His Desert Bride by Demand by Lela May Wight

Author:Lela May Wight
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2022-04-13T13:22:19+00:00

* * *

Charlotte felt it. The shift.

It wasn’t a dramatic change. It was a change in the atmosphere. Akeem’s head was bare, his hair ruffled, his bearded jaw squared, and his black tunic hung loosely from his broad shoulders. But inside his muscles were taut. Her eyes moved down his throat to the V-neck collar. He reflected nothing but steel, even though his clothing was relaxed.

‘You never should have come at all,’ she said. ‘If you didn’t—’

‘Didn’t what?’

‘Didn’t want me. I know you wanted the girl you thought I was. A one-night stand. But this woman in front of you now. She is an unwanted queen—’

‘Wanting is not the problem. This—’ he waved his hands between them ‘—is the problem.’

‘Me?’

‘This intensity.’

‘You came to me,’ she reminded him. ‘Not the other way around.’

‘I came because I understand—intimately—the disorientation of having nothing to ground you to a world that has been thrust upon you. I wanted you to have something—’

‘Something to ground me?’

‘Yes,’ he lied. Because he’d come here because he hadn’t been able to fight it. The need to be close. The pull. But he would fight it now. He would fight it with everything he was.

‘And when you came in here the past caught up with you?’

‘Not the past, Charlotte,’ he said. ‘You.’

‘At St John’s I came to find you, didn’t I?’ she said.

She’d sneaked past the resident care workers and sought him out. She’d found him asleep and she hadn’t had to say anything. Together they’d crept into the gardens, hand in hand, and hidden under that oak tree.

She’d told him everything. And when she had voiced all the secrets she’d been told to keep quiet—never to tell outsiders—he’d simply held her. He’d let her feel all the feelings she’d kept at bay her entire life.

‘It is not the same,’ he said.

‘You let me grieve for the life I should have had and for the person I should have been.’

And together, over the following weeks, they’d made a plan. They’d chosen a different life.

‘I am not grieving,’ he said.

‘Okay,’ she conceded. ‘But did you ever think that maybe the past has caught up with me, too? That my dad—his betrayal, my past, our past—is something we should talk about? Something I need to talk about?’

‘Your father was a fool.’

‘My father led us here.’

‘I came back to England for you—because of you. Not your father,’ he denied. ‘But this—the past—cannot impede our engagement announcement tonight.’

‘But I am your past,’ she said. ‘How can you separate the two without confronting what that means?’

‘It means nothing.’

Exasperated, she asked, ‘Why is today so important to you?’

‘Imagine eyes, hundreds of them, watching you, knowing your name and everything about you when you know nothing of them. Then imagine standing before them, waiting for them to accept you.’

‘It must have been hard...’ she whispered, scared for the boy he’d once been. Alone. Craving acceptance. She knew the bitter taste of rejection from those who should have accepted her unconditionally. Turning their backs on her. Betraying her.

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