next day they’d travelled to his father’s home and base, Alhaja Island. Ammar had been horribly remote, barely speaking to her. Hesitantly, Noelle had asked him what had happened and he had said something about a business call, which had made her feel small and unimportant. A business call was more important than his own wedding night?
There had been no time for a proper conversation, and she’d been too young, too inexperienced and confused for a confrontation. She’d kept waiting for Ammar to change back into the man she knew and loved, but he never did.
That evening he’d flown to Lisbon for yet another business engagement. She’d remained on Alhaja, waiting for his return. Before their marriage they’d talked about setting up a house outside Paris, near enough the city for work but a good place for children, for family. She’d had it all planned out, the bookshop she would open in the Latin Quarter, the house they would buy, a cottage really, with wrought iron rails and a blue-painted door. She’d pictured it all, her work, her home, her life, all with Ammar. Dreams, she thought now, the old bitterness corroding her soul. Stupid, foolish dreams. She’d waited for two long, lonely months on Alhaja before she realised Ammar had no plans to return. And in a desperate last-ditch attempt to win her husband back, she’d flown to Rome to meet him.
It hadn’t been easy; she’d had to call her father, coax him into letting her use his private jet. Balkri Tannous did not keep any means of transport on Alhaja, and so she’d been a virtual prisoner with the household staff, a silent, sullen crew. Her father had agreed, surprised yet able to deny her nothing—which Noelle had known—and through several begging phone calls to Ammar’s staff, as well as a helpless-female act with the concierge, she’d contrived to find the name of his hotel and wait in his room dressed only in a silk teddy and stiletto heels.
What had happened afterwards Noelle could not even bear to think about.
Yet now, as she paced her bedroom, she felt her anger desert her and leave a welter of confused regrets in its wake. Why did Ammar want to resurrect their marriage? She had assumed all these years he’d completely forgotten about her but, no matter what either of them felt now, she could not pretend that was true. He hadn’t forgotten. And neither had she.
Noelle sank onto her bed, exhausted by her own emotional wrangling. Anger was so much easier to deal with than doubt, yet she could not even cling to it.
You loved me once.
She had. At least, she thought she had, but had she really even known him? How could the tender, gentle man she’d loved have turned into a cold, unfeeling brute as soon as their vows were said? And what of the man he was now, and surely always had been?
I’ve done too many things already I could be arrested for. One more won’t matter.
Noelle didn’t want to think what he had meant by that. She’d learned, since the annulment, that Tannous Enterprises was said to be corrupt. She had harboured vague ideas of white-collar crime, had wondered if Ammar had been involved. She’d assumed, in an effort to gain some much-needed distance, that it was just more proof she’d never really known him. More evidence that any consideration or tenderness he’d shown her in those first few weeks had been nothing but a charade.
Now she wondered. Today she’d seen in Ammar a glimmer of the man she’d once loved, and it terrified her. What if that man—the tender man she’d once loved—was the real Ammar?
It would be so much simpler if she hated him. If he made her hate him. And surely she had enough reason to … and yet. And yet.
She didn’t.
Eventually she fell into bed and a restless, troubled sleep. When dawn broke she felt no more refreshed, and had no more answers.
She showered and dressed, this time in a pair of jeans and a pale pink sweater she’d found in the wardrobe. They were too big, but not so much that she couldn’t wear them. She cinched the jeans with a wide leather belt and rolled the sleeves up on the sweater. Had Ammar himself bought the clothes for her? It felt strangely intimate to imagine him picking things out for her, knowing her size. Her old size, at least, before she’d surrendered to Arche’s ideal of feminine beauty, which was stick-thin and relentlessly plucked and manicured.
She opened the shutters on her bedroom window and blinked in the glare of the morning sun. The sky was a hard, bright blue, the desert a stark and endless stretch of sand. She could see nothing but sand and rock and sky. She swallowed hard and closed the shutters again.
I want us to be husband and wife.
His voice had invaded her dreams, and all night as she’d tossed and turned she’d endured a procession of memories she’d been trying to banish for years. Those poignant, tender days in London, when Ammar had seemed like a different man. The man she’d fallen in love with.
Well, he wasn’t that man now. And, more importantly, she wasn’t that woman, that naive girl who believed in love and wanted marriage and babies and a house in the country. She was a different person, stronger, harder and definitely more independent. She’d spent the last ten years building her career and making sure she needed no one. She sure as hell didn’t need Ammar, and some time towards dawn she’d realised the best way to convince him to let her go was to show him just how different she was.
Resolutely Noelle headed downstairs in search of Ammar. She wandered through the marble foyer and several sparely elegant reception rooms before she found him in the back, in the kitchen. He stood by a floor-to-ceiling window that framed a sweep of sand, dressed in a worn grey T-shirt and faded jeans. His feet were bare and he held a mug of coffee as he stared out at the desert, a faint frown wrinkling his forehead, his eyes narrowed against the glare of the sun. For a stunned second everything in Noelle contracted with longing and regret. This was what she had wanted so desperately. A normal life, a normal marriage. Mornings with sunshine and the scent of fresh coffee and a hello kiss.
Well, she had two of those things today. Definitely not the third. She cleared her throat. ‘Good morning.’
Ammar turned, his expression lightening a little as he took in her outfit. ‘Not so bad,’ he said, gesturing to her clothes. ‘The fit.’
Noelle nodded tersely. She did not know how to act. Fighting every statement exhausted her, but being civil felt like a surrender.
‘Coffee?’ Ammar asked, and she nodded again. It seemed easier not to speak at all. She watched him move to the kitchen counter and pour coffee from the chrome pot. ‘Do you still take cream and two sugars?’
‘No,’ Noelle said, and her voice sounded harsher than she intended. ‘I drink it black.’
He arched one eyebrow in silent question and handed her her undoctored coffee. Noelle cupped her hands around its warmth, wondering how to begin. Ammar seemed different this morning, not approachable exactly, but less autocratic. She saw his laptop was open on the table, to a world news website. The moment felt, bizarrely and unbearably, normal.
‘When did you stop taking cream and sugar?’
‘About five years ago, when I started working for Arche.’
‘Arche?’
‘The department store I work for, as a buyer.’ She glanced pointedly at the diamond-encrusted watch on her wrist, given to her by her father on her twenty-first birthday. ‘I’m twenty-three minutes late for work right now, with no explanation. You might cost me my job, Ammar.’
