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know it, too? Had she looked it up and decided to use it as an excuse?
    And yet that would have required that she had known he was coming. Adan frowned. Whatever the case, he would have her examined by a doctor when they arrived.
    He picked up the phone and called his assistant in Jahfar. Adan ordered the man to request that Hassan Maro come to the palace the next day, and then asked him to find a specialist in psychological issues.
    An email from Jasmine popped into his inbox as he was finishing the call. He opened it and read her chatty missive about the fitting for her bridal costume and the preparations for their wedding feast.
    A shaft of guilt speared him. He hadn’t told her where he was going when he’d left.
    He’d known Jasmine since they were children. There’dnever been a spark between them, but they liked each other. And she was kind, gentle and would make a good mother to Rafiq, as well as to their future children.
    Jasmine was a
safe
choice. The right choice.
    Adan worked a while longer, eating breakfast at his desk, and then emerged to find Isabella sitting in the same seat as last night, her bare legs stretched out and crossed at the ankles as she studied the papers in her fists. The papers from last night, he realized.
    She looked up as he approached. There was no smile to greet him, as there once had been. She still seemed nothing like the girl he’d married. That woman had been meek, biddable and sweetly innocent. It hit him suddenly that she’d been as forgettable as a table or a chair, or any other item you counted on but didn’t notice on a daily basis.
    This woman was sensual, mysterious and anything but biddable. There was a fire in her. A fire he’d never observed before. And he couldn’t stop thinking about it.
    Her face without all the makeup was as pure as an angel’s. Her hair was as wild as yesterday, dark gold with lighter streaks that didn’t come from a salon. He’d only ever seen her with long, straight locks that she usually wore in a loose chignon. This was a completely bohemian, surfer-girl style that he wasn’t accustomed to.
    She was wearing a dress today, a blue cotton sundress that showed too much skin for his liking, and a pair of sandals.
    “You slept well?” he asked.
    Her green eyes were still smoky, though not as smoky as yesterday when they’d been surrounded in dark makeup. She looked troubled, not rested.
    “As well as can be expected, I guess.”
    He understood the sentiment.
    “We will arrive in Jahfar in another three hours or so,” he said.
    She set the papers aside. “And what happens then, Adan?”
    “Many things, I imagine,” he replied, purposely keeping it vague.
    “When can I see … Rafiq?”
    He noticed that she swallowed before she said his son’s name.
His
son, not hers. Not anymore. She’d given up that right two years ago. And he would not subject Rafiq to any confusion, not when he was about to marry Jasmine.
    “You cannot, I’m afraid. It is out of the question.”

CHAPTER FOUR
    I SABELLA stared up at him, wondering if the shock and hurt she felt were showing on her face, or if it was only inside that she was being clawed to ribbons. The pain was immense, but she refused to cry. She was finished with crying. She’d cried in the bathroom and she’d cried in her bed in the night while the plane’s engines droned endlessly on, but she would not cry again.
    Nor would she accept his decrees as if he were her own personal dictator.
    “Perhaps I shouldn’t have phrased it that way,” she said. “It wasn’t truly a question.”
    He looked so hard and handsome in his
dishdasha
and headdress. His dark eyes glittered in that hawklike face. His lips, no matter how they flattened or frowned or grew firm with irritation, managed to be much more sexy than she would like them to be.
    “You cannot see him,” he pronounced. “It will confuse him.”
    Anger burst in her belly like a firecracker. “He’s two, Adan. How will it confuse