LITMIR.BIZ

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I wish, Jasmine, so do not try and manipulate me with your body.”

      The sensual fires he’d aroused were doused instantly by his taunt. Thankfully, he didn’t continue the lesson.

      “I will be leaving in forty minutes.” With that, he rose and strode out the door of her workroom.

      Jasmine didn’t know how long she sat there, unable to function. She felt as if he’d ripped out her heart and then laughed at her agony. She hurt too much to feel the pain. When she finally rose and made her way to the wide glass doors that led out to a balcony overlooking the main gardens, it was to see Tariq walking to a royal limousine.

      He was dressed in a black suit, his tie the vivid green of his eyes, his beautiful hair brushed back. She saw him stop and look up at the balcony. Quickly, she stumbled back into the room. From this far, she couldn’t make out the expression on his face, but she knew he hadn’t seen her. Then he stepped inside and the car drove off.

      It was as if his departure released the paralysis that had protected her from her own anguished emotions. Suddenly close to an emotional breakdown, she scurried through the corridors, praying she wouldn’t meet anyone along the way. Once safely behind the locked doors of the exquisite room that was her own, she walked out into the private garden and hid under the spreading tree with the blue-white flowers. The branches were so heavy with blooms that they almost touched the ground, providing her with a scented cave of darkness in which to let go of her torment.

      Her sobs came from somewhere deep inside, wrenched out of her body with such force that she didn’t have breath enough to make a sound. She was destroyed by the sudden insight that she’d been fooling herself. She’d believed that she could love Tariq enough to make him love her, a girl who’d never been loved. She had allowed him every liberty, going so far as to tie herself to him for life. She’d given him her body and her soul, keeping nothing back.

      And now he’d rejected her gift in the cruelest of ways. She was nothing but a possession to him, prized but not irreplaceable. He felt nothing but lust for her. Lust! Her illusions of time healing the wounds of the past shattered under the realization that his actions weren’t born out of pain. He just didn’t care if he hurt her.

      Had he married her only to humble her? Crush her?

      She curled into a ball at the base of the tree and wrapped her arms around her shaking body, trying to breathe through the pain that lay like a rock in her throat. Dusk fell outside but she didn’t notice. She’d cried all the tears she had inside, but her pain was so great she couldn’t move.

      Freed, the demons that she’d drowned in tears descended upon her, wanting their pound of flesh. In Tariq’s land, in Tariq’s arms, she’d almost managed to forget the lack in her. The missing part that made her incapable of being loved. Suddenly, the memories of that terrible day in her childhood when she’d understood the truth flooded over her.

      “Does it bother you that you demanded half of Mary’s inheritance before you’d adopt Jasmine?” Aunt Ella had asked the woman Jasmine had thought was her mother. “After all, Mary is our baby sister.”

      “No. She should’ve known better than to get pregnant by some stranger in a bar. I don’t know what possessed her to have the child.” The sound of ice cubes hitting crystal had penetrated the library door. “We aren’t some charity. How else were Jasmine’s expenses going to be covered?”

      “You got a lot more than that,” Ella had persisted. “Mary’s inheritance from Grandpa was twice the size of ours.”

      “I think of it as adequate compensation for having to accept bad blood into my family. Lord only knows what kind of a loser Jasmine’s father was. Mary was so drunk, she couldn’t even remember his name.”

      Later, when Jasmine had forced herself to ask, Aunt Ella had taken pity on her and told her about Mary. Apparently, in order to avoid any hint of scandal, Mary had moved to America after Jasmine’s birth. She’d never returned. The people who’d raised Jasmine, Mary’s older sister, Lucille, and her husband, James, had already had two children, Michael and Sarah, and had been unwilling to take on another, until they’d been given a financial incentive. Yet they’d gone on to have another child of their own—a beloved younger son named Mathew.

      That day, Jasmine had been slapped in the face with the fact that any care she’d ever known had been bought and paid for. Searching for someone to love her, she’d written to Mary, saying hello. The response had arrived on her thirteenth birthday, a cool request to make no further contact because Mary had no wish to be associated with a past “indiscretion.”

      An indiscretion. That’s all Jasmine was to her birth mother. And to her adoptive mother she was bad blood. Neither Mary nor Lucille had been able to love her. Today, she was forced to accept that the lack hadn’t magically disappeared. She was still unloved. Still unwanted.

      The next day, Jasmine decided there was nothing to be gained by crying over something she couldn’t change. Despite the hurt that existed inside her like a living, breathing creature, she forced herself into her workroom and picked up the scissors she’d dropped the day before.

      She had to do something until she figured out how to handle the situation with Tariq, the man whom she’d married in a blind haze of love. Perhaps she’d made the biggest mistake of her life, but she didn’t want to think about that now. Neither did she want to think about the way her old fears and insecurities had tormented her last night.

      An hour into her work, she heard a telephone ring, but ignored it. There was a knock on her door a minute later.

      “Madam?”

      She looked up to find one of the palace staff at the door. “Yes, Shazana?”

      “Sheik Zamanat wishes to speak with you.”

      Jasmine’s throat locked. About to ask Shazana to tell Tariq that she was busy, she recognized the possible consequences of asking a loyal staff member to lie, and nodded.

      “Please transfer the call to this phone.” She indicated the one near the door of the turret.

      Shazana nodded and left. The phone rang seconds later. Jasmine stood up and walked over. She picked up the receiver…then hung up. Heart thudding, she hurried down the hallway, into her bedroom and out into the garden. The phone rang again just as she escaped. She hid under her tree.

      It was cowardly to hide from Tariq but she couldn’t bear to talk to him, couldn’t bear to hear the voice that she’d dreamed about for years rip her to pieces with the painful truth about her inadequacy. Last night, she’d believed that all her illusions had been destroyed, but today she realized she couldn’t face the total loss of hope. Not yet. Not yet.

      Perhaps an hour later, she emerged and made her way back to her workroom. There was a message on the table by the phone. She picked it up with shaking hands. It instructed her to call Tariq at a given number.

      “Go to hell!” She crunched the note into a ball and threw it into the wastebasket, then began to work on the top she was making. Her movements were jerky and uncoordinated, as for the first time, anger began to simmer under the hurt and sorrow. So Sheik Zamanat expected her to come to heel when he hollered? She almost stabbed the material with her scissors. He was about to learn that his wife was not some toy he could throw aside and pick up whenever he felt like it.

      Tariq hung up the phone for the fourth time. He was annoyed by his wife’s subtle rebellion, but another, more dangerous emotion threatened. That emotion would not let him forget the naked pain in Mina’s eyes when he’d last spoken to her.

      After so long, the anger and hurt he’d ruthlessly controlled for years had shattered its bonds and lashed out. When Mina had voiced her love, he’d felt as if she’d torn open wounds that had barely begun to heal. The almost unbearable pain had sprung from a need that he didn’t want to accept. It had caused him to say things he shouldn’t have.

      Guilt was not something he was familiar with, but pangs of it had

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