Free Marriage Behind the Fa?ade by Lynn Raye Harris Page B

distance, hanging on his every word, looking at him as if he were the only person in the world besides her.
    As they’d gotten older, her behavior changed, but only slightly. She became subtler with her adoration, but it was still there. He’d felt as if she were suffocating him, though he rarely saw her and never spent time alone with her.
    And then he’d thrown a fit when his father had summoned him and told him it was time for the wedding to take place. He’d been angry, and he’d gone to Dimah, railed against her.
    “She killed herself,” Malik said, remembering. “Because I told her I hated her.”
    He didn’t miss the sharp intake of breath, the little gasp. She would despise him even more now.
    “Oh, Malik.” And then she squeezed his hand again. It was meant to be comforting, but the gesture was somehow more important to him than that. More profound. “It wasn’t your fault.”
    He could still see Dimah’s face. The way he’d crushed her dreams. “How could it not be? We were to be married, and I told her I hated her—because without her, I wouldn’t be forced to do this thing.”
    “You aren’t responsible for her actions,” Sydney insisted. “No one is. She made a choice.”
    Malik could only stare. He wanted to believe, but he would not do so. Because he deserved to feel the pain of what he’d done. “She would not have made this choice if I’d quietly done my duty.”
    “You don’t know that.”
    Her fingers were threaded through his now. He wondered if she knew it. He raised their clasped hands, turned hers over until he’d bared her pale wrist. Pressed his mouth there because he’d been dying to do so.
    He felt the shudder pass through her. But it wasn’t a shudder of revulsion.
    “Why are you so willing to forgive me this terrible crime?” he asked. “You of all people should know how selfish I can be.”
    “I—” She dropped her gaze from his. He felt … disappointed somehow. Because now she would agree with him. There was no other choice. “Everyone is selfish from time to time. It doesn’t mean you’re at fault for what your fia—What Dimah did.”
    A surge of feeling blazed inside. She was wrong, of course, but he loved that she defended him. Was that why he’d gone against everything he’d known was right and married her?
    He remembered meeting her, remembered the way her long legs had intrigued him as she’d walked in front of him and talked about the houses she was showing him. And then she would turn from time to time, quite surprisingly, and glare at him. As if she were daring him to say something, anything, that would give her the excuse she needed to end the appointment.
    He’d been captivated, not only by her fierceness, but also by the way she dealt with him. As if he weren’t the least bit attractive to her. He’d found that novel, considering the way women usually behaved when they discovered they were dealing with a bachelor prince.
    Not that he didn’t enjoy the fawning, the coyness, or even the downright bold ways in which women usually approached him.
    But he’d never been treated with thinly veiled hostility. And it had intrigued him.
    “How good you are to defend me,” he murmured against the delicate skin of her wrist. “I remember that you did not always feel so charitable toward me.”
    Her head came up then, her eyes sharp and blazing with emotion. “I still don’t. But I don’t think you should blame yourself for another’s actions, no matter how dramatic.”
    “Is it not my fault that you left me in the middle of the night with hardly an explanation? Is it not my fault that you are here, now? I cannot be blameless in everything, habibti, though I appreciate that you would make me so.”
    “I—I made my own choices,” she whispered harshly.
    Lightning blinked in a chain of succession over the sea. It was like a series of lights being turned on for only a second before flashing out again. Thunder followed, but it was farther