The Sheikh's Bartered Bride

from his gaze. Her small, feminine fingers traced the

patterns on thee coins for several seconds of silence. Her hand stilled and her head came up. "Do you?"

"Do I value you?"

"Yes."

"Can you doubt it?" She was his wife. Someday, God willing, she would finally understand what that meant to a man raised as he had been raised.

"If I didn't doubt it, I wouldn't be asking."

The reminder of her mistrust angered him, but he forced himself to speak in a mild tone, without recriminations. "On the day we arrived in Jawhar, I made you a promise."

She frowned, her lovely skin puckering between her brows. "You promised never to lie to me again."

"And I have not."

She nodded, apparently accepting that at last.

"I made a promise before that, little kitten."

Her face showed her confusion. It was a mark of how impacted she had been by later revelations that she had forgotten something that had been very important to her at the time.

"I promised to always put your needs and desires first from this time forward. Tell me how I could value you more?"

"Are you saying that if it came between something your family wanted and what I wanted, you would choose my wants over theirs?" Her voice was laden with skepticism.

"Yes. That is what I am saying."

"So, if I said I didn't want you to sponsor their living visas?"

"Could you say that and mean it if their lives were in danger?" he asked instead of answering her question.

Her head dropped, her face hidden from him again. "No."

Her continued refusal to see the good in their marriage and in him, frustrated him. "You are very pessimistic."

She jolted, her head coming up. "What?"

"You see only the negative."

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Catherine felt Hakim's words like an arrow piercing her. "I don't see only the negative." But even as she said the words, she wondered at their truth.

His expression told her he didn't have to wonder. He knew she was lying. "You would dismiss our marriage as nothing because of an agreement that has no bearing on our lives together. You seek new evidence at every turn to justify your mistrust of me and your cheapening of our marriage."

"I did not cheapen our marriage!" How dare he say that? She had loved him. It was his and her father's deceit that had cheapened the marriage and she said so.

"I did not dismiss you as nothing and demand divorce the day after we were wed. I did not refuse you the comfort of my body or the affection of my heart. You are angry because love," he said the word scathingly, "did not motivate my proposal of marriage. Yet you professed your love for me and then rejected me and threatened to dishonor me before my people. What is this love?"

Each charge affected her conscience like a prosecuting attorney's court indictment. He had never said he loved her and yet he had treated her with consideration. She had said she loved him, but then threatened divorce within thirty-six hours of their marriage.

"I... " She didn't know what to say.

His words were true and yet it had not been a weakness in her love that had made her do those things, but the strength of her pain. Of her sense of rejection, but he had never actually rejected her.

"You are no doubt sitting there right now planning to tell me not to touch you. No matter that you are my wife. You do not care if I ache with wanting for you. No doubt you will rejoice in the knowledge I am suffering."

"No, I-"

He rode right over her words. "You can easily spurn the intimacy between us."

"It's not easy, " she cried.

He snorted, clearly unimpressed with her response. "I have promised you honesty, do I not deserve the same?"

"I'm not lying."

"Are you saying you plan to share my bed?"

"Yes." She had already decided that for the sake of her pride, she would not fight him on this. She would rather walk back into intimacy with Hakim under her

own steam than deny him and be seduced into his bed anyway. She loved and wanted him too much to deny him.

That fast, his eyes heated with a desire that burned her. He started walking toward her, but she put out her hand.

"Wait."

He stopped.

Before another storm of anger could rise between them, she quickly held up the headdress still clutched in her other hand. "I need to give you this."

His brows drew together in puzzlement, his eyes glittered with wariness. "Why?"

She took a deep breath and then let it out slowly, gathering her thoughts and courage at the same time. "In essence, you bought me with a mining permit."

She had taken a bit to work this all out in her head, but though her father had suggested the marriage, she felt as if she had been bartered in a business deal. She needed to redress that before she could share her body with Hakim again.