The Sheikh's Forbidden Virgin by Kate Hewitt Page B

across the sand to Aarif; his back was to her, one arm braced against the rock overhang. His head was bowed, every taut line of his body radiating anguish. Anger.
    She stood a few metres behind him, her arms creeping around herself in the cold, and waited.
    What could she say? What could he say?
    What, she wondered distantly, could happen now?
    A long moment of silence passed; the horses shifted fretfully and a slight breeze stirred the hair lying limply against her face. Then Aarif spoke.
    ‘What we’ll do,’ he said in a cold, flat voice, as if they were in the middle of a conversation, ‘is tell everyone I found you this morning. You sheltered here alone, and I found a protected place of my own. Then at least your reputation will not be called into question. I don’t think there is anyone in the party who wishes to cast doubt on you or this marriage union.’
    Kalila heard his words echoing relentlessly through her, but they didn’t make sense. He was sticking a plaster on a wound that required major surgery.
    ‘That’s all very well,’ she finally said when she’d found her voice, ‘but it hardly addresses the real situation.’
    ‘I hardly think you want your father’s staff knowing what happened,’ Aarif replied, his voice still cold and so horribly unemotional. ‘I am trying to salvage this mess, Princess.’
    ‘How? By lying?’
    ‘By protecting you!’ Aarif turned around, and Kalila took an instinctive step backwards at the anguished fury twisting his features. ‘God knows I made this mess, and I will be the one to clean it up.’ He spoke with such a steely determination that Kalila quelled.
    ‘How?’ she whispered.
    ‘I will have to tell Zakari.’
    She closed her eyes, not wanting to imagine that conversation, or what it meant for her. For her marriage. ‘Aarif, if you do that, you will ruin my marriage before it even begins.’
    ‘I will tell Zakari that it is my fault—’
    ‘And you think he will believe that? That you raped me?’ She shook her head, disbelief and disappointment warring within her. She didn’t want this, this sordid discussion of what had just happened between them. She couldn’t bear to talk cold logistics when her heart cried out for him now—still—
    ‘I was responsible,’ Aarif insisted in a low voice. ‘I should have stopped, turned away—’ He shook his head. ‘I accused you of being selfish, Kalila, but it is I who have been the most selfish of all.’ He muttered something under his breath and stalked away, his body so taut his muscles almost seemed to be vibrating with a seething self-loathing.
    Kalila took a few tentative steps towards him. She wanted to touch him, to reach him, yet every instinct told her she couldn’t. He had shut himself off completely, walled himself with his own sense of responsibility and guilt.
    Still, she tried.
    ‘Aarif, I could have protested. I could have stopped. We are both to blame.’ His back was to her, and he said nothing. Dragging a breath into her lungs, she forced herself to continue, to lay her heart open to him as her body had been. ‘The truth is, I didn’t want to. I wanted to be with you, Aarif, from the moment you touched me. The moment I touched you, for if we are going to apportion blame, then I was the one who first—’
    ‘Don’t,’ he cut her off, ‘romanticise what was nothing more than a bout of lust.’
    Kalila blinked. She felt as if she had been slapped. Worse, she felt as if he’d taken the handful of memories they’d just created and crumpled them into a ball and spat on them. ‘No,’ she whispered, ‘it wasn’t.’ Aarif was silent, and she spoke again, her voice wavering and then finally breaking, ‘Aarif, don’t make this into something sordid—’
    ‘It is sordid!’ he snapped. ‘Everything about it is sordid, Kalila, can’t you see that? My brother trusted me, trusted me, with your care. He asked me to come fetch you because he believed he could depend on me, and I