Chapter Five #3
He stared at Hana as if he couldn’t believe what she had just said. As if it was so impossible to imagine. Hana could tell it wasn’t arrogance, or male pride. It was about ego in the truest sense. It was about what he believed about himself. What people had been telling him since he was a child.
She knew of his father’s reputation for furious outbursts and meanness.
Knew her own father had wanted as little to do with the neighbouring sheikhdom as possible because of it.
Hana might have grown up on the outskirts of her siblings, but she’d always felt connected to her father.
But Malik’s father’s public tirades against his son were legendary.
So much so that Hana doubted Malik’s mother had been able to counter how Malik had felt to have been called a ‘terror’ so publicly.
Hana could have cursed Malik’s first fiancée.
How could she have been so ignorant to cut ties with him because of something so utterly beyond his control?
How had Farrah not seen how much there was to Malik?
How could she not see the extent to which he would sacrifice his own wants and needs for his country, for his brother, his nephew?
That he would stand and bear the scrutiny of the world as a leader, when it was the most painful thing for him to do?
Because that’s how inherently good he was.
There were a hundred ways Malik could have handled being stranded on an island with her, and every single one of them could have been so much worse than how he treated her.
Yes, he’d been angry at first, understandably so.
But he hadn’t used that anger, hadn’t belittled her or mocked her like others might have.
Like her siblings might have. No, he’d controlled it, showing just how many lies there were in his unjustly earned reputation.
Malik’s hand fisted against his leg and she wanted to reach for it, to smooth it open, to take away the tension he felt.
She could see now, just how much she had cost him, cost them both, by spying on him in the spa.
Because had she not done exactly what Farrah had accidentally done?
That was why he’d expected her to have the same response. To run away. Like she had.
Her gaze searched his face. His eyes were fixed on the fireplace so that hers could roam over his strong features, the breadth of his shoulders, his chest, where the towelling robe had come open a little. A chest she knew the feel of.
She closed her eyes against the sight of it, but her mind taunted her with images of him in the spa, braced against the shower wall, water running off him.
She hadn’t lied to him about the burn scar.
She genuinely didn’t see anything horrible in it.
Nor about the condition that had blighted his childhood.
Nothing more than a quirk of genes that he had overcome, stronger and more powerful for it.
Because that’s what she sensed in him. Power. Perhaps that’s what his father had truly feared in his second son.
Hana opened her eyes to find him staring at her, his expression unreadable.
Her heart punched the breath from her lungs as she felt burned by the intensity of his gaze. A fire that she would happily let consume her completely.
The air around them felt thick, as if it wasn’t enough to sustain her any more. As if she needed something else.
Him.
‘Hana…’
He’d said her name a number of times that evening, but never like that. Never with such longing. She wanted to hear him say it again.
She wanted…him.
Her heart tripped over itself, beating in a staccato, making her dizzy. Malik’s gaze flickered down to her lips and back up to her eyes. His jaw clenched, the muscle pulsing in the shadow cast by the fireplace.
The room dropped away from her periphery. Her family, the promise she’d made to do her duty, the plans she had to convince him to change his mind, to go through with the marriage he had so hastily called off… .
Her world reduced to one thing. Him.
She knew what it was like to touch this man, knew what it was like to feel the heat of his body, but it hadn’t been enough then, and it wasn’t enough now. She wanted to know what it was like to feel the touch of his hand, the press of his lips, urgent and demanding.
But just as she went to lean forward to find out, Malik pulled back and shame turned delicious heat into scalding embarrassment on her cheeks.
What had she been thinking?
He had rejected her once already, and there she was making a fool out of herself.
‘Hana—’ Malik said, this time her name sounding like an apology that she didn’t want to hear.
‘No, it’s okay, I’m sorry. I don’t know what that was,’ she lied.
Desperate for something to do, she went to pick up the plates.
‘Hana,’ he tried again, reaching for the plates to put them aside, but she held on to them, a little too hard, and when he released his hold, they slipped from her fingers and crashed to the floor.
Broken bits of ceramic scattered across the floor, but when she heard his sharp inhale she looked up to see that a piece of the plate had cut his forearm. The cut quickly bloomed with blood and Hana took one step back and then other.
She couldn’t do anything but cause trouble, could she?