Chapter Five
FOR JUST A few short blissful moments, Malik felt human again. Getting out of the frigid clothes that had stuck themselves to his body and stepping beneath the hot sprays of the surprisingly powerful jets, he didn’t even begrudge the designer their overly lavish decorative style.
Calling a truce with Hana had also felt…
right. As had admitting that he’d acted a little too quickly with regards to their engagement.
He was still convinced it was the right decision, the more he knew of her made the idea of a marriage between them impossible.
But that was different to not having heard her out before calling off the wedding.
He bent his head beneath the water and let out a sigh he felt he’d been holding on to for longer than he knew. And gave himself another blissful moment before reluctantly turning off the shower. He had just wrapped himself in a towel when a sharp, high pitched alarm sounded throughout the villa.
Hana!
The shocking sound launched his pulse into overdrive, and his mind towards panic as he launched from the bathroom of the master suite and back towards the living area.
And it took him a moment to try to understand what he was seeing. Partly because he couldn’t quite see through the thick black smoke billowing upward and out from the small metal pan on the stove.
Hana was flapping a tea towel at the stove, but before he could shout to warn her, the material caught the flame from the gas still heating the pan.
A scream tore from her mouth and she started to slap the rag, now engulfed in flames, against the counter where there were packets and jars and a roll of highly flammable kitchen paper.
Biting back a curse, he stalked straight into the middle of the eye of the storm, removed the towel from Hana’s hands, put himself between her and anything else she could destroy, and tossed the rag into the sink and turned on the water—without breaking eye contact with her.
He glared at her as if he could telepathically convey his frustration, but all she did was look up pleadingly at him with those honey-coloured eyes.
‘Are you trying to kill us?’ he said when he finally found his voice.
‘I’m sorry, I was just trying to make dinner. I thought that if we ate some food, maybe… I’m sorry,’ she said, wringing her hands and looking horribly like she was going to cry. He’d rather face the fire.
‘Okay. Could you, for just the next—say—hour, perhaps not try to do anything?’
She looked up at him, eyes glittering, misery clear.
‘Go and sit by the fire and just…don’t do anything,’ he commanded as he leaned behind her to turn off the gas still heating whatever had been in the saucepan before it had been cremated. From the look of it, the princess had just successfully managed to burn water.
It took the best part of half an hour to clean up the mess and get rid of the acrid smoke from what turned out to be a packet of instant noodles.
After he’d dealt with that, he finished preparing the dinner Hana had been trying to make for them.
He gathered the strange assortment of food and returned to the fireplace.
Hana was sitting on the floor with her back against the sofa, staring into the fire and listlessly picking at the hem of her robe’s sleeve. She looked so miserable that he wanted to reassure her.
‘Here,’ he said, passing her the plate he’d put together.
Her smile of thanks was small.
‘I take it you’re not much of a cook,’ he offered.
She shrugged her shoulders and scrunched her nose. ‘I mean, I’ve spent a lot of time in the palace kitchens. I’ve just not…actually cooked anything before,’ she conceded.
He smiled. No, he could imagine that a princess hadn’t been taught anything as mundane as cooking.
‘You do, though,’ she observed.
‘Mmm?’
‘Cook,’ she clarified.
‘I do when I go out into the desert alone.’
Her eyes grew wide.
‘You go out there alone?’
He laughed in spite of himself. ‘Yes, that’s actually what I like most about it,’ he admitted.
She shivered as if the thought was something terrible to her.
‘You don’t like being on your own?’ he asked.
Something in her face changed and she shook her head.
‘No,’ she said, and perhaps usually that would have been enough. Normally, Malik wouldn’t have even wanted to know more.
But there was something about the darkness of the night, the storm outside, the flames in front of them, that allowed for the whispering of secrets and truths that might not have been shared under any other circumstances.
‘Why not?’ he heard himself ask.
Her gaze flickered between him and the distance.
‘I’m much younger than my siblings,’ Hana began to explain.
‘The oldest, my brother, Rashad, was already a teenager when I was born, and my closest sibling in age, Noor, was already seven. They didn’t really want to play with an annoying baby all the time,’ she replied in a voice that Malik most definitely did not recognise as Hana’s.
It was a voice that spoke of anger and resentment, things he simply didn’t associate with the Sheikha of Omrhain.
‘So…’ she continued and shrugged, ‘I was alone a lot. But Amara, my nursemaid, she was all the company I needed.’
The determination with which she spoke was something that he was beginning to associate with the princess. Determination and positivity. He wondered what that was like. To be so bright, so sunny. Even in the eye of a storm like the one that raged around them.
But the way she described her siblings made him think about how close he’d been to Ishmail, in spite of their parents.
Ishmail had never begrudged him, despite being born to the woman who replaced his own mother.
Ishmail never treated Malik with anything other than the fiercest of brotherly love.
It might have, in fact, been the only thing that saved him.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said then, feeling the deep well of hurt that had caused Hana to feel so alone.
‘That’s okay. It doesn’t matter. I still love them,’ she said fiercely.
And that was when he saw it. The truth of the Sheikha of Omrhain. The way that this woman would love, even in the face of such rejection. It was the opposite to anything Malik had ever known.
Something in Malik’s expression made Hana worry that she’d said something wrong, and she ended up doing what she always did. Over explain.
‘Really, they probably all deserve medals for having put up with me over the years,’ she said, unconsciously repeating what she’d heard her middle brother saying.
‘What is that supposed to mean?’ Malik asked.
‘Well…’ She shrugged. ‘Just that I tend to cause…problems for my family.’
Malik’s frown turned into a scowl and Hana panicked. She’d clearly said something wrong. She just couldn’t work out what. And she couldn’t allow the situation between their countries to get even worse.
‘Please don’t get me wrong, they’re very understanding. After all, it wasn’t easy for them.’
‘What wasn’t?’
‘The loss of our mother,’ she said, swallowing around the lump in her throat.
‘I can’t imagine it was easy for you either,’ he pointed out.
‘No, but it’s different for me. I didn’t know her.
My experience of her is…’ Hana searched for the right word, one that would make sense of the complicated feelings she had about her birth.
She loved her mother, but it wasn’t the person she missed.
It was… ‘An impression. Like a relief. A shape left by absence,’ she concluded a little sadly.
A yearning for something that she’d never had.
‘But they had years with her, so they know exactly who they’re missing. ’
Malik stared at her in the firelight.
‘Do you blame yourself?’ he asked, hesitantly. His tone, it was…as though it were important for him to know. As though he wanted to understand.
‘I don’t blame myself, but I feel responsible,’ she said, putting it into words for the first time.
He nodded as if he understood. As if it spoke to something in him. But whatever it was, his next question interrupted her before she could ask.
‘And your father?’ Malik asked eventually, putting aside his plate as if his hunger too had disappeared.
‘He’s very busy, but when it’s just the two of us it’s wonderful,’ she replied sincerely. She loved that time. He would tell her stories about a mother that she didn’t remember and that he couldn’t forget. He never did it when her siblings were around, as if he too felt guilty, ashamed, even.
Malik was staring into the fire, his thoughts unreadable.
‘I was sorry to hear about your brother,’ she said, quietly.
He grimaced and shook his head as if to dislodge her words. ‘There’s still hope,’ he said tonelessly, as if he was clinging to a lie he no longer believed himself.
‘I like him,’ she replied, choosing her tense carefully to protect his feelings. ‘He’s a nice man,’ she said into the silence.
‘You met him?’ Malik asked, surprised.
Hana let the smile she felt at the memory show. ‘Yes. He visited a few times, about seven years ago? If you think I’m awkward now, you should have seen me then,’ she admitted ruefully. ‘I may have spilt something on his robes.’
‘I bet he didn’t say a word,’ Malik surmised, focused on something in the distance that Hana would never see.
‘No, he didn’t. He’s very forgiving.’ Hana looked down at the hands in her lap, playing with the frayed hem of her robe.
‘Is that why you need to marry?’ He cut a glance her way and she smiled, a little tiredly.
‘I’m accident prone, not naive, and certainly not stupid.
I’m a royal. I understand duty and I understand the sacrifices we make for it. ’
‘Is that what marriage to me would have been like? Sacrifice?’ he said, but the thing that caught Hana’s heart the most was that his question wasn’t angry, but genuinely curious—as if it was something he almost expected.
‘No. I would have loved it,’ she insisted, perhaps a little too eagerly.
Malik barked out a laugh. ‘I think most who know me would disagree.’