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upset.”
    Akbar nodded.
    “How is she?” Sarah asked, feeling almost sorry for her rival.
    “Who?” Akbar looked confused. It was getting late; he was probably tired and must have misheard her.
    “Rasha. How is she?” Sarah repeated.
    “Rasha? She’s dead. She died giving birth to her baby.”
    Sarah couldn’t believe it. For the last decade, she’d been living under the impression that her husband was with another woman while all this time that woman was dead. No matter how much Sarah hated Rasha, she didn’t deserve to die, especially in a way that could have been prevented.
    “Maybe, if I’d been there to help…” Sarah said. She was a doctor and it was her job to prevent such terrible things taking place.
    Akbar took her Sarah’s hand and squeezed it. “No, there was nothing you could’ve done. When it was Rasha’s time, I drove her to the capital to the hospital. She gave birth there. And died there, too. It was the Women’s Hospital, where you used to work.”
    Where she used to work until Akbar refused to give his written consent for her to continue. She snatched her hand away from his.
    “Who did you marry after Rasha died?” Sarah asked.
    “No one. I’ve been alone, looking for you all these years.” He tried to reach out for her hand again, but Sarah got up and began clearing away the empty cups.
    “It’s late,” she said. She turned on the tap to wash up the mugs. “Where are you staying in London?”
    “Here, of course.”
    The mug in Sarah’s hand dropped into the sink, breaking the handle. She turned around. “But where are your things?”
    “I collected them before I went to get Ali from school and together we brought them back here. My bags are in room at the front.”
    “You can’t possibly stay here. Where will you sleep?”
    “With you, of course! You’re my wife and this is my family.”
     

Chapter 8
     
    Sarah lay awake in bed. She could hardly believe that after all this time, Akbar was with her again and had finally met his son. Ali obviously adored his father who’d suddenly walked into his life like a fairytale prince out of the desert, but then it was difficult not to adore Akbar. From the moment Sarah first met him, all those years ago, she’d been deeply attracted to him; he had a charm that was almost impossible to resist.
    However, she wasn’t going to leap back into his arms the second he walked through her door. She’d spent the last ten years putting her life back together in London, working hard and raising Ali. She couldn’t just drop it all and go back to living in a Bedouin camp in the desert. She wondered whether Akbar could adjust to living in London. Other men had done it, including his best friend from childhood, Yacoub. Perhaps his friend could find him a job, but then how would they get around the visa problems? They had no paperwork to prove that they were married and the UK immigration officials didn’t accept applicants on the basis of hearsay. Also, what kind of work could Akbar do? A man who was one of the greatest warlords in his country could hardly be expected to work in a shop or an office. Maybe he could do something with horses, but that type of work was difficult to come by and didn’t pay well.
    Sarah rolled over and stretched out her arm into the empty space next to her. She’d told Akbar that he couldn’t sleep in her bedroom, wife or not, and had sent him to sleep on the sofa in the front room, which she’d turned into a makeshift bed. However, Sarah was beginning to regret her decision to turn him away. She hadn’t had sex since she’d left Akbar and although she tried not to think about it most of the time, she did miss it. A few years after she arrived back in London, she’d gone on a blind date that a friend set up for her. It was a disaster. The man spent the entire evening staring at her chest before throwing himself on her outside the toilets in the bar where she met him. She ended up waiting in the rain for