‘When things are settled.’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I will be able to visit you from time to time. It won’t be the same, but…’ His words tailed off as he saw the frozen expression on her face.
‘What, and become your English mistress, while you take a bride back in Maraban?’
‘I have no bride in Maraban!’ he grated.
‘Not yet! But soon you will!’ She let out a deep sigh. ‘Having to be content with little bits of you, when I’ve had…had…’ Only now her words tailed off, too. She had been about to say that she had had all of him, but that hadn’t been true, had it?
She had had his company and his laughter and his body, but there had never been any mention from Khalim of the most important thing of all.
Love.
She shook her head, fighting to keep her dignity. He would remember her as his proud, independent Rose, not a snivelling wreck of a woman. ‘No, Khalim,’ she said firmly. ‘It won’t work.’ She pictured a life where she would always be waiting. Waiting for the infrequent phone call. Waiting for news that he had taken a wife at last. News of his wedding. Or of his baby, perhaps…She shook her head as the pain lanced through her again.
‘Better we end it now, Khalim. Cleanly and completely. At least that way we’ll be left with our memories, instead of destroying what we once had.’
Had he really imagined that she would agree to his outrageous suggestion? Could he honestly see Rose resigning herself to a lifetime of playing the understudy? And yet he did not want to let her go. Damn her! He knew that she still wanted him, just as much as he wanted her—so why could she not just agree to his proposition?
His mouth tightened, and he removed her hands from where they lay locked upon his shoulders.
‘And that is your last word on the subject?’
She met the anger in his eyes and she turned away rather than face it. She did not want her last memory of Khalim to be one of smouldering rage. ‘Yes,’ she said.
‘So be it,’ he said, with chilling finality. ‘Philip is waiting.’
She heard him leave the room and go to answer the door, heard him speaking in an undertone to Philip, and then suddenly he was back and she whirled round to find him looking remote and frozen, and she guessed that reality really was beginning to kick in. She wanted to go up and comfort him again, but there was something so forbidding about the icy set of his features that she didn’t dare.
She wondered if her face showed that inside her heart was breaking. ‘Goodbye, Khalim.’
He thought how detached she looked, as if nothing could touch her. And perhaps nothing could—for he certainly could not. She wanted no part of him, unless she could have everything of him. She wanted too much! ‘You will continue to live here?’ he questioned.
‘How can I?’ She meant—how could she possibly stay in a place which had been filled with his presence if he was no longer there? How could she bear to face the empty space on the bed beside her? Or consign herself to being without his warm body enfolding hers night after night?
‘The deeds of the house are in your name,’ he said. ‘I bought it for you.’
‘And why did you do that?’ she demanded. ‘As a kind of insurance policy?’
‘You have a way of reducing everything down to the lowest possible denominator, don’t you, Rose?’ he stormed. ‘It was supposed to be an act of generosity—nothing more sinister than that!’
But suddenly she felt cheap. So this really was the pay-off, was it? An expensive house in Chelsea to compensate for the fact that her sheikh lover had left her!
‘I don’t want your charity, Khalim!’
His face grew cold. ‘Then please accept it as my gift, for that was the only way it was intended. Goodbye, Rose.’ His black eyes raked over her one last time, before he turned away and out of the room without a backward glance.
Rose waited until she had heard the front door slam shut behind them and then counted slowly to a hundred, before she allowed herself the comfort of tears.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
‘ROSE, are you mad?’
Rose calmly finished placing the last of her clothes into a suitcase, and clicked the locks into place before looking up at Sabrina—a particularly glowing-looking Sabrina, she thought, with a brief pang of envy. But that was what being newly married did for you, wasn’t it?
‘No, I am certainly not mad. Why should I be?’
‘Because this house is beautiful, and if Khalim wants you to have it—’
‘I can’t live here without him, Sabrina!’ Rose thought how strained her voice sounded. Well, at least it would match the strain on her face. ‘Can’t you understand that?’