As she listened Izzy’s heart was hammering and ridiculous hope was suddenly blossoming inside her tight chest to such an extent that it was a challenge to breathe. ‘And why was that?’
‘I do not think I could live without you in my life,’ Rafiq grated between his teeth, as though the words were being torn from him under the pressure of the cruellest torture. ‘You have transformed my life and I will do just about anything not to return to the life I led before I met you. It was empty, joyless. My sole focus was becoming King, and my sole interest was this country. Now…wrong though it is in my position…you are my main focus!’
‘Well, I don’t see what’s wrong with that or why you should get so worked up about sharing that with me,’ Izzy told him softly. ‘I think what you’re saying is that you love me.’
‘You don’t love me when you can ask about those options all these months on!’ Rafiq shot at her rawly, his pain and vulnerability palpable to her.
‘No, I just wanted to know where I stood and now I know that I’m standing exactly where I want to be,’ Izzy murmured gently as she crossed the room to his side. ‘Because I love you too. I started falling for you the day we met but you walked away, and I would never have seen you again if I hadn’t traced you because I’d fallen pregnant.’
‘I wouldn’t be so sure of that. Misguided and unwise though it was when I was being expected to take a wife again, I had your name and your address and sooner or later I would have used that information to see you again because I don’t believe that I could’ve stayed away!’ he confessed in an emotional surge. ‘I wanted you the moment I first saw you and I never stopped wanting you, not for a moment. I didn’t even look at another woman after being with you.’
Izzy stretched up tender hands to frame his lean, devastatingly handsome features. ‘It was pretty much the same for me. Is that why you said that you believed in fate?’
‘Yes, I believe we were fated to meet, fated to be together,’ he told her raggedly. ‘You really do love me?’
‘You’re so very easy to love,’ she murmured, her heart lurching at the longing, the need for reassurance that she could see in his beautiful eyes, this man, who had known neither the love of his mother nor the love of his first wife, who did not even understand or fully believe that he could inspire love in any woman.
His essential humility had fooled her into crediting that he was merely staying married to her to preserve the status quo and keep his heirs in Zenara. How much blinder could she have been not to recognise that a man who still held her all night even when there was no prospect of sexual satisfaction had to truly care about her?
‘So at the hospital when you said, “There is only one you”—’
‘I was admitting that I loved you and that you are irreplaceable,’ he proffered tautly. ‘I was so scared that something would go wrong, that the staff would automatically prioritise the heir to the throne’s survival over yours…should there have been that horrible choice. We could, conceivably, have other children but I could not replace you, the woman I love, with anyone. I have never known such fear.’
‘Oh, Rafiq,’ she sighed, wrapping both arms around him, rejoicing in the strength of his tall, well-built physique. ‘If only you had told me sooner how you felt.’
‘My mother and Fadith showed me that women don’t appreciate men who get too emotional,’ he confided in a tight undertone. ‘I didn’t want you to think less of me. I didn’t want to appear weak in your eyes. Weakness is not an attractive trait and I was trying to win your love.’
‘And all the time you already had my love,’ she whispered with a huge smile bright with happiness. ‘Just as I couldn’t recognise your feelings, you couldn’t recognise mine.’
‘I’ve never been in love before, only in lust, and that only briefly and never with anyone who mattered to me beyond that level. But it was different with you from the start. I began falling for you the minute you told me about the guy who wore eyeliner because nobody ever chats to me about stuff like that,’ he admitted ruefully. ‘I loved how natural you were with me. I didn’t want to tell you who I was. I didn’t want to walk away from you, but I wasn’t free to do what I wanted. I had promised my uncle that I would remarry so that Zayn could have another few years of freedom before being forced to marry and procreate for my benefit. And in the light of that promise, it would have been wrong for me to seek to see you again.’
‘And yet you still went to the trouble of finding out where I lived. How did you find out?’
‘I suspect that someone at the rental agency you worked for was bribed. I didn’t ask for the grubby details. I just wanted the information even though I knew I was only tempting myself with what I couldn’t have, because seeing you again would only have made the idea of marrying some other woman more of a nightmare than it already was.’
Rafiq freed her and strode over to open the safe in the wall, extracting a small box from it. ‘I was saving this for your twenty-second birthday next week but now seems more like the right moment,’ he breathed with a flashing smile as he handed the box to her.
Izzy lifted the lid on a glittering diamond eternity ring, and he removed it from its velvet
