LIFE, OF COURSE, didn't come to a standstill, just because you got your heart broken, Nakayla realized painfully over the next month. Twenty hours after Karim had ended their call, a real estate agent had arrived with keys for her old apartment and a very betrayed-looking Mehab after him.
"He banished me here, after berating me and four generations of my ancestors for losing sight of you, over the phone. For letting you leave. And now I'm to guard you here, in this crowded, noisy city. He should have just killed me," he said, despair high in his voice.
Nakayla, feeling emotional and lonely and heartsick for Karim and anyone remotely related to him, threw her arms around him. Mehab's thin frame froze at first, and then slowly he patted her back awkwardly. The expression in his eyes, like deer caught in headlights, made Nakayla laugh in the middle of tears.
"I'm sorry, Mehab," she'd said and he'd nodded, understanding in his gaze.
With Mehab's help, Nakayla settled back into her apartment. When she'd asked him where His Royal Highness thought Mehab was supposed to stay, he'd told her an apartment had been arranged for him, on the same floor of her building.
Before she could even make a list, a delivery service stood at her door, with milk and juice and fruits and steaming hot meals. Since refusing would mean talking to Karim again, Nakayla let herself be pushed.
With Karim arranging her life to the smallest detail, even a continent away, she felt as if she was in limbo, waiting for some slick, high-powered law firm to start custody proceedings.
A month passed while she played with the idea of going back to work, yet didn't, a month in which she hid from Alicia, because she couldn't bear to tell her the truth and make it even more real, a month in which she heard not a word from Karim.
Even Mehab, who accompanied her on her long meandering walks through the parks and streets, and compared New York to Tahiti incessantly, carefully veered away from anything related to Karim.
And the more rational and in control of herself she became, the more Nakayla went over every look, every word, every touch Karim and she had shared. Faced her cowardice in running away without even waiting for him to return, forcing him to offer an explanation over the phone.
But he wouldn't choose her over Tahiti. Ever.
Did she want him to, she wondered as winter approached and the days grew shorter and she became less and less sure of herself.
Would that be the same man she had fallen in love with if he did?
Like a toll he had to pay for being loved by her? Was that what her love was—a transaction?
YOU ARE READING
His Pregnant Prisoner
RomanceCould he be dead? Could someone as larger than life as Karim be truly gone? Could someone she had known for two months, someone she had laughed with, someone she had shared the deepest intimacies with, be gone in the blink of an eye? Nakayla Archib...
