In Too Deep_ Husband Material & the Sheikh's Bargained Bride - Brenda Jackson [60]
She’d been a fool. He hadn’t lost control. His actions had been damage control. Which he had to perform indefinitely. As long as his enemies watched him.
Her public rejection had been what he’d been guarding against all along, as it would have destroyed his projection of a blissful marriage that was vital to his image, to the stability of his ruling house.
So he’d seduced her again, to make her fall in with his plans. Again.
And if she hadn’t been so desperate to be with him again, she would have remained in his bed, unaware of the truth. She would have continued putting on the show he needed, fooling his enemies with the sincerity of her ardor.
And being made a fool of for the rest of her life.
Adham had left Sebastian an hour ago.
He’d been driving aimlessly ever since. For the first time in his life, he felt at a loss.
He needed some time to come to terms with what had happened last night. It had been more than explosive sex. It had been nothing like the first time he’d taken her.
This time, when he’d made her his, she’d made him hers.
His father had said this would be his fate, just as it had been his own—to find one irreplaceable woman where he least expected, to want her with everything in him, to love her till the end of his days.
But did she love him?
He’d felt his heart clench as if on a burning coal when Sebastian announced that she did, as a forgone conclusion.
For he truly didn’t know.
He had no doubt she wanted him with every fiber of her voluptuous body. But what about her heart?
There were too many considerations that made him fear her heart wasn’t involved. Or worse, couldn’t and wouldn’t be.
She had been at her lowest moments when she’d fallen into his arms. She had needed his support, in more ways than one. Now, she might still be reeling from her father’s loss, needing to cling to him to fill the void of security. What if her feelings for him were gratitude and need mixed with lust? The gratitude he could do without, the need he accepted as her right as his wife, the lust he craved. But none of this constituted love. And he couldn’t live knowing she didn’t love him as wholeheartedly as he loved her.
There was one way to discover the truth. A test.
He dreaded the result. He didn’t know if he could live with it if he learned that she didn’t and could never love him. But he had to do it.
He couldn’t live not knowing for certain, either.
Hours later, he returned home, and felt it immediately.
A psychic vacuum. An absence.
He tore through the house looking for her. But even as he dashed from one place to another, calling out her name, he knew.
She was gone.
On his third time storming to his bedroom, which had been theirs for only one night, he saw something he hadn’t noticed before on his bedside table. A note.
He approached it as if it were a live grenade, unfolding it with the care of someone defusing a bomb.
But there was no defusing the destruction in the note.
Only four words. I want a divorce.
Nine
After the disbelief and devastation, Adham called Sabrina’s cell phone for thirty minutes straight.
Each time the phone rang until it disconnected.
He careened through the house, raising hell, interrogating everyone within sight, not caring that he was revealing to his subordinates that he had no idea where his wife was.
He was at his wit’s end when the bodyguards he’d asked to keep an eye on her, and whom he’d forgotten about in his madness, called. They’d said she’d gone back home. Her family home.
The two hours it took him to get to Grant Vineyards and Winery taught him the meaning of agony.
By the time he spotted her, a bright white figure in the distance among the verdant vines, he felt he’d aged two decades.
He strode after her receding figure through the uniform rows of vines that seemed to stretch into infinity, adding to his impression that he’d never reach