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He not only believed it wouldn’t, he didn’t want it to.
He refrained from saying anything. His father would have to roll the dice and decide Shaheen’s fate himself.
Finally his father gave up, brushed past him and walked out with heavy steps.
Shaheen watched him, compassion flickering through the deadness inside him.
His father hadn’t had an easy life. Certainly not a contented one. Shaheen had grown up believing that his father had never known happiness or love outside of what he felt for his job and children. It had been only a couple of years ago that they’d found out he’d once tasted that happiness and love, with a woman. Anna Beaumont.
He’d had an affair with her during his separation from Queen Sondoss two years after Haidar and Jalal were born. Then Anna had fallen pregnant, and his efforts to end his marriage to Sondoss had failed. And though it had nearly destroyed him, he’d left Anna, telling her he could never be with her again, due to the threat of war with Sondoss’s home kingdom of Azmahar, and that it was imperative to abort their child.
Instead, Anna had put her baby up for adoption. Shaheen’s aunt Bahiyah, secretly knowing about her brother’s affair, had adopted Aliyah and passed her off as hers.
It was only many years later, while his father was recovering from a heart attack, that he’d searched for Anna again and discovered the truth. It was a timely discovery, as another flare of unrest in the region could only be resolved if a daughter of King Atef’s married the king of Judar. Now Aliyah was King Kamal’s worshipped wife and Judar’s beloved queen, and Anna Beaumont had become a constant presence in Aliyah’s and, by association, his father’s lives.
Shaheen believed that had only deepened his father’s unhappiness. For he could never have the only woman he’d ever wanted, and as Shaheen sensed, still did.
He and his father had that in common, too.
Shaheen kept his eyes fixed on his father’s slumped shoulders as they reached their destination, braced himself as they stepped into the ceremony hall.
Brightness and buzzing seemed to rise at their entry, but he couldn’t register the magnificent surroundings beyond the darkness and ugliness inside him. It was reflected on every surface, on every face that turned to look at him.
Suddenly every hair on his body stood on end.
What now?
His eyes panned the room, seeking the source of the disturbance that had drenched him. It now felt as if a laser beam was drilling through his gut.
Then everything came to a grinding halt.
His heart almost ruptured with one startled detonation.
There, at the farthest end of the hall …
Gemma.
Five
Shaheen’s mind had snapped. It must have.
He was seeing things.
He swallowed the lump of shock that had lodged into his throat, shuddered as it landed like a brick in his stomach.
He was seeing Gemma.
But he couldn’t be. His mind must be projecting the one thing it wanted most, the woman whose memory and taste and touch had been driving him insane and whom he’d despaired of seeing again.
He closed his eyes.
He opened them. She was still there.
“Shaheen, why did you stop?”
He heard his father’s concern as if it were coming from a mile away. Gemma, who was at the far end of the two-hundred-foot space, felt mere inches away.
Her gaze snared his across the distance, just like that first time, was roiling with the same intensity, the same awareness. One thing was missing. Shock.
Of course. She was expecting to see him. There was no element of surprise for her this time. But there was more in her expression. Apprehension. Aversion even.
She was that loath to see him? Then why was she here?
The relevant question hit him harder than the shock of her being here.
How was she here? In Zohayd, in the palace, at this function?
He felt himself moving again, his body activated and steered by his father’s hand on his forearm as he led him deeper into the throngs of people gathered to watch his sacrifice.
Moving forced him to relinquish his eye lock with Gemma. He rushed ahead to gain another direct path to her. But she evaded his eyes now, hid from him.
Frustration seethed through him, questions. The urge to cleave through the crowd, push everyone out of the way till he got to her overwhelmed him. He imagined hauling her over his shoulder and storming through the palace to his quarters, pressing her to the nearest upright surface and devouring her.
It wasn’t consideration for his father’s guests, the most influential people in Zohayd and the region, that stopped him. It was her avoidance. The knowledge that she didn’t want him as he wanted her. That whatever had brought her here wasn’t him.
For an interminable time, he believed he responded when addressed, monosyllables that he vaguely thought were appropriate, shook hands and grimaced at eager female faces and fawning family members, all the time trying to catch glimpses of her, desperately trying to get her to look at him again.
At one point, his older brother Harres appeared at his side.
“You look out of it, bro. Got stoned to get through this?”
Shaheen felt the urge to deck him. “And what if I did, Mr. Immune-From-This-Abominable-Fate Minister of Interior?”
Harres grimaced. “I did offer to do it myself again. I told them that, unlike you, I don’t care one way or another, and I’d certainly remain neutral in my post since I would never get attached to whatever wife they saddled me with. They still refused.”
Shaheen’s aggression drained. Harres had tried to take his place time and again. He would spare him if he could.
He exhaled. “They know you’d get attached to your children.”
Harres shrugged. “Maybe. Probably. I don’t know. I really can’t imagine being a husband let alone a father.” He put an arm around Shaheen’s shoulder, gave him a hard squeeze of consolation, the golden eyes that could have been their father’s flaring with empathy. “I would have done anything to spare you this.”
Which Shaheen had just thought. “Aih, I know.”
He again caught sight of Gemma among the shifting crowd, took an involuntary step nearer as if to force her acknowledgment, resurrect her hunger with his eagerness.
“And I know who you’re looking at. Who would have thought our little Johara would turn out to be such a stunner?”
Harres’s words made no sense. Had Shaheen’s mind started to deteriorate from the stress?
Shaheen looked at Harres, seeing him for the first time since they’d started talking, the juggernaut knight the kingdom had entrusted with its security, and who’d done the best job in its history. An expression softened his hewn, desert-weathered features, one Shaheen had never seen there except around their female family members. A rare gentleness, a proud indulgence.
And he’d thought Harres had said … No. He couldn’t have said that name. Where would it come from, anyway?
He shook his head, desperate to clear it. “What are you talking about?”
“The vision in gold over there. Our Johara … or I should say your Johara all grown-up.” Harres gave a nod in Gemma’s direction. “You’ve been looking nowhere else since you walked in. And I can’t blame you. I gaped at her for a solid ten seconds when Nazaryan greeted me with her on his arm. Who would have thought, eh?”
Shaheen stared at Harres as if he’d started talking in a language he’d never heard before. “Nazaryan?”
Harres snapped his fingers in front of his eyes. “Snap out of it. You’re scaring me.”
Shaheen shook his head again. “What do you mean Nazaryan?”
“I mean Berj Nazaryan, our royal jeweler, her father.”
Shaheen’s eyes slid from Harres’s, as sluggish and impeded as his thoughts, followed the direction of his earlier nod.
Gemma was the only one in that direction dressed in gold. Harres was talking about her. And he was calling her … calling her …
Johara.
The bubble of incomprehension trembled inside Shaheen. Then it burst.
Gemma was Johara.
Shock mushroomed through him like a nuclear detonation.
His mysterious Gemma was Johara. Berj Nazaryan’s daughter. Aram’s sister. The girl he’d known since she was six. Who’d become his shadow since the day he’d plucked her out of the air from a thirty-foot fall.
No wonder he’d felt he’d known her forever. He had. He had recognized her with that first look, even if not consciously.
And no wonder. She looked nothing like the fourteen-year-old she’d been when he’d last seen her. Skinny with glasses and braces, with no ability to wield her femininity the way girls in Zohayd learned to from a very early age. She hadn’t only realized her potential, she’d become the total opposite of her former self.
He’d thought he’d seen every brand of beauty this world had to offer. But she was something he’d never thought would be gathered in one woman, all his tastes and fantasies come to life. And that was just on the surface. Deeper, where it counted most, little Johara, as Harres had called her, had become the woman who’d seduced Shaheen on sight, had possessed him in a single night.
He rocked on his feet with the mushrooming realization. Only Harres’s hand on his arm steadied him.
Among the storm tossing him about, he managed to answer Harres’s worried question. “No, I don’t need air. I’m fine.”
But he was so far from fine he could be on another planet. He might never be fine again.
He’d taken Johara to his bed.
He’d taken her, in every way, repeatedly.
Just as he thought shock couldn’t engulf him any further, his eyes captured her incredible dark ones again. And the final piece of the puzzle crashed down in place. It should have been the first thing he understood the moment he realized who she really was.
He might not have recognized her, but she had known who he was from the first moment. She’d given him enough clues. Her first word to him had been a gasp of his name. She’d later told him all about herself, which had amounted to what he did know of her family history, without the names, dates and places.
And when he hadn’t clued in, so bowled over by her he hadn’t even connected the sun-size dots, she’d chosen to leave him in the dark. The apprehension he felt from her must be her anxiety about his reaction now that she knew he’d finally wised up.
“Now that you’ve met your potential brides, how is your stomach holding up?”
“Can we give you tips who not to choose?”
Shaheen dazedly turned toward the two warm, musical female voices. Aliyah and Laylah flowed to him, hugging him on both sides, reaching up to kiss a cheek each, their exquisite faces brimming with vitality and joie de vivre.
He automatically hugged and kissed them back as the ramifications of what had happened between him and Gemma … Johara expanded inside him, squeezing all his vitals.
“The beauty in emerald over there, the one with the incredible black hair down to her feet?” Laylah pinched his cheek playfully as she turned his head in the direction of the woman she was describing, before turning his face back to her quickly. “Don’t even look at her again. Her unbelievable locks will turn to serpents at the first opportune moment.”
“And the redhead over there.” Aliyah directed his gaze toward the woman she was mentioning with more discreet taps on his cheek. “Run if you ever see her again. She grows scales and blowtorches anyone within a mile radius.”
Harres laughed. “If you’re trying to make Shaheen feel better about this, you’re going about it in bizarro fashion.”
Laylah poked a teasing elbow into Harres’s abdomen. “Hey, we’re saving him from settling on the prettiest flower and being devoured alive.”
“So now that you’ve eliminated the most beautiful flowers, do I surmise you think he should go for the ugliest one?”
Aliyah gave a horrified shudder. “Oh, no, that one is just as monstrous, without the advantage of being nice to look at. What’s inside is on the outside in her case. In fact, we’ve narrowed down his choices to two.”
Harres huffed a sound of pure sarcasm. “Don’t tell me. The candidates with the least monstrous qualities.”
“Actually they’re both pretty decent. One is not as accomplished or worldly as Shaheen would prefer, but we believe she would become so as his wife. The other one is really nice, but doesn’t have much of a sense of humor. Again, with Shaheen for a husband, she’ll definitely develop one.”
Shaheen felt as if he’d fallen into the twilight zone, expected to hear a laughter track burst into the background any moment now.
He cleared his throat. “Shaheen is right here.” The two women squeezed him again, sheepishness coating their expressions. “Thank you, my dears, for vetting my bridal nightmares as only you two discerning ladies could. Write down your choices and hand them to Father. But if he decides one of the monsters is more beneficial to the negotiations, that is who I’ll end up with. Anyway, my life as I know and want it is over. So, as I told Father earlier, one catastrophe with which to meet my end is as good as another.”
A pall fell on the duo in the wake of his words.
Horror dawned in Aliyah’s and Laylah’s eyes, contrition twisting their features. They really hadn’t realized how much Shaheen hated this, were now mortified that they’d been oblivious to his own distress and teased him about it.
“Oh, Shaheen, I didn’t know you were …”
“Oh, Shaheen, I didn’t realize …”
Aliyah’s and Laylah’s apologies stumbled over each other. They fell silent, Aliyah biting her lip, Laylah’s eyes filling with tears.
His focus flowed back to its captor, to Gem—to Johara. Her eyes darted away the moment his fell on her. She’d been watching him.
A bubble of agitation and elation expanded inside him.
She might be avoiding him, but she wanted to look at him and did so the moment she could.
Harres’s phone rang.
He answered. After a few terse sentences, he turned his eyes to Shaheen. “I’m sorry to leave you. But something’s brewing at our borders. It may take hours or even days to defuse.”
