The Husband She Never Knew(18)
Author: Kate Hewitt

She’d hadn’t just been naïve, she’d been blind. Wilfully, stupidly blind, until tonight.

‘Say something, Ammar,’ she whispered.

‘What do you want me to say?’

‘I don’t know.’ She didn’t know what would make it better, what would expel the doubt and shock and hurt from her heart. ‘Tell me how it happened,’ she finally said. ‘Tell me how you came to work for your father like that.’

He stared at her and she couldn’t tell a thing from his face. His eyes were dark and hard. ‘I was his son.’

‘But—’

‘If you want me to tell you how he forced me into it, I can’t.’

And she had been hoping for that, she knew. Some sort of excuse. Some way for her to say I understand and It’s OK then. But there was nothing.

‘Still,’ she tried, ‘you must have been a boy when you started—’

He let out a cold, hard laugh. ‘You want to make excuses for me, Noelle, and there aren’t any. I did what I did because I was my father’s son. He commanded me, yes, but I liked having the kind of power he gave me. Seeing people stand to attention when I came into the room. Sometimes I even liked the fear I saw in their eyes.’ He turned to stare out of the window, his whole body rigid.

She knew he was trying to shock her, to tell her the worst about himself, and it was working. She felt her mouth dry and her heart thud. ‘Why did you stop, then?’ she asked in a hoarse whisper. ‘Why did you want to change?’

‘Have I?’ he asked softly, turning to fix her with a piercing gaze. ‘Have I really changed at all?’

Noelle swallowed hard. Said nothing. The events of the evening had sapped all her strength, taken away her certainties. She couldn’t face another confrontation, not now, when everything inside her felt twisted and tangled in knots of treacherous doubt.

‘I think,’ she whispered, ‘I’d like to be alone tonight.’

Something flashed across Ammar’s face, a lightning streak of emotion, and then his expression blanked again. ‘As you wish,’ he said, and turned and walked out of her apartment.

Ammar rode in the lift to his penthouse alone. Anger pulsed through him, but underneath it he felt a deep ocean of despair, an overwhelming grief he could not let himself sink into. If he did, he’d never climb out of it again.

Yet just remembering that look of dazed disillusionment in Noelle’s eyes made his heart pump and his fists clench. She’d found out about him.

It didn’t matter what she’d heard, or even whether it was true or not. What mattered was she doubted him. Hell, maybe she even feared him.

She didn’t—couldn’t—love him.

The lift doors opened and Ammar strode into his apartment. His father’s apartment, all modern chrome and glass. It had never felt like his. Nothing felt like his, except his house in the desert, an escape from everything … except who he was. He could never escape that.

He drove his fingers through his still-short hair, nails scraping skin, and longed for some release from all this emotion. All this anger and disappointment and pain. He didn’t drink, so he couldn’t lose himself in alcohol. He didn’t smoke, had never done drugs, and sex, for tonight at least, was out of the question. He had, ironically, no vices.

And yet his life had been one of immorality, corruption and greed. His father’s … and he’d carried out every order, if almost always with reluctance. There was no escaping that, not for him, not for Noelle.

It had been only a matter of time, he saw that now with stark, bleak clarity. Ten years ago he’d lost himself in the daydream of romance, the fairy tale of loving her. He’d listened to her talk about their happily-ever-after, her little bookshop, a house outside Paris, even children. He’d let himself be led along, bought into it all with a hope borne of desperation. He’d wanted it so much. And it was only after he’d said his vows that he realised what a sham it all was. He was. Fairy tales and happy endings were not, and never could be, for men like him.

He took a deep breath, forced himself to let it out slowly. Don’t think. Don’t think about any of it. He’d swim, he decided. Exercise had always been the best way to blank out his mind.

Yet even after a hundred hard laps in the penthouse pool his mind still seethed with memories. Noelle touching his face. Kissing his lips. Surrendering her body to his. Telling him she loved him.

I want to love you, Ammar.

What happened when she didn’t want to any more?

This. This heartache, this loneliness and despair. It was surely no more than he should expect. No more than he deserved.

Resolutely, Ammar turned back to the pool for another hundred laps.

He worked through the night, too restless and edgy—and lonely—for sleep. He had, he realised, become used to sleeping with Noelle’s soft body next to his, his arms around her. Amazing, really, considering until a few weeks ago he’d always slept alone. Lived alone, worked alone. He didn’t have friends, or even colleagues. The only person in his whole life who had ever been close to him was Noelle.

The phone rang the next morning as he was drinking his second cup of black coffee.

‘I saw you were out and about on the town last night.’

His brother Khalis’s voice, laughing and light, came down the line. Ammar tensed, as a matter of instinct. For most of his life he’d been estranged from his brother. They’d been playmates and best friends for those first few years, until his eighth birthday, when his father had called him into his study and hit him hard across the face. Showed him how things were going to be from now on, and being anyone’s friend, even his brother’s, wasn’t part of that plan. And even though Ammar had, amazingly, reconciled with Khalis several weeks ago, a normal conversation still felt strange. Miraculous and bizarre, and he didn’t always know what to say. Hell, he never knew what to say.

‘Out and about?’ he repeated guardedly.

‘I read the social pages,’ Khalis explained with a laugh. ‘You were at some charity gala with a French woman—Ducasse?’

‘Noelle.’ Ammar’s throat felt tight.

‘She’s beautiful,’ Khalis said, and Ammar felt a totally unreasonable flare of jealousy. ‘Is she who I think she is?’ He’d told Khalis when they’d reconciled that he intended to find his wife. Make her his. Big words. Useless ones.

‘Yes,’ he said tightly.

His tone must have given it all away for Khalis gave a little sigh and said, ‘So it’s not going so well?’

‘No.’ It was all he could manage. It was more than he wanted to admit.

‘What happened?’

Ammar gripped the phone so tightly his knuckles ached. ‘She found out.’

‘Found out?’

‘About me.’

‘What about you?’

‘What do you think?’ he snapped. His brother wasn’t stupid, so Ammar had no idea why he was acting like he was. ‘About Tannous Enterprises. About how corrupt it is.’

‘Was,’ Khalis corrected gently, and Ammar closed his eyes.

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘It does.’

‘You don’t even know,’ Ammar said savagely. ‘How much, or even what I’ve done. You walked away, you were gone for fifteen years—’

‘And left you to deal with our father alone.’

He let out a harsh laugh. ‘I didn’t deal with him. I obeyed him. In just about everything.’

‘Not everything.’

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘I did some research, Ammar, in the last few weeks. I know you tried to resist where you could, at least in the last few years.’

‘Useless.’ Furtive, puny attempts that accomplished so pathetically little, and what about all the years before, years where he’d used and abused his power because it made him feel strong? Years of weakness disguised as strength, immorality hidden under a thin veneer of respectability. It had taken a near-death experience to finally give him the courage and will to change.

‘Not useless,’ Khalis said, ‘to some.’

‘To most. And it doesn’t change anything. Who I am—’

‘No, not who you are. What you did. There’s a difference, Ammar, trust me.’

‘What do you know about it?’ Ammar snarled. He knew he sounded angry and ungrateful, but having this conversation at all was killing him. No, what was killing him was knowing he was losing Noelle. Articulating it to his brother was just the icing on a God-awful cake.

‘Actually,’ Khalis said mildly, ‘I do know something about it. It was Grace who showed me that no one should be defined by their mistakes. Not her, not me, and not even you.’

Ammar fell silent, thinking that through. He knew Khalis had recently become engaged to this Grace, guessed that their road to true love had had a few bumps. But surely nothing like the mountains and craters he and Noelle were facing. ‘What if,’ he asked in a low voice, ‘there’s nothing but mistakes?’

‘That’s not true.’

‘You don’t know—’

‘Give me a little credit. And stop thinking about who you were or what you did. You told me you’d changed, Ammar, that you wanted to change, and I believed you.’ His brother’s voice turned wry as he added, ‘Admittedly not at first, but I do now. You’re a different man, so be different. Show Noelle you’ve changed.’

I’ve tried. The words stuck in Ammar’s throat. Maybe he hadn’t tried enough, or changed enough. Maybe nothing he ever did would be enough.

‘Tell her,’ Khalis said gently. ‘Not just the bad bits, the things you’ve done in the past. Tell her who you are, what you’ve endured, and who you want to be. Tell her everything.’

An hour later Ammar pulled up outside Noelle’s apartment. He was showered and shaven, even if his eyes were bloodshot and he felt alternately high and drained from both adrenalin and exhaustion.

He got out of the car, murmured a few words to the concierge and headed upstairs. He had just lifted his hand to knock when Noelle opened the door to her apartment. She stilled, staring at him, and it took a few stunned seconds to notice she wasn’t dressed for work in one of her dark pencil skirts and crisp white blouses. She wore a pair of capris and a T-shirt and she carried a bag. A suitcase.

She was going somewhere.

‘I was going to call you,’ she said, not quite looking him in the eye, and Ammar felt his hand fall to his side.

‘Were you?’

‘Yes …’ She hitched her bag higher up on her shoulder. ‘It’s just everything was such a rush and I need to make my train …’

‘Where are you going?’

‘Home.’ The single word felled him. Home. Back to the chateau in Lyon, he knew, and her parents. Not him. He wanted to be her home, her shelter, and yet in that moment he knew he wasn’t and she didn’t want him to be.

‘This is unexpected,’ he said, and heard how remote he sounded. How else was he supposed to sound? He’d been about to tell her everything. Perform emotional open-heart surgery on himself for her—no, for their sake—and meanwhile she was getting the hell out.

‘I know. I’m only going for a few days. It’s just I haven’t seen them in a while and I think it would be good to …’ She trailed off, neither of them bothering to complete her obvious excuse.

Ammar swallowed, stepped back. ‘I’ll drive you to the train.’

‘No—’

‘You’d prefer to take a taxi?’

‘I just don’t want to trouble you,’ she muttered, and Ammar felt his heart squeeze. For a moment he couldn’t breathe.

‘It’s no trouble,’ he finally said, and turned to head back down the stairs.

They didn’t speak in the car. Noelle stared down at her lap, clearly miserable, and Ammar kept his gaze straight ahead. How had it come to this? The better question, he thought savagely, was how could it have not? Could he really be surprised that Noelle wanted out? For that was what this was, he knew. An escape. She’d realised what kind of man he was, what he’d done, just as he’d always feared she would, and now she wanted to leave him. And why shouldn’t she?

They reached the Gare de Lyon in silence and Youssef pulled the car in front of the landmark clock tower.

‘I’ll see you inside,’ Ammar said brusquely because, even though he knew it was over, he didn’t want to let her go yet.

Noelle didn’t answer, but neither did she resist. She muttered her thanks when he picked up her suitcase and strode through the crowd, people parting instinctively for him.

The train had already pulled into the station and they stood on the platform, the air already sultry on a summer’s morning. A beautiful day, fresh blue sky and a lemon-yellow sun. And this.

He handed her suitcase to a porter while she fussed with her handbag and tickets, her hair a dark curtain in front of her face. And then there was nothing more to do, nothing more to say but goodbye.

She glanced up at him, her eyes luminous, her mouth trembling. ‘Ammar—’ she began, her voice so hesitant and sorrowful that he knew he couldn’t stand what she was going to say.

He reached for her, sliding his hands along her shoulders and underneath the heavy mass of her gleaming chestnut hair he so loved and pulled her towards him. She came, neither resisting nor accepting, her eyes wide, her jaw slack.

And then he kissed her, hard, with all the pent-up grief and regret and most of all the all-consuming love he felt. He hoped she knew that. He hoped, even now, she knew how much he loved her.

‘Goodbye,’ he said roughly and, before she could say anything, he turned and was striding away through the crowds, his vision so blurred he could barely see to put one foot in front of the other.