He let his head drop back and started counting the small fretwork panels that decorated the ornate ceiling. He hadn’t done that since he’d been a recalcitrant schoolboy either. ‘She’s on sabbatical.’
‘Zach,’ his brother said in that tone.
Zach blew out a breath. ‘Do we really need to have this conversation now?’ Because he was starving and a seven-course dinner was about to be served in the banquet hall.
His brother eyed him uncomfortably. ‘I don’t know. Do we?’
‘Not in my mind.’
‘Fine. But first tell me why you look worse than you did when you returned from your kidnapping in the desert.’
‘I don’t know. Perhaps I’m not getting my beauty sleep,’ he quipped, deadpan.
Unfortunately Nadir didn’t laugh. ‘She left you, didn’t she?’
‘Who?’
‘Damn it, Zach, I’m about—’
‘Yes, she left me,’ Zach grated. ‘Happy?’
He stalked away from his brother and vaguely considered hurling an eighteenth-century Persian vase against the wall. It would probably shatter in a very satisfying manner.
‘Want a drink?’
He hadn’t heard Nadir go to the drinks cabinet and he stared down at the two tumblers in his hand. ‘No.’ He didn’t want a drink. He didn’t want much of anything. The feeling of hollowness he’d experienced just after their father had died had returned tenfold.
‘Fine. I’ll have them both.’
Zach nearly laughed. His brother was trying to stage an intervention, and he loved him for it, but he was absolutely hopeless at the task.
Throwing himself into an armchair that was about as comfortable as a wooden plank, he regarded Nadir moodily. ‘You probably should have told Imogen to come and talk to me instead.’
‘Don’t be an ass.’ His brother took the other plank. ‘So, what are you going to do about it?’
Zach looked at him bleakly. ‘Nothing.’
‘Well, that’s healthy.’
‘Listen, brother, I appreciate this, don’t get me wrong—especially since you’ve ditched the King of Ormond for me—but my situation isn’t like yours and Imogen’s.’
‘I don’t know about that but what I do know is that you’ve finally found a woman you love and you’re just going to let her go.’
Did he love her? This last week he’d convinced himself he didn’t but that wasn’t working out that well for him, either. ‘I promised her I would.’
‘Promised her what?’
‘If you love something, you let it go. If it comes back, it was meant to be. If it doesn’t, it never was.’
Nadir looked like he wanted to crack him over the head with one of the tumblers in his hand. ‘If you love something you let it go...? That kind of drivel belongs in fairy tales and greeting cards, not in real life.’
‘It was her decision. I’m not going to be like our father and chase her.’
Nadir sat forward and tilted a glass in his direction. ‘I tell you, if you don’t go to her and tell her how miserable you are without her, I will, because there’s no way I’m losing one of the best regional ambassadors I’ll probably ever have because you’re too screwed up to tell her how you feel.’
‘I’m not screwed up.’
But wasn’t he?
A long buried memory rose up to taunt him as if it had happened yesterday. It was the day Nadir had argued with his father and left Bakaan for good. Being an eager-to-please thirteen-year-old on the cusp of manhood, Zach had wanted to make things right and had gone to his father and offered himself up as a replacement for Nadir. His father had stared at him for what had seemed like an eternity and then he’d started laughing. And he hadn’t stopped until tears had rolled down his hollow cheeks and onto his white robe. Zach couldn’t remember much of anything after that. The only thing he could remember was the hot ball of shame in his stomach as he’d stood before his father rooted to the spot.
Hell. He rubbed his hands over his face. He was so madly in love with Farah it had been easier to let her go than to open himself up to that kind of ridicule again. He looked back at his brother. ‘Do you need the helicopter?’
‘No.’ Nadir shook his head. ‘But take backup this time, will you? If her father doesn’t shoot you out of the sky, your wife might, and with all the changes we’re making we can’t afford to replace it.’