Deception on His Mind (Inspector Lynley, #9)(196)

“How could you do it?” he asked. “I've been asking myself that question over and over since I talked to her.”

“Please, Theo. It doesn't help to talk about it.”

“Doesn't help?” He asked the question bitterly. “That's fine with me, because I don't much care if it doesn't help. I loved you, Sahlah. You said you loved me.”

The top of the Coke can shimmered in her vision. She blinked quickly and kept her head lowered. Around them, the work of the hospital went on. Orderlies hurried by with trolleys in front of them, doctors made their rounds, nurses carried small trays of medication into their patients. But she and Theo were divided from them as effectively as if they'd been encased in glass.

“What I've been wondering,” Theo said, “is how long it took you to decide you loved Querashi instead of me. What was it, a day? A week? Two? Or maybe it didn't happen at all because, like you kept telling me, your people's ways don't make love necessary when it comes to marriage. Isn't that how you put it?”

Sahlah could feel the blood beating fiercely behind the birthmark on her cheek. There was no way that she could make him understand when his understanding demanded a truth from her that she would not part with.

“I've also been wondering how it happened and where. You'll forgive me for that, I hope, because you'll understand that for the last six weeks I've thought of practically nothing else but how and where it didn't happen between the two of us. It could have, but it didn't. Oh, we came close enough, didn't we? On Horsey Island. Even that time in the orchard, when your brother—”

“Theo,” Sahlah said. “Please don't do this to us.”

“There isn't an us. I thought there was. Even when Querashi showed up—just like you said he was going to show up—I thought there still was. I wore that f*cking bracelet—”

She flinched from the term. He wasn't, she saw, wearing the bracelet now.

“—and I kept thinking, She knows she doesn't have to marry him. She knows she can refuse to do it because there's no way in hell that her dad will make her marry anyone against her will. Her dad's Asian, yes. But he's English as well. Maybe more English than she is, really. But the days went by and turned into weeks and Querashi stayed. He stayed and your father brought him round to the Cooperative and introduced him as his son. ‘In a few weeks, he joins our family,’ he told me. ‘He takes our Sahlah as his bride.’ And I had to listen and offer best wishes and all the time I wanted to—”

“No!” She couldn't bear to hear the admission. And if he thought her refusal to listen meant her love for him was dead, that was just as well.

“Here's how it was at night,” Theo said. His words were terse. Their sound limned his bitterness. “During the day I could forget about everything and just work myself into a stupor. But at night I had nothing but the thought of you. And while I couldn't sleep and I couldn't much eat, I could deal with that because all along I thought you would be thinking of me as well. She'll tell her dad tonight, I kept thinking. Querashi will leave. And then we'll have time, Sahlah and I, time and a chance.”

“We never had either. I tried to tell you that. You didn't want to believe me.”

“And you? What did you want, Sahlah? Why did you come to me those nights in the orchard?”

“I can't explain it,” she whispered hopelessly.

“That's the thing about games. No one can ever bloody explain them.”

“I wasn't playing a game with you. What I felt was real. Who I was was real.”

“Right. Fine. And I'm sure that was true for you and Haytham Querashi as well.” He started to rise.

She stopped him, her hand reaching out and closing on the bare flesh of his arm. “Help me,” she said, looking at him finally. She'd forgotten the exact blue-green of his eyes, the mole next to his mouth, the fall of his soft blond hair. She was startled by his sudden proximity and frightened by her body's response to the simple sensation of her hand's touching him. She knew she had to release him, but she couldn't. Not until he'd committed would she let him go. He was her only chance. “Rachel won't, Theo. Please. Help me.”

“Get rid of Querashi's kid, you mean? Why?”

“Because my parents …” How could she possibly explain?

“What about them? Oh, your dad'll probably be bloody well cheesed off when he hears you're pregnant. But if the kid's a boy, he'll adjust quick enough. Just tell him you and Querashi were so hot for each other that you couldn't wait until after the ceremony.”

Beyond the rank injustice of his words—born however they were from his own suffering—their sheer brutality forced the truth from her. “This isn't Haytham's baby,” she said. And then she dropped her hand from his arm. “I was already two months pregnant when Haytham came to Balford.”

Theo stared at her, disbelieving. Then she could see him trying to bleed the full extent of the truth from an agonised study of her face. He said, “What the hell …?” But the question died before he finished it. He merely repeated the opening part, saying, “Sahlah, what the bloody hell …?”

“I need your help,” she said. “I'm begging for your help.”