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Her heart lurched like a captured bird in her chest

Oh God, she’d really done it

She’d reallyher, hard with an indiscri a female body beneath him, had repeated the words that had bound her to hi, really A sha on his part, a capitulation on hers

It’s all for Mennah It’s all for Mennah

Maybe if she repeated theof forever pluaze away fro for her daughter to wake up so she could run to her and be spared another exposure to Farooq

All she heard over the a Middle Eastern h the surround sound syste their departure, had bubbled with exciteh the trip in his lih takeoff She’d executed her sudden sleeping o, and he’d secured her car seat in one of the jet’s bedroom suites

“You haven’t eaten”

At his rebuke, her eyes fell on the masculine, square-cut silver service set and cutlery, laid out before her oncrystal and crisp white napkins She’d picked so from the extensive reat fanfare under polished brass doentle flames Hashem had raised the covers to show her the cookbook perfection below and the arolands Her stoainst being catered to as if she was a beloved mistress when she was just a necessary evil, an abhorred hostage

Corrosion surged again in her throat “I’ry”

His jaw hardened “You haven’t eaten in the last seven hours Your sto on itself by now”

Gee What was it withable to read her mind? Or was she just too predictable to live?

“You’ll have to excuseto your calculated expectations After all that’s happened in said seven hours, all it feels now is the urge to heave out its nonexistent contents Just i to tell me I make you nauseous?” Exasperation flashed across his face before ing me to expose your proclamations for the feminine taunts that they are?”

She pressed a fist to her head in an atte inside “Just why do you want e to part with theed hue, ers once had, following a path of seduction, of destruction over her “You have gained soht”

She snorted “Yeah, tell me about it”

“I will In detail When I’e of…particulars”