The Desert King / An Affair with the Princess: The Desert King

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“Yeah, that’s Kamal for you.”

Anna shook her head dazedly. “I meant both of you. The vibes you generated were enough to send Judarian homeland security reaching for a nationwide red alert.”

Aliyah let out a resigned laugh, glanced sideways at Kamal, found him still standing there, glaring at her, looking like the bronze colossus of a wrathful god.

If only he didn’t look so…everything. And have a character to match. Except when it came to her. A shudder rattled through her.

Anna caught her gaze, concern showing in her heavenly eyes. “This marriage isn’t just a hated duty to you, is it? You want it, yet you believe it won’t work and you’re…scared?”

While that was a simplistic way to sum up the mess, Anna had again cottoned on to her basic turmoil. She took a last look at Kamal, saw the promise of retribution for defying him, for flaunting his precious customs, written all over him.

Her smile was conceding and defiant at the same time as she sighed. “Witless.”

“I like her already.”

Kamal rounded on Shehab, glowering. Shehab only grinned at him, his enjoyment glaring, chafing.

“A woman who isn’t intimidated by you, who can pull that face—ya Ullah, that face—on you, is all right by me. More than all right. She’s a once-in-a-lifetime find. A treasure.”

Kamal wondered how the international community would react if, during the countdown to his joloos and wedding, he engaged his smug older brother in a knock-down, drag-out fight. Would it really matter if they both showed up at the ceremonies with broken noses, stitched lips and black eyes?

He exhaled the surplus of aggression. He wasn’t letting Shehab bait him. Aliyah had done too good a job of it.

She’d let him see her. And after he’d made it clear he expected not to see her until she came to him in her zaffah. He’d invoked customs when in reality he just couldn’t deal with the added turmoil of seeing her again one second before he had to.

And he’d been right to stipulate that ban. His current condition testified to the accuracy of his projection that seeing her would mess with his coherence and control. He couldn’t afford that now when he needed them most.

And Shehab, alf laa’nah alaih—a thousand damnations on him—was taking such joy in plucking at the last anchors holding his restraint in place, giving him a taunting, considering look. “But this isn’t her reaction to a fresh exposure to you, is it? It doesn’t feel like the outcome of one meeting. Her defiance of your incomparable powers of exasperation feels too…estab-lished. As for your reaction…b’Ellahi, it was priceless.”

Kamal bared his teeth at Shehab before casting his gaze again where she was no longer standing. He still saw her in his mind’s eye, as if her focus on him had left a brand that still sizzled.

He tore his gaze away, cast it to the stately spires of the innermost palace gates, which were flying the flag of Judar at halfmast in mourning for his late uncle, King Zaher.

The weight of responsibility pressed harder on his shoulders, the best cure for his personal upheaval. He exhaled, strode toward the expansive steps, taking in the palace in an inclusive glance. He felt he was seeing it for the first time.

The four-level soaring, sprawling stone edifice was a marriage of the cultures that formed Judar, its architecture a melting pot of their grandeur, each line, ornament and texture owing its design, method and philosophy to one culture or the other. Somehow Byzantine, Indian, Persian, Turkish and other influences conspired to form an Arabian whole, echoing a vast, rich and sometimes brutal history. The palace still owed enough to Western modernization to be a monument of today. And tomorrow.

It reminded him of Aliyah.

And it was his dominion now. The seat of his power. A power that combined his own global influence with that of the throne.

He scaled the steps faster, felt Shehab keeping up with him, his taunting gaze still burning the side of his face.

“What I regret is that I didn’t catch it all in digital memory for the viewing pleasure of the coming generations.”

Kamal shot him a sideways look. “You do remember your warning to me, when I was taking your beloved Farah’s name in vain? You, too, have a perfect set of teeth to cherish and protect, if only to flash them like a fool at your enchantress. So shut up, Shehab.”

“Is this a command, ya maolai?” Shehab all but wiggled his eyebrows as he called him “my liege.” Then seriousness crept into his hard, noble features. “Is Aliyah why you think love affairs are destined for heartache and humiliation? Why you’ve been like a tiger with a festering wound these past years?”

Leave it to Shehab to fathom it all simply from watching him seethe across the distance at Aliyah. He had been like an agonized tiger since he’d cast her out of his life, his disillusionment becoming total intolerance of any human frailty. But he’d always been fair in his ruthlessness.

He hadn’t been with her. Not two nights ago. He’d slashed at her with unforgivable things. The inferno she’d ignited inside him, physical and emotional, had obliterated control and judgment.

And he couldn’t let that happen. The throne of Judar depended on him. The peace of the region. He had to keep Aliyah at arm’s length emotionally, would join with her physically only to produce the vital heir. He couldn’t let her overwhelm him again. As she could, so easily, so totally, if he ever weakened.

Shehab was going on. “I won’t probe…”

“Oh, please do. Then I can have the pleasure of probing right back. Into your maddeningly, obliviously blissful face.”

Shehab sighed. “If I thought it would help, I’d let you. You probably think I owe it to you for passing the throne to you.”

“You talk as if you passed me a ball.”

“I did my share of the running but had to leave the touchdown to you.” Before Kamal turned on him, made him touch down face-first, Shehab raised placating hands. “But sports metaphors aside, whatever went wrong between you, Kamal, bury it. She’ll be your woman, your wife and your queen. And she looks and sounds like your match. You must have felt enough for her in the past if it hurt that bad and affected you that long when things went sour. Focus on the positive, dismiss the negative. Treat her well and it can only circulate in a flow of goodwill and intimacy.”

Kamal slowed as they passed through the soaring mahogany doors. “What’s this? Did our mother leave you instructions to read me before I married? Or did you find this in a wife user’s manual? Or an edition of Domestic Bliss for Dummies?”

Shehab threw his head back on a hearty laugh before his gaze turned penetrating. “I want you to be happy. You haven’t been for a long time, Kamal. I don’t have any information on the situation, but I do trust my instincts, my heart. Especially after they led me into what you so strongly object to, the deepest reaches of love with my incomparable Farah. I want the same for you.”

Holding back his response, which would have been riddled with obscenities, Kamal picked up speed as they crossed the vast columned hall that sprawled underneath a gigantic dome. The transition from the glare and dry heat to the interior’s soothing light and the coolness achieved by the palace’s structure and building materials silenced him. That, and feeling that he was seeing everything through new eyes now that he would call the palace home. His and Aliyah’s.

The sweeping spaces, the extreme opulence, the floors that looked like polished extensions of the palace’s beaches, felt as unreal as the whole situation. And the man who’d been the cause of it all was at his side spouting romantic nonsense.

He finally shot Shehab a dagger of displeasure. “Thanks, but no thanks. I don’t want to be in the deepest reaches of anything. I’ll leave wallowing in the depths of blinding self-deception to you and Farooq. You especially, as a spare crown prince, have it really easy. No pressure, no demands. You threw the job of king in my lap, now leave me to do it right.”

Shehab’s gaze lengthened until Kamal felt he’d given him a total mind scan, documented every thought and evasion and struggle. Then Shehab finally wagged his finger at him. “Attitude.”

Before Kamal showed him some real attitude, Shehab’s gaze suddenly gentled. “Don’t take the past into your future, Kamal. It serves no purpose but to poison your views, your very life.”

“Ah, talking from precious experience now, aren’t we?” Kamal scoffed as they halted in front of his stateroom and he sent guards away with a flick of a hand. “How preconceptions robbed you of appreciating to the fullest every moment of your plunge from the realm of sanity to life under your siren’s influence?”

Shehab had the temerity to look moved. “Such an indescribable waste, yes. But a wise man learns from others’ mistakes. Don’t try them yourself just to find out for sure that they’ll yield the same result. For they will.”

“Your situation,” Kamal spat, “as pathetic as it is, is nothing like mine, your mistakes in no way comparable to my alleged ones. You leave the past out of the future and bury your head in the sand. There’s nothing more around here.”

Shehab’s gaze summed him up again, then he exhaled. “If you don’t think you owe it to her, or to yourself, you owe it to your subjects. Forgive and forget, or you won’t be the king they deserve. Or change your mind. Try it. It might turn out to be the best move of your life, letting go of preconceptions and bitterness.”

“Watch it, ya akhi. You might one day overdose on optimism.”

“I’ll take that over doing so on pessimism any day. If the end is the same, at least I’d have the journey. Think about it.”

Kamal gritted his teeth. “Yes, sage older brother. I’m in your debt for this pep talk. How can I live without your wisdom?”

Shehab looked around, then after making certain they were alone, smacked him on the back of his head. Hard.

Before Kamal charged him, Shehab bowed deeply then turned and walked unhurriedly away, chuckling. “Anytime…ya maolai.”

Five

“So…you’re my sister, in just about every way, huh?”

Aliyah cocked her head as she avidly examined the woman with the most artless, most infectious smile she’d ever seen.

With hair in every gradation of bronze and gold, eyes the color of Judar’s emerald shores and the rest of her an unusual blend, Farah had an atypical beauty, another thing they had in common. And she wasn’t being smug here, about her own beauty.

Personally she’d never seen what the big fuss was about. But the world had had another opinion, at least the world of Western media and advertisement. That had valued her exotic mix so much they’d paid big bucks for the privilege of plastering it on their campaigns and products, had made her able to support herself without her family’s money or power, and sponsor a dozen causes, too.

Farah was also clearly of mixed ethnicity, though which ones, it was even harder to tell than with her. Was that why Anna had adopted her? To remind her of the girl she’d given up?

Farah eagerly nodded. “Oh, yes. And I’m ecstatic about each and every one. Oh, God—I can’t begin to tell you what the last couple of months have been like. I was living this no-expectations life, then I met Shehab. And as if that wasn’t beyond dreams, this happens. It’s still hard to wrap my head around it all, when I spent my life wishing for any sort of family. Now I not only have a sister who’ll be my sister-in-law, too, but you’re American—well, half-American—my age and you’ll share the same residence.”

“If you can call living in the palace a mile apart living in the same residence!”

Farah chuckled. “Yeah, we’ll probably never bump into each other without a previous appointment.”

Aliyah returned her smile, ignoring the spasm that constricted her heart. No reason to rain on Farah’s parade, inform her that within a year she’d be out of there, one way or another. It wouldn’t serve any purpose right now to say that her marriage to Kamal would have no resemblance to Farah’s marriage to his brother, Shehab, which had been born of love and the willingness to sacrifice anything for the other.