Rising Stars & It Started With… Collections. Кейт Хьюит
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about one day, seven hours and thirty-six minutes.
But when she was told by her mother again that she’d warned her not to get too attached, as if the twins were like the hamsters she’d once brought home to care for during the school holidays, Amy knew that she had to move out.
It took her a week to find a small furnished rental while she looked around for something more permanent, something that might one day feel like home. Right now her heart still lived at the palace. At night she yearned to be next to Emir, and she still slept with one ear open for the twins. Her breasts ached as if she were weaning them, but she knew she had to somehow start healing—start over, start again. She’d done it once, she told herself. The next time would surely be easier. Right?
She tried to hold it together—she went out with friends, caught up with the news, bought a new London wardrobe and even went and had her hair done, in a nice layered cut with a few foils. Her friends told her she looked amazing. Those days swimming in the pool with the twins meant that she had arrived in the middle of a London winter with a deep golden tan.
She had never looked better—except her appearance didn’t match the way she felt.
‘You look great,’ her ex fiancé told her.
If she heard it again she thought she might scream. But he’d heard she was back and wanted to catch up, and Amy was actually glad for the chance to apologise.
‘For what?’ he asked.
For the year of bitterness she had needlessly carried. He’d been right to end things, Amy told him.
‘Are you sure about that?’ he asked, before dropping her home. Fresh from a break-up with a single mum, he had revised his paternity plans and suggested that they might try again.
She was sure, she told him. Because it wasn’t a logical love she wanted, Amy knew as she headed inside, it was an illogical one.
She knew what love was now.
Even if she did not understand it.
Even if it could never be returned.
She’d had her heart broken three times.
The accident, losing her fiancé, the aftermath—they didn’t even enter the equation. They had been tiny tasters for the real grief to come.
She missed her babies, loved each little girl as fiercely as she would have loved her own. She had been there at their birth and held them every day since and she ached for them. She felt she had let Hannah down—not by sleeping with Emir, but by leaving the girls.
She was tired of being told she’d get over it—as if the love she felt didn’t count, as if in a few days’ times she’d wake up not missing them—but somehow she had to work out how to do just that.
She would not cry, Amy told herself. She had to keep it all together. She would look for a job next week and make some appointments—catch up on the life she’d left behind. Except as she went in her bag for her phone it was not to see if he’d called—because it had been two weeks now and still he had not—but to look at the photo of Emir and the girls that she had taken on that precious morning in Alzan.
She was horrified when she opened her bag to find that her phone was missing. Amy tipped out the contents, frantically trying to remember when she had last used her phone, positive she had taken it out with her. Perhaps she had left it at the restaurant? But, no—Amy remembered that she had sneaked a peek of the photo in the car.
It wasn’t the phone that concerned her but that image of Emir, Clemira and Nakia that she could not stand to lose. It was all she had left of them.
Amy couldn’t even telephone her ex to ask if he had it, because his number was in her phone. Just as she started to panic the doorbell rang. Amy ran to it, hoping he had found it, even smiling in relief as she opened the door. Her smile faded as soon as she saw who it was.
‘Emir?’
There were so many questions behind that single word, but his name was all she could manage. She wasn’t even sure that it was him. For a moment she even wondered if he had sent his brother, for the man standing in her doorway was the Emir she had never seen—a younger looking, more relaxed Emir—and he was smiling at her shocked expression. How dared he look so happy? How dared he look so different? For though she knew he wore suits in London, she had never seen him wear one and he truly looked breathtaking.
‘Not the man you were expecting?’
‘Actually, no.’ She didn’t have to explain herself and refused to, because even if he had seen her ex drop her off it was none of his business any more.
‘You’re a very hard person to find.’
‘Am I?’
‘Your mother wouldn’t give me your address.’
‘I wouldn’t have expected her to.’ Amy gave a tight shrug. ‘So how did you find me?’
‘Less than honourable ways,’ he admitted.
He was powerful enough to get anything he set his mind to, and she must remember to keep her guard up around him. She could not take any more hurt, but she had to know one thing. ‘Are the girls okay?’
‘They’re fine,’ Emir said. ‘Well, they miss you a lot.’
She remembered standing in his office, telling him practically the same thing, and she remembered how it had changed nothing. Yet she did ask him in—she had to know what he was here for, had to see this conversation through in the hope that she might one day move on.
‘Are they here in London?’
‘ No.’
Emir quickly crushed that hope, but perhaps it was for the best, because she could not bear to say goodbye to them again.
‘They have a new nanny. She is younger and not as rigid as Fatima. They are just starting to really settle in with her and I didn’t think I should interrupt—’
‘Emir, please …’ She put a hand up to stop him. She really didn’t need to hear how quickly and how well they were adapting to her replacement. ‘I’m glad the girls are fine.’
She forced a smile and then for the first time since he’d arrived at her door remembered he was a sheikh king, she honestly forgot at times, and now that she remembered she didn’t really know what to do with him.
Aware of her rather sparse furnished rental, and wondering if instant coffee would do, she remembered her manners and forced a smile for him. ‘Would you like a drink?’
‘I came here to talk to you.’
‘You could have done that on the phone.’ Except now she’d lost hers, Amy remembered. But what had seemed so devastating a few moments ago became a triviality. ‘Have a seat. I’ll make a drink.’
‘I didn’t come here for a drink.’
‘Well, I’m having one.’
She headed to the fridge and opened it, grateful for the cool blast of air as she rummaged around and found some wine and then looked for glasses. She was glad for something to do—needed to have her back to him for a couple of moments as she composed herself. Amy did not want her broken heart on clear display to him, for she could be hurt so easily.
‘What are you thinking?’ Emir asked, the tiny kitchen area shrinking as he stepped in.
‘Do you really want to know?’
‘I really want to know.’
‘That it’s just as well this is a screwtop bottle because I don’t have a corkscrew …’
‘Amy!’
‘And I’m wondering what happened to all the people who made the corks.’ She was, and she was also wondering if the trees they came from were called cork trees,