‘Oh, don’t come over all tactful now!’ Izzy interrupted angrily. ‘You assumed that I would give up my children pretty much completely to do…what? Train as a teacher? My children are more important and if you don’t get that, you don’t get anything about me!’
‘It may be that I was guilty of wishful thinking, of hoping that there would not be conflict between us over this issue.’
‘Oh, you’d better believe that there’s going to be conflict!’ Izzy hissed.
‘But there were no false pretences,’ Rafiq insisted. ‘There was a genuine misunderstanding. I took too much for granted when you agreed to marry me. I was too keen to persuade you to marry me for the sake of the children, too relieved by your agreement to go into the matter in proper depth. Neither of us clearly expressed our wishes or intentions.’
‘It should’ve been obvious to you that I always intended to take my children back to the UK with me.’
Rafiq raised a lean brown hand in an infuriating silencing motion. ‘They are my children too.’
‘I’m their mother,’ Izzy stated vehemently.
‘And I am their father. Why should I be any more willing to be deprived of my children than you are?’ Rafiq demanded wrathfully, stunning dark golden eyes ablaze with anger.
‘I wasn’t planning to deprive you of them. You would’ve been free to see them any time you liked!’ Izzy fired back.
‘And how much time do you think I have to travel to the UK?’ Rafiq prompted. ‘In eighteen months, I will be King. My uncle only leaves Zenara for state visits, which are tightly scheduled, and he has little free time for travel. I will no longer be travelling on business. Even now I am bound to a very tight itinerary. I am not and I will not be free to do as I like.’
Izzy breathed in deep and threw her head back, copper curls dancing around her porcelain-pale face. ‘I’m sorry if that is the case but, considering that we agreed to separate before we married, your problems are not my problems,’ she declared, suppressing the guilt his arguments had unleashed inside her and the sensation that she was being unfair. ‘And if you are likely to be that busy, surely the children will be much better off living with me.’
‘For them I will make time, I will always make time,’ Rafiq framed with fierce conviction. ‘Probably because few people made time for me as a child.’
And her heart clenched inside her because she knew that he would make that effort, knew it for sure even while still furiously, bitterly resenting his willingness to believe that she would have been prepared to accept only an infrequent role acting as a mother to her children.
‘This pregnancy may not have been planned but, now that it has happened, I’m fully willing to change and adapt,’ she told him curtly.
Rafiq thrust impatient long fingers through the black hair still tousled by her clutching hands. Her face flamed and she looked hurriedly away from him as if by so doing she could block such thoughts and memories.
‘It’s too late in the day for this conversation,’ Rafiq murmured flatly. ‘I can see that I have offended you and that was not my intention. Perhaps tomorrow we will both be in a more reasonable state of mind.’
‘I still don’t understand how we’re going to work anything out when we both want the same thing,’ Izzy breathed tightly.
‘We’ll work it out because we’re both adults,’ Rafiq countered impatiently. ‘And adults negotiate and compromise.’
Izzy almost urged him to speak for himself because she wasn’t in the mood to compromise, not when it came to being a mother to her own children. That wasn’t negotiable, was it? In that field, she wasn’t prepared to make concessions because she couldn’t afford to bend. It would break her heart to walk away from her babies and deny them her full love and attention. How could he think otherwise?
‘I won’t surrender my rights,’ she whispered tightly as Rafiq reached the connecting door that separated their bedrooms.
Rafiq skimmed dark golden eyes back to her in an electrifying moment of silent communication. ‘We’ll see.’
No, we won’t see, she told herself as she punched her pillow and got back into bed. She wasn’t about to change her mind, no matter what he had to say. Some wedding night, she thought prosaically, cringing at the recollection of the intimacy they had shared before she realised how he saw her. Well, monster was an exaggeration, she conceded grudgingly, but Rafiq certainly did view her as less than the feminine ideal of caring motherhood and that had bitten deep. Why had it hurt so much? Why on earth did she care so intensely about his opinion of her? Why was she so vulnerable when it came to him? Why couldn’t she grow a thicker skin?
In the morning she was heavy-eyed and still at odds with herself. It was both a relief and an annoyance to walk out into the courtyard where breakfast was to be served and be greeted with an apology on Rafiq’s behalf and the news that a major fire in a hotel in the capital city, Hayad, had demanded his presence early that morning. Braced to see him again and deprived of the expectation, she stiffened and her back went rigid. She would be much happier without him, she told herself staunchly.
She was still deep in that uneasy mood when a young man strolled out from under the trees shading the table. He extended a confident hand in greeting. ‘May I join you for breakfast? I’m Rafiq’s brother, Zayn.’
Momentarily, Izzy froze because in the midst of all the drama she had forgotten about his visit. But there he was, tall, lean and as dark as Rafiq in colouring and unmistakeably her husband’s sibling.
