What if Kahlil discovered Ben? What if he found out about their son?

No. She’d never go back to him. Never return to Zwar. Bryn drew herself tall, conviction making her back straight, her determination reinforcing her courage. “I don’t understand what that has to do with us.”

“Everything, darling.” He was gazing down at her with considerable interest, thick black lashes fanning his carved cheekbones and the bronzed luster of his skin. “I’ve come to see why you’re getting married again when you’re still married to me.”

Still married to him? Ridiculous. If he thought he could hoodwink her with a silly statement like that, then he had another thing coming. She wasn’t eighteen anymore. She wasn’t a child bride, either. “We’re not married,” she said crisply, disdain sharpening her voice. “We were divorced three years ago.” How could he still refuse to accept their divorce? It’d been three years, more than three years. Three and a half years, actually. “I’m not in the mood for games. Perhaps in Zwar, divorces aren’t permitted, but here they’re perfectly legal.”

“Yes, darling, I understand that much. And perhaps you’ve forgotten I have a law degree from Harvard, an American university, and despite my Arab nationality, I grasp the legality of an American divorce, but we were never divorced.”

There was a quiet menace in his voice, a menace she heard all too clearly. Her head jerked up, her gaze clashing with his. “If this is your idea of a joke—”

“Have I ever been a comedian?”

No, she answered silently, bitterly. He was one man in desperate need of a sense of humor.

“I’m trying to prevent you further embarrassment,” he added with the same infuriating calm. “I considered waiting until you’d arrived at the church, the guests filling the pews. I could just picture your eager groom at the altar, standing there in his black-and-white tux—he is wearing a tuxedo, isn’t he?”

She couldn’t bear to be the brunt of Kahlil’s scorn. She’d witness him level others in the past, but never her. Kahlil had never been anything but protective, generous, loving.

Her heart squeezed on the last one, pained by the unwanted memory. Their marriage had been brief. Too brief but she couldn’t go back, couldn’t undo the past. “I think it’s time you left.”

He put his hand in the door to keep her from shutting it in his face. “I’ve tried to be polite, but perhaps it’s better if I’m blunt. There will be no wedding next Saturday. And as long as I live, there will be no wedding to any man, ever.”

She ground her jaw together, struggling to contain her temper. Maybe in his country men could veil their women, tell them how to dress, what to think, where to go, but not in the United States, and not in her home. “I don’t belong to you.”

“Actually, in Zwar, you do.”

“People are not objects, Kahlil!”

Pushing the door all the way open, he picked her up, hands encircling her rib cage, thumbs splayed beneath her breasts.