The Sheikh's Claim

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Ice suddenly extinguished the embers of sensual fire in his eyes. “I forget nothing. It’s a curse Aal Shalaans suffer from. It’s also why I failed to perform that deletion I intended. The moment I knew you were back here, I admitted that I never would.”

She’d known about Aliyah’s amazing eidetic memory but this was the first time he’d mentioned possessing something similar. But then, what had he ever told her? He’d talked, a lot, but it had all been about passion, both sexual and contentious. Besides that … nothing.

She shrugged. “This infallible memory must also mean you haven’t forgotten the bad parts. And those were ugly enough to douse anything you imagine was so wonderful.”

“You mean the parts where you got close to one of my best friends and conned him into marrying you, only to dispatch him in record time? Though maybe I shouldn’t call ‘almost two years’ record time. As always, I salute your tenacity. You must have wanted to get rid of him sooner.”

“So you assume.”

At the reigniting challenge and enjoyment in his eyes, she almost smacked herself. Focus. Just be a neutral bore and defuse his confrontational circuits.

“So why don’t you fix my assumptions?”

She wanted to tell him to go fix himself.

Instead, she decided to deflate the misapprehension that clearly fueled his perverse interest in her.

She released her breath in a resigned exhalation. “I wasn’t at liberty to disclose the matter when we … last met. I’m still not comfortable talking about it, but I guess there’s no reason to keep it a secret anymore, at least from you.”

“Is that your oblique way of warning me to keep this a secret? Because I’m known to be such a blabbermouth?”

“You mean you won’t run to the media with my disclosures, or rush to tweet about them?” She tamped down another wave of bitterness, lips twisting with it. “But you’re right. The way you keep secrets, I bet anything I tell you would be even safer than it would with a corpse. But I wasn’t thinking about your ironclad discretion when you showed up two months after Patrick’s death. With the turmoil I was in and the dangers I was facing, not to mention your added aggravation, sharing the truth with you was pretty low on my list of considerations.”

“Are you going to share said truth now? About how he ‘really’ died? If it’s what you told the police, don’t bother.”

“I don’t know how the police work in this region, O Prince of Two Kingdoms, but in New York they don’t care what you ‘tell’ them. They only listen to solid evidence. Especially when someone so rich and young dies of unnatural causes.”

“But they found no evidence of foul play, hence my accusation a couple of years ago.”

“About getting away with murder?” She cocked her head at him, hating the way her heart sputtered as his eyes followed the movement of her hair when he was more or less accusing her of being a murderess. “So you think I’m capable of it?”

“I know you’re capable of driving a man to take his own life.”

“Based on what? My infamous former career as a woman who used my body to make a living? Or as the woman who dared to end things with you?”

She stopped, cursing herself silently, viciously. She was sliding into inciting recriminations again.

“How about as the woman who ‘used her body’ to trap herself a billionaire when I didn’t make the bid you were after?”

It was no use. This man could goad a rock into hurtling itself at him. “You’re saying I was after a proposal? As in marriage? Did it seem to you like I thought fairy-tale movies were based on true stories? Last time I looked, those and rom-coms were the only realms where the prince married the servant’s daughter.”

“When you said you wanted a man who ‘wouldn’t hide you like a dirty secret,’ who’d ‘walk with you in the sun,’ you meant you wanted a proposal. You let me know I was useless to you if I didn’t cough up one only when you had a suitable substitute secured.”

“Suitable substitute secured? I bet you can’t say that five times in a row.” She coughed a furious laugh. “It never crossed my mind that our … liaison would be more than what it was—trivial, sporadic, not to mention base. And that’s why I decided to end it. Sex was no longer enough to put up with the degradation.”

“Degradation?” he hissed. “I went to every effort to make sure our … liaison, as you put it, remained only between us so you wouldn’t be exposed to anything of the sort.”

Bile rose again. “And I knew it couldn’t have been different between us. But that doesn’t mean it was okay or even sane. I was trapped in a vicious circle, wanting to end it then letting you walk back into my life anytime you pleased, to lure me back into that … toxic compulsion. That’s why I ended it. The inequality, the unbridgeable gap, the pointlessness, on every level, was corroding my self-esteem and psychological health.”

“And the only cure for both was a besotted billionaire husband.”

She snorted. “That’s your favorite assumption, isn’t it? You have to find a mercenary, borderline criminal rationalization to explain that a woman would choose to deprive herself of you, don’t you?”

“When I’m left with no explanation, apart from an ambiguous rant, I had to fill in the blanks, before and after the event.”

“And you couldn’t find a rationalization where you were in any way to blame, right?”

“If I were, you should have aired specific grievances and given me the chance to undo them. Instead, you chose to become hysterical before storming out. And you promptly ended any chance for me to approach you with reconciliation efforts. What could I do but adopt the harshest explanations?”

“Wow, your Cambridge English major is sure coming out to play, isn’t it?”

His smile turned lethal. “So you’re telling me that blowup wasn’t a pretext to get me out of the picture while you grabbed the opportunity to land a far more malleable man with almost as much money?”

“Patrick was far more of a man, period, and a human being than you can ever dream of being.” And she was pathetic, because knowing that had never extinguished the hunger that consumed her alive. Not that she’d let it steer her now that she had far more than herself to safeguard, to defend. “And I certainly didn’t marry him for his money and assets. In fact, he married me for them.”

After that first punch, Jalal had managed to anticipate Lujayn for the next two years. Her pattern had changed in the following two, but after some readjustment, he’d still charted it.

Then had come that day two years ago. Nothing had happened according to his expectations then or ever since. It was as if he’d lost his insight where she was concerned.

She kept throwing curves he remained unprepared for. She’d just insulted his manhood, his humanity. But that wasn’t what he’d taken issue with. It was that riddle she’d hurled at him.

Suddenly, every frustration of the past four years blew away his intention to play this cool and seductive. The suaveness he’d maintained till now became a seething mass of urgency.

“You prefaced all this with your intention to tell me the truth. So b’haggej’ jaheem, skip the cryptic teasers. What in hell do you mean he married you for his money and assets?”

Those unique eyes of hers echoed his ire and passion. “Nothing cryptic to it. He wanted to make sure his wealth and projects didn’t go to his so-called family after he died.”

He’d demanded she give it to him straight. But he hadn’t expected she would, or that much. It was so straight that his mind stalled with implications he’d never considered.

“If you were any kind of friend to Patrick, let alone one of his best friends as you like to claim, you must know his relationship with his family was … pathological, to say the least.”

He nodded slowly. After Patrick’s mother died, his father had married a woman who turned out to be a wicked stepmother straight out of a fairy tale. Her evil became even more evident when she had children. She did everything she could to destroy Patrick’s relationship with his father to make him cut Patrick off from his inheritance. To her fury, Owen McDermott did the opposite. Unlike a typical, oblivious fictional father, he was aware of his new wife’s flaws and that their children shared her hatred of Patrick. His will cut them off from the bulk of his fortune, leaving it to the honorable Patrick to give them what he saw fit.

And Patrick had given. But nothing had ever been enough.

She continued, “Patrick told me his life story the first night we met.”

How he remembered that night. It had been one of the handful of times he’d gone out with her, meeting in a secluded restaurant. They’d stumbled upon Patrick who’d been out drinking alone. Jalal had been called away to handle a business emergency, and Lujayn had driven the intoxicated Patrick home. He’d thought nothing of it in his certainty of their exclusive interest in each other.

His heart clenched at the expression that came over her, as if she were looking into the past with longing and regret.

“We became friends from that night. He started coming with me on my vacations to Ireland, the homeland he hadn’t returned to since his mother died. He found a new family there.”

“Yours.”

He didn’t need her nod of corroboration. All the time they’d been together, she’d been taking another man home.

“He and my father grew very close, and along the way, Dad gave him advice that multiplied his inheritance a dozen times. His so-called family came swarming back, demanding their ‘share.’”

“And he didn’t want to give them any more.” Her poignancy chafed him so badly he wanted to shake her out of this melancholy over another man. He clenched his fists on the urge. “So you’re saying he married you to give it to you instead.”

“Me and my family. We were the ones he trusted.”

“Why should he have wanted to trust anyone with his fortune?”

“It wasn’t simply money. He had many projects, companies and charities. He knew if his stepmother and half brother and half sisters got their hands on those, they would liquidate everything and go somewhere tropical and live like retired despots. He wanted to make sure they didn’t have legal claim to any of it.”

“Thanks for the elucidation, but that wasn’t what I asked. Why would he prepare alternative heirs when he was so young? It’s as if he knew he was going to die. Did he have psychiatric problems? Was he suicidal?”

“He certainly was not!”

Her denial barreled into him. It felt real. Too real. As if an emotional charge was building inside her as she talked about Patrick, remembered him. The mere mention of something she considered insulting to Patrick had her on the verge of another attack.

The blackness that had been roiling inside him ever since she’d left him and married Patrick spread. She’d once been passionate about her displeasure with him, but now she treated him with cold contempt. Patrick commanded her respect and allegiance, even in death. Had he been so wrong about what he’d thought they’d shared? About her relationship with Patrick?

Scowling at him as if she’d like to give him another one-two combo, she said, “Patrick was the most psychologically healthy person I’ve ever known. He was also the most benevolent. He would never have done anything to harm himself, not only because he was stable as a rock, but because so many people depended on him.”

That he knew to be true. He’d admired Patrick from the day they’d met, over fifteen years ago, for his boundless energy and enthusiasm, his progressive views, but mostly for his unswerving humanitarianism. It had been bitterness over Lujayn that had driven him to sever all ties with him, business and otherwise. That was what he’d regretted most when Patrick had died. That he had died with them at odds.