your claims of a conveniently timed miscarriage, barely a month after the wedding. And this after I had proclaimed your innocence, your innate goodness, to the whole of my country. How much of a fool do you take me for, Lucy?”
She stared at him in horror.
“Is that who you think I am?” she asked, stunned. Horrifed.
“That is exactly who you are,” he retorted.
Which made him far less of a fool than she was, she realized, her stomach lurching. This, finally, explained the way he’d treated her for these long months. He despised her. Believed her to be the worst kind of woman.
And she was the idiot who was still in love with him.
CHAPTER FOUR
LUCY stared at him, looking stricken. As if he’d wounded her, deeply and unfairly. Rafi bit back a curse. How did she do that? How could she act as if the truth were a weapon wielded against her?
She is good at what she does, his aide, Safir, had said to him months ago when Rafi had uncharacteristically let some of his anguish at her betrayal slip out. She has made it her life’s work, he’d said.
She really was good at it, Rafi thought. She had lied her way into what was, for her, a spectacular marriage. He was the one who had to suffer the consequences.
“So that’s why you disappeared,” she said after a long moment. “You think I lied about the baby and the miscarriage.” Her brown eyes were wide with distress, and one delicate hand hovered near her throat. This close, he could smell her unique, intoxicating scent. The faintest hint of jasmine, the suggestion of her warmth. He longed to haul her into his arms, to lose himself in her as he had before. “That’s why this is the first time I’ve seen you in more than three months.”
“Despite all evidence to the contrary,” he said quietly, deliberately, holding her gaze with his, “I did not want to suspect you of this. I wanted to believe you were exactly who you claimed to be. A woman as swept away by what happened between us as I was.”
It hurt him to admit that, but it was true. It was just as every one had warned him, though he had been so determined not to believe it in the beginning. But what he had never admitted was that there was some part of him that had been relieved—because if she were that scheming, that grasping, it absolved him of responsibility, didn’t it? Every man had a weakness, even him. And he would spend the rest of his life coming to terms with what his own weakness had wrought.
“You wanted to believe it,” she said softly, her eyes moving over his face as if she searched for something. Her lips trembled slightly
