Sheikh's Purchased Princess by Sophia Lynn

second thought, he wrapped his arms around her.
    For a long moment, she simply wept into his shirt, uncaring what she looked like or what was happening to her. It felt so good to simply let everything go, but the problem with letting everything go was that eventually, you had to pick it up again.
    “Oh god, I'm so sorry,” she said, stepping back and wiping her eyes. “I didn't mean…”
    “No problem at all, I'm sure,” the man said, gazing at her with curiosity and a compassion that seemed endless. “Only why don't you come with me? You look a bit overheated, and I can get you some iced tea at that little cafe there.”
    Emily's first impulse was to refuse, but then for some reason, she fell into step beside him. He was older than her, she could tell, though she could not hazard a guess as to how much. She guessed that he was a grad student, or perhaps a very young professor at the most.
    In her tattered clothes and with her high school looks, she felt very young sitting next to him, but as he spoke to her with patience and kindness, she lost some of her nervousness and fears.
    When he sat back with an appreciative gleam in his eyes and told her that she was perhaps the cleverest person he had spoken to all day, she felt her chest puff with pride.
    “Do you come here often?” she asked, feeling greatly daring. “I mean, here to this coffee shop?”
    “I do,” he said, a smile creasing his eyes. “As a matter of fact, I will be here tomorrow, if you are interested…”
    ***
    “We only knew each other a few weeks. Your hair was red then,” Adnan said, and she felt those traitorous tears in her eyes again; if she wasn't careful, she would start weeping like the sixteen-year-old she had been. A part of her hated that girl, the one who had given her heart away so easily, but a part of her was fiercely protective as well. The way she had grown up, there was precious little time or energy for anything as lovely and frivolous as a love affair.
    “It might have only been a few weeks to you,” she whispered, “but it was everything to me. My parents were getting divorced. I had no friends. I was fighting against a curriculum designed for students two years older than I was…you were all I had.”
    Adnan reached for her again, but she pulled back.
    “Why did you leave?” Emily demanded. “Why did you decide that I wasn't even worth saying goodbye to?”
    Something flickered across Adnan's face, there and gone again. With a sinking feeling, she realized that whatever he said to her next was not going to be the truth.
    “There were pressing matters back in Nahr,” he said finally. “Things I could not get away from. Emily, you were and are a brilliant young woman. I never thought for a moment that you would struggle in my absence or that…”
    “Never thought?” she exploded. “I was hanging on by my fingernails. I was barely clinging to sanity, and you never thought I would miss you?”
    Adnan flinched as if she had thrown fire at him.
    Good , she thought angrily. Let him know how it feels to be so confused, so afraid…
    “I loved you,” she continued. “From the moment I saw you…”
    He looked up at her, shocked.
    “You were barely more than a child,” he protested, but she shook her head.
    “It doesn't matter,” she cried. “I was in love with you, from the bottom of my heart to the top, and seeing you was all that kept me going through it all. I would have done anything for you. I would have listened to anything, accepted the entire you—”
    “I had no way of knowing that,” Adnan said, his voice low. “I thought I was just another adult to you, someone you were spending time with because…because…”
    “Because I was lonely?” Emily laughed, the sound as harsh as the cawing of a crow. “Oh Adnan, I've been lonely my entire life. I had never known what it was like to not be lonely until I met you. It was so much more, though. It was love, even if it was new and foolish, it was love,