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No. She’d fallen for him when he’d been incredible to her. So incredible, even his cruelty hadn’t erased the memories. The image of the man she’d thought was her soul mate kept superimposing itself over everything that had happened afterward. Her mind and soul kept rejecting the proof of his words and actions, still looking for reasons for his change, for ways to exonerate him.
But she believed his words now, that things were as perilous as he’d described. And in a situation that big, what did her emotions and future matter?
He was right. They didn’t. She didn’t.
But no matter how insignificant she was to him, in all this, she mattered to herself. Now that she’d realized the depths of her self-deception and weakness, it was up to her to quell them. So that his disgust and disregard didn’t annihilate her.
But there was one thing she couldn’t quell anymore. Tears.
She let them escape, inside and out. “What if I can’t…c-conceive? What if you can’t father a baby? What then?”
He grimaced. “You’d still keep the jewels, don’t worry. But my fertility isn’t in question. If you turn out to be infertile, that would be grounds for an easy divorce, even with our culture’s constrictive royal matrimonial laws. Then I’d negotiate another marriage with the daughter of the second noblest patriarch of the Aal Shalaans.”
“Just like that, huh?” She hiccuped. “Throw out the defective model and look for a functioning one…”
She stopped, at breaking point. Just get out of here…now.
He let her go this time when she stumbled around, following her silently to the door. Just as she groped it open, he broke his silence, his words lodging into her back again.
“Tomorrow you will be taken to Judar. As is our custom, I won’t see you again until our marriage ceremony, but I will supply you with the list of things to be done, the rules to be followed.” Then his voice dipped into bass reaches on a growl eloquent with everything that splintered her heart. “Don’t disappoint me.”
Four
“I would have given anything if only I could take it back!”
At the blurted-out declaration, Aliyah’s gaze swept again over the woman sitting across from her. Judar’s afternoon August sun was streaming through the western window of Aliyah’s guest wing in the royal palace, turning the woman’s hair into a blazing halo of undulating gold, striking turquoise beams off her eyes and drenching the perfection of elegant, chiseled features in a play of light and shadow.
Anna Beaumont was sure one beautiful lady.
It made Aliyah sheepish to acknowledge that the first thing she’d done when she’d laid eyes on her an hour ago was to marvel at their resemblance.
But there was no denying the fact that this woman could be her in blue contacts and a blond wig, with some aging makeup. Not much aging, though. Anna didn’t look twenty-seven years older than her. Aliyah wouldn’t have thought her a day above forty, a real good forty, if all that DNA evidence hadn’t confirmed that Anna was her biological mother and therefore over fifty.
She wondered how King Atef had never noticed this.
But then, seeing a resemblance between his niece and the ex-lover he’d cast out of his life over a quarter of a century ago, especially with their opposite coloring, would have been a long shot.
When Anna didn’t follow up her momentous declaration, Aliyah sat forward and poured another round of unsweetened jasmine tea from the heavily worked silver teapot into the handpainted, blown-glass cups. The artistry behind their every line—more manifestations of the extremes of taste and affluence permeating the royal palace—roused the artist in her. It also sort of distracted her from the quiet, desperate feeling that she was sinking deeper into the quicksand of her situation, of Kamal’s plans and decrees and existence.
She handed Anna the cup and held her eyes as they both drank in silence, her thoughts turning inward, going over the past two days.
Everything Kamal had said would happen had and was still happening like clockwork. She’d been delivered to her condo after their showdown, with that royal guard duet coming up to help her pack. She’d resorted to threats to make them refrain from folding her underwear and alphabetizing every item, had tossed them out only for them to ricochet back to her doorstep before the crack of dawn to accompany her to the Judarian equivalent of Air Force One.
Kamal was giving her the royal treatment all right. Imposing it on her more like. He’d sent her a clipped voice mail driving home that this was what she should expect from now on as his future queen. He’d elaborated on how she should receive her dues, mete out her responses with the poise, benevolence and grandeur befitting her impending majesty. Yes, he’d used those very words. And was evidently still conscious and in the best of health.
Finding no energy and no point in resisting his incursion she’d let herself be swept away to her so-called future kingdom and installed in so sumptuous and extravagant a guest wing that it could have housed forty princesses. Then the list of things to be done that he’d provided for her had started to roll on.
First thing this morning was to have leisurely communications with three of her parents, informing them of her acceptance of the marriage of state and assuring them she’d play her part. With utmost attention to decorum, of course. As if.
She’d never treated those three in any way that wasn’t grounded in love and respect, even when their actions had almost messed her up for good, but she was damned if she’d stand on ceremony with any of them. Kamal had to be satisfied with what she was letting him have—control over these countdown days.
She’d finished her conversations with her parents—who’d all been mighty relieved, she should add—and without missing a beat had headed to her dictated afternoon tea with her fourth parent.
Kamal had had Anna flown in from King Atef’s court, where she must have been cause for some serious domestic disturbance. The queen—the woman who’d turned out to be Aliyah’s stepmother—was a master of dissatisfaction, unreasonableness and conflict. Aliyah could only imagine her attitude now that she had real strife material on her hands.
And here they were. An hour into the long-awaited meeting. A twenty-seven-year-long wait on Anna’s side, a two-week one on Aliyah’s, which still felt like a lifetime. Aliyah thought she would have recognized Anna if she’d met her on the street. And it went beyond the resemblance. There was this unmistakable…connection.
She bet Anna had felt the same from the first moment, but they’d both reached an instant and unspoken agreement to test the waters first. She’d felt that Anna was agitated within an inch of her sanity at the enormity of the situation. She, on the other hand, was…comfortably numb. Too many enormous shocks could do that.
So they’d talked about Judar, Zohayd, compared royal palaces, weathers, customs, currencies, reminisced about L.A., which they’d both lived in and now seemed to have left behind permanently.
Then Anna had blurted out that fraught statement.
Seemed she was ready to wade in deeper.
Not that she was finding it easier. She let go of Aliyah’s gaze, hers brimming as she stared down into her cup, choked out, “This sounds like so much exaggeration, like lip service, but I—I…I don’t know what I can say that won’t sound like…like…”
Aliyah put down her cup, invited Anna to look back at her with a gentle touch on her knee. “How about you say exactly what you’re thinking? Feeling? It would save a lot of confusion. We’ve run out of small talk so I guess it’s time for something big.”
Anna nodded, her eyes reddening even more. Then she inhaled, whispered, “Do you resent me…too much?”
Aliyah plopped back on the couch and glided both palms over the cotton-silk pastels damask as she considered her answer.
Then she sighed. “Okay, I won’t say I didn’t resent this. I did. I do. But it’s not you I resent. I don’t presume to judge you. I can only imagine what drove you to the decisions you made, and that it couldn’t have been easy or made your life better. When all is said and done, I can only say thank you.”
Anna blinked. She couldn’t have looked more stupefied if Aliyah had just told her she could turn into a bat at will.
Anna finally breathed. “You’re thanking me? What for?”
Aliyah shrugged. “For not aborting me. It would have been the far easier, clean-cut route to go. And though my life hasn’t been a bed of roses and doesn’t promise to be, I’m still real fond of it. I wouldn’t exchange it for oblivion. So…thanks.”
Again, those blue-gem eyes surged with tears that tugged at the ones lying too close to Aliyah’s surface now.
“I never dreamed…oh, God, that you would feel that way….” Anna stopped, panting, then burst out, “Do you really feel that way?”
Aliyah gave her a tremulous smile. “One thing you will find out about me soon enough is that I go around saying exactly what I really think and feel. A very objectionable practice, I’m perpetually told, but at least you know exactly where you stand with me.”
Anna seemed to lose all tension, melted back in her armchair. “I can never tell you how…how it makes me feel, hearing you say that, that you really feel it. I’ve lived with the guilt, the pain for so long. Then I find out you’re alive, near your father, well and loved, and that I can see you. I would have settled for seeing you from afar, for being deservedly hated by you…but you…you…You’re wonderful, so full of light and life.”
“Full of light and life, huh? Now that’s a new spin on things. To everyone else, I’m full of erratic energy and instability.”
Anna looked genuinely taken aback. “How can anyone think that? I can’t think of anyone who’s less erratic and unstable.”
Aliyah threw her head back on a self-deprecating laugh. “Oh, postpone your verdict until you’ve known me longer than an hour.”
“I won’t change my mind a year or ten years from now. Things like that are the first thing one feels from others. You’re energetic, vivacious and from what I’ve heard, incredibly creative, truly independent and have the strength of your convictions. And yes, you’re unpredictable, but I don’t need more than the past minutes to realize it’s in the best of ways. You clearly do what’s right rather than what’s accepted.”
Aliyah lips twitched. “Wow, that’s quite a testimony. Can I call on you next time I have to fend off accusations of irrationality? Hmm…I do what’s right rather than what’s accepted. I think that will be my new slogan, Anna….” She stopped, bit her lip. “Uh…is it okay if I call you Anna? I’d feel weird if you wanted me to call you Mom or something.”
Anna surged forward, eagerness spilling from her tremulous smile. “As long as you call me at all, I’m happy for you to call me anything that feels comfortable to you.”
Aliyah’s smile grew. “Anna feels comfortable.”
In answer, Anna’s smile faltered. Aliyah felt she could see into the older woman’s mind, that she thought she wasn’t entitled to this level of ease with the daughter she’d given up.
“Listen, Anna, as you said, time isn’t an issue here. What happened is in the past, so let’s leave it there and move on. Now. I don’t want to observe a period of appropriate awkwardness. If you want to know me, if you want to be a part of my life, then let’s start now. What do you say?”
Anna looked like she’d burst into tears before she nodded vigorously. “I do—I want all that. Oh, God…how could anyone ever think you erratic and irrational?”
Aliyah stilled. The call of blood, Anna’s willingness to do anything to atone, to know her, be there for her now that she’d found her, surged inside her. For the first time in her life, she felt she wanted to, could share her secret.
She took the leap. “When I was six, my teachers couldn’t interest me in anything in school, couldn’t even get me to sit down. I was always listening to voices and seeing whole worlds inside my head and telling everyone who’d listen—and even anyone who wouldn’t—about them. I was almost diagnosed as autistic, but I was too curious and could talk anyone under the table. Therapists had to label my condition so they settled on ADHD.”
Distress crept into Anna’s face. “This is my fault…you inherited those tendencies from me. I was always too hyper, too awake, too quick, too something or other. It was what drew Atef to me, and I think what ultimately put him off—apart from the fact that he had to marry for his kingdom.”
Aliyah shook her head. “I bought into the psychobabble for a long time, but I no longer do. Who’s to say what’s ‘hyper’ and what’s not? What’s ‘too much’ of anything? We’re individuals who can’t be quantified. They wanted me to conform, and when I didn’t they decided there was something wrong with me, tried to fix me and almost ruined me for life. They misdiagnosed me, put me on prescription drugs, kept increasing the dose to get the effect they were seeking until, for the next ten years, I was a zombie.”
Anna gasped. “Oh, my God…oh, Aliyah, I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah, me, too. I feel like I missed my childhood, that it passed before me while I watched it from behind a distorted barrier.”
“Didn’t your—your parents realize that?”
“Yeah, but not for many years. At first they were so relieved when my teachers—the ones who’d started the whole thing—started saying I’d become an exemplary student, citing that as proof of their insight into my so-called condition. Later my parents kept attributing my subdued state to puberty. By the time I was fourteen, they could no longer fool themselves and tried to wean me off the drug. I went ballistic. I don’t remember what happened exactly, but I think I tried to commit suicide. They gave up, put me back on it. I didn’t know what was going on. I trusted them and took my medicine like a good girl. Then when I was almost seventeen I overheard a very enlightening conversation. They’d long realized I’d been misdiagnosed, or at least that I had a severe reaction to the drug—to both taking it and trying to get off it. And I decided to take matters into my own hands, kick the habit that I realized had been controlling me all my life.”
A tear raced down Anna’s cheek. “How did it go?”
“To hell. The mental and psychological version. I was an addict, and I went through every kind of withdrawal. I think I went totally insane for a while.”
Aliyah fell silent as her heart stampeded as if she were in the throes of one of those episodes again. Putting her ordeals into words was both cathartic and exhausting.
A long time later, Anna hiccuped, whispered, “But you’re okay now. You have been for many years.”
The urge to comfort her surged within Aliyah, came out on a fervent “I am.” Then she felt compelled to be as honest about the rest. “Though I can’t call getting shoved into a marriage of state to the last man on earth I ever wanted to see again ‘okay.’”
The tear trailing down Anna’s cheek became a stream that splashed on the hands upturned helplessly in her lap. “Oh, my God…it’s all my fault again. Everything I am, everything I did affected your life so profoundly. It’s still hurting you, changing the course of your life where you don’t want it to go. I kept thinking maybe I don’t need to feel so guilty, since everything was turning out great for you, especially since I saw your g-groom and thought him incredible…”
Aliyah huffed the breath she’d been holding. “You and every female on the planet, Anna. That doesn’t make him human.”
Anna looked as if she might have a heart attack. Aliyah wanted to reach out and comfort her. She curled her hands on the urge for a second then exhaled. What the hell. She was what she was. And one thing she’d never stop doing was comforting others in distress.
Anna jerked when Aliyah reached out and squeezed her shoulder, her eyes widening on such a mixture of surprise and hope that Aliyah groaned. “It’s not your fault, okay? I may have thought that when I was still in shock and having an internal tantrum, but that’s just too far-fetched. You didn’t make the Aal Shalaans into grabby bastards, and you didn’t make Kamal a ruthless one.”
“You’re making me feel even worse, being so kind.”
“I’m just honest.” Aliyah smiled, prodding her to smile back, to lighten the mood. She had enough heartache in her future, she couldn’t take any now. “One way to look at things is that it’s a good thing you had me, or two kingdoms would be on the brink of civil war right now. I’ll go down in history as the chess piece that defused the whole mess. Not many women can boast such a pivotal role, even if it is, alas, a passive one. Still, most women marry for far, far less and do nowhere as much good. We can even say that your relationship with—let’s call him King Atef, since I can’t get around to calling him Dad, either—has been preordained, so you’d have me and I’d be the peace chip.”
Anna’s smile trembled, as did her voice. “That’s certainly one way to look at things.”
“Makes everything sound so much better and worthwhile, doesn’t it? How about we sanction it as the official version?”
Anna nodded, her eyes filling with a jumble of pain, relief and anxiety. “I never dreamed I’d cause anything like this. I didn’t know who or where you were, then Atef found me and I let him think Farah was his daughter, when she’s my…my…”
“Your adopted daughter. Your real daughter, really. Being your biological child doesn’t make me that. I always believed a child is raised, not born.”
Anna’s gaze faltered. “And you don’t want us to have any more than a biological link?”
She surged forward, put her hand on Anna’s knee. “Oh, I do. Though I don’t know if I can come to think of you as my mother. I already have one, whom I love, even though she let so-called experts mess with my life. But I know she did it out of an almost pathological need to see me healthy and normal.”
Anna gave her a sad smile. “Then that is something besides you that I share with Bahiyah. I almost messed up Farah’s life with the same pathological need.”
Aliyah’s lips twisted whimsically. “Hmm, another thing I have in common with Farah. Wow. I can’t wait to meet her.”
“She can’t wait, either. But she doesn’t want to impose on you.”
Aliyah gave her a mock-wicked glance. “Oh, I’ll impose on her. I have three days to get ready for the wedding of the century, as the list my ‘groom’ gave me indicates. I need all the eager-to-please people I can lay my hands on.”
The sounds of powerful cars gliding to smooth stops tickled her ears as she spoke.
Kamal’s cavalcade. She knew it. The king had come home.
She quirked an eyebrow. “Say—how about we stretch our legs?”
Anna nodded, swayed to her feet, smoothed her sky-blue skirt suit and fell in step with Aliyah as they exited through huge French windows to the enormous veranda leading to a dozen thirty-foot-wide stone steps and the wing’s garden, an explosion of flowers and rare plants.
Anna, still bent on elaborating on the main issue eating at her, didn’t seem to notice the cavalcade drawing to a stop at the palace’s main entrance. “You’re so willing to deal with the most awkward things, with your pain, so openly, and I have the feeling you can take on the whole world and come out the winner. Yet, with all your pragmatic approach, you haven’t accepted this marriage as you claim, have you? You’re feeling…trapped.”
Pragmatic? This lady had way too much to learn about her still. But she’d gotten one thing right at least.
She was trapped. In a marriage without love or respect. But she should console herself it was also with a time limit. In nine months’ time, if she proved to be a fertile little chess piece, he’d do an encore of his favorite trick and cast her aside.
Not much of a consolation when she thought of her track record. The first time he’d done that, he’d almost destroyed her. Any bets he’d succeed this time?
Aliyah heaved a huge sigh, nodded and stood straighter as Kamal stepped out of the middle limo.
He saw her the split second he straightened, his eyes slamming into hers across the distance.
In the next second anger radiated off of him like a shock wave.
Didn’t like that she was letting him see her, did he? Going against the dictates of their culture and its unreasonable demands of decorum, its servitude to and belief in the caprices of luck and its evil influences. Supposedly if the groom saw the bride in the five days before the wedding, their marriage would be blighted with inexplicable incompatibility and strife.
She couldn’t see how theirs could be blighted with worse than what they already had—ill will, bad blood and subzero expectations.
She held his gaze, came forward so he could take a good look at her. Disappointing you yet, ya habibi?
His imperious face and body filled with the answer, with the unmistakable intent to stride up to her and let her hear it, along with a few more decrees no doubt, maybe even a restraining order. She only made a face at him, tossed her hair and turned to Anna.
Anna gaped at Kamal for a moment before turning stunned eyes on Aliyah. “My. Oh, my. That was…intense.”
