His Pregnant Prisoner

Part 38

Nakayla felt the dark anger in his words like a whip against her skin. "I threw myself into this marriage with everything I had and more. I..." Tears threatened to steal away her words, her very will. "I even told myself that your feelings for me didn't matter. Not when you..."

"Then come back."

"But I'll always wonder what could take you away from me. When Tahiti will make you choose over me and our child.

"What new political alliance and promise of power would be the thing that makes you decide it's worth more than us? It'll kill me, Karim."

"Then you do not know me at all, much less love me. And the kind of reassurance you ask for, it's not in me to give." He sounded like the crack of thunder, angry and cruel and final, and it seemed to suck away the breath from her very lungs. "Your vow, your grand declaration...they are nothing but empty words, lines from a fantasy you have of what love should be.

"And I..." it trembled then, his voice and Nakayla shivered, "I am the fool that I believed you, that I tortured myself every minute that I didn't deserve this thing between us...and you, that I hoped at all," he said in such a tired, empty voice that Nakayla could imagine that dullness that would dim his golden gaze, the weight that would pull at his sensuous mouth, the tightness that would descend on those broad shoulders.

Nakayla stared at her phone for a full minute before she realized he'd hung up.

And then, she cried. Big, racking sobs that had Kristoff inquire outside the door, tears that burned her nose and eyes and throat, shook her body, and hurt her head.

This wouldn't be the end of it, she knew. Not this argument between them or the last she saw of him. Not the last of the fire he'd made her walk through from the first minute.

Karim wouldn't give up on this child they'd created and that wasn't a bad thing, she told herself, as if that could cleanse away the misery that sat like a boulder on her chest.