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He smiled, bright white teeth against tanned skin. “I’m a ghost, Jada. You don’t read about me in the news, and there’s a very good reason for that.”
“You don’t read about me in the news, either, and the reason is that I’m boring.”
“Oh, I am not boring, and if the press ever got wind of me? I would be a headline.” Coming from another man it would have sounded like bragging. Like he was talking himself up. But Alik said it like he was stating the most mundane of facts. And it made her believe him. “As it is,” he continued, “they know nothing about me, and I intend to keep it that way.”
A shiver ran up her back, the hair on her neck standing on end. “You have a high opinion of yourself and your media appeal.”
Granted, he would have media appeal in spades. Even if it was just because he had model good looks. She looked at him harder. No, perhaps he didn’t have a model’s good looks. Models usually possessed some sort of androgynous beauty, while Alik was hard. A scar ran through the center of his chin, one marring the smooth line of his upper lip. His hands were no better. Rough, looking as though the skin on the backs of them had been, at some point in his life, reduced to hamburger, and had since healed badly.
She hadn’t noticed at first. She’d been too bowled over by his presence in general to take in the finer details. And now she was wondering exactly who this man was. This man she’d agreed to marry.
She had a feeling that she didn’t really want to know.
“I’m simply realistic,” he said. “However, anonymity suits me. It always has.”
“Well, that’s good, because it suits me, too.”
“Glad to hear it.” He picked up his cell phone and punched in a number. “Bring the car to the front of the coffee shop. And map the route to the airport.”
“The airport?” Panic clawed at her, warring with despair for the position of dominant emotion.
“There is no need to wait, as I said.”
“So, where are we going then? Paris? Barcelona or that town house in New York?” She tried to feign a bravado she didn’t feel. Tried to find the strength she needed to survive this new pile of muck life had heaped onto her.
“Tell me, Jada, have you ever been to Attar?”
Attar was Alik’s adopted country. The only country he’d ever sworn a willing allegiance to. As a boy, pulled off the streets of Russia, he’d been asked very early on to betray his homeland, his people.
And he had done it. The promise of food and shelter too enticing to refuse. His conscience had burned at first, but then it burned past the point of healing. Singed beyond feeling.
Over the years he’d belonged to many nations. Taken the helm of many armies.
Attar was the one place he loved. The one place he called home. Sheikh Sayid al Kadar and his wife Chloe were a big part of that.
As his private jet touched down on the tarmac, waves of heat rising up to envelop the aircraft, Leena woke with a start, her plaintive wails working on his nerves.
He’d never been especially fond of children. Yes, he tolerated Sayid and Chloe’s children, had sworn to protect them, but he hardly hung out to play favorite Uncle Alik, regardless of the fact that Sayid was the closest thing to a brother he’d ever had.
But then, he didn’t anticipate spending too much time with his own child. The thought made him feel slightly uncomfortable for the first time, a strange pang hitting him in the chest. He wasn’t sure why.
Because you know what abandonment feels like.
He shook off the thought. He wasn’t abandoning Leena. He was shaking up his entire damned life to make sure she was cared for. And he was doing her a kindness by staying away.
“Welcome to Attar,” he said. “We’re on the sheikh’s private runway, so there’s no need to wait.”
“The sheikh?”
“A friend of mine.” His only friend.
“Well, I guess you are sort of newsworthy,” she said.
She had no idea. His relationship with Sayid was only the tip of the iceberg, but he hardly intended to tell her about his past. He had no need to. They would marry, he would install her in the residence of her choice and then he would carry on as he had always done.
He made a mental note to put Leena’s birthday in his calendar. He would attempt to make visits around that time. Failing that he would send a gift. That seemed a good thing to do. And it was a bloody sight better than abandonment.
He put his sunglasses on, prepared to contend with the heat of Attar, a heat he had grown accustomed to over the past six years. He suddenly realized that Jada and Leena weren’t.
He pulled out his cell phone. “Bring the car up to the jet, make sure it is adequately cooled.” It was strange, having to consider the comfort of others. He rarely considered his own comfort. He would have charged out into the heat and walked to where the car was, or walked on to Sayid’s palace himself.
He grimaced. He didn’t especially want to go straight to Sayid’s palace. He would have the driver take him to his own palace.
“Wait until the car pulls up,” he said to Jada.
“Why?” she asked.
“This is not the sort of heat you’re used to.”
“How do you know?”
“Unless you’ve spent years in a North African desert, it’s not the kind of heat you’re used to. I assume you have not?”
“Not recently,” she said, her tone stiff. It almost struck him as funny, but he had the feeling if he laughed vulnerable body parts might be in danger.
“I thought you probably had not.”
When he saw the sleek, black car pulling near the door of the plane, he gave the pilot the signal to open the door. The moment it started to lower, a wave of heat washed inside the cabin.
“You weren’t joking,” she said.
“No, I wasn’t.” The stairs were steep, and he wondered if a woman as petite as Jada could manage a wiggling one-year-old on her way down.
“Give her to me,” he said.
“Why?”
“Do you want to try and negotiate those with her in your arms? If so, by all means.” His discomfort with the situation, with the prospect of holding the child again, made his voice harder than he intended.
“And what makes you think you’ll do better? You aren’t experienced with babies. What if you drop her?”
“I have carried full-grown men down mountainsides when they were unable to walk for themselves. I think I can carry a baby down a flight of stairs. Give her to me.”
Jada complied, but her expression remained mutinous.
“After you,” he said.
She started down the steps and into the car, and he followed after her. There was a car seat ready in this vehicle, his orders followed down to the letter. There should also be supplies for a baby back at his home. Money didn’t buy happiness—he knew that to be true. He doubted he’d felt a moment of true happiness in his life. But money bought a lot of conveniences, and a lot of things that felt close enough to that elusive emotion.
He much preferred having it to not having it. And a good thing, too, as he’d sold his soul to get it.
“Where are we headed?” she asked when the car started moving.
“To my palace.” He looked out the window at the wide, flat expanse of desert, and the walls of the city beyond it. This was the first place he had ever felt at home. The desert showed a man where he was at, challenged him on a fundamental level. The desert didn’t care for good or evil. Only strength. Survival.
It had been a rescue mission in this very desert that had nearly claimed his life. And now it was in his blood.
“You have a palace?”
“A gift from the sheikh.”
“Extravagant gift.”
“Not so much, all things considered.”
“What things?” she asked.
He didn’t know what made him do it, but he unbuttoned the top three buttons on his shirt and pulled the collar to the side, revealing the dark lines of his most recent tattoo. The one that covered his most recent scar.
Her eyes widened. She lifted her hand as though she was tempted to touch, to see if the skin beneath the ink was as rough and damaged as it looked. It was. He wanted her to do it. Wanted her to press her fingertips to his flesh, so he could see just how soft and delicate she truly was against his hardened, damaged skin.
She lowered her hand and the spell was broken. “Is that part of that newsworthiness you were talking about?” she asked.
“Some might say.”
“It looks like it was painful.”
“Not especially. I think the one on my wrist hurt worse.”
“Not the tattoo,” she said.
He chuckled, feeling a genuine sense of amusement. “I know.”
They settled into silence for the rest of the drive. Jada stared out the window, her fingers fluffing his daughter’s pale hair. He wondered if she looked like her mother. Her birth mother. He could scarcely remember the woman.
Based on geography he had a fair idea of who she was, but he ultimately couldn’t be certain. A one-night stand that had occurred nearly two years earlier hardly stuck out in his mind. He’d had a lot of nights like that. A lot of encounters with women he barely exchanged names with before getting down to the business of what they both wanted.
He wondered if a normal man might feel shame over that. Over the fact that he could scarcely recall the woman who’d given birth to his child. Yes, a normal man would probably be ashamed. But Alik had spent too many years discovering that doing the right thing often meant going hungry, while doing the wrong thing could net you a hotel room and enough food for a week. He’d learned long ago that he would have to define right and wrong in his own way. The best way he’d been able to navigate life had been to chase all of the good feelings he could find.
Food and shelter made him comfortable, so whatever he’d had to do to get it, he had. Later on he’d discovered that sex made him feel good. So he had a lot of it. He was never cruel to his partners, never promised more than he was willing to deliver. And until recently, he’d imagined he’d left his lovers with nothing more than a smile on their face and a post-orgasmic buzz.
That turned out not to be strictly true. It made him feel unsettled. Made him question things it was far too late to question.
His palace was on the coast of Attar, facing the sea. The sun washed the sea a pale green, the rocks and sand red. And his home stood on the hill, a stunning contrast to the landscape. White walls and a golden, domed roof that shone bright in the midday heat.
Here, by the sea, the air was more breathable. Not as likely to burn you from the inside out.
“This is my home,” he said. “Your home now, if you wish.”
He wanted to take the invitation back as soon as he’d issued it. There was a reason he’d not mentioned the Attari palace in his initial list of homes Leena might live in. The heat was one reason, but there was another. This was his sanctuary. The one place he didn’t bring women. The one place he brought no one.
Not now. Now he was bringing his daughter and the woman who was to become his wife. For the first time in his memory, he seriously questioned the decisions that he’d made.
CHAPTER FOUR
JADA COULD SCARCELY take in all of her surroundings. She clutched a sweaty, sleeping Leena to her chest and tried to ignore the heat of her daughter’s body against hers, far too much in the arid Attari weather, and continued through the palace courtyard and into the opulent, cool, foyer.
“This is…like nothing I’ve ever seen.”
“I felt the same way when I first came here. To Attar. It is like another world. Although, it’s funny, I find some of the architecture so similar to what you find in Russia, but with dunes in the background instead of snow.”
“Do you keep a home there?” she asked. She realized suddenly that it was not in the list of places he’d named earlier.
“I do,” he said. “But I don’t go there.”
“Why?” The question applied to both parts of the statement. Why would he keep a home he never went to? And why would he not go there?
“I have no need to revisit my past.”
“And yet you keep a house there?”
“Holding on to a piece of it, I suppose. But then, we all do that, do we not?”
“I suppose,” she said. She flexed her fingers, became suddenly very conscious of the ring that was now on her right finger. She’d removed her wedding ring about a year after Sunil’s death. And then a few months later she’d put it back on, but on her other hand. A way to remember, while acknowledging that the marriage bond was gone.
A way to hold on to a past that she could never reclaim. She knew all about holding on to what you couldn’t go back to.
“I asked that my staff have rooms prepared for you and Leena. Rooms that are next to each other. I will call my housekeeper and see that she leads you to them.”
“Not you?”
“I don’t know where she installed you,” he said, his total lack of interest almost fascinating to her. She wondered what it would be like to live like him. No ties, no cares. Even when it came to Leena, he seemed to simply think and act. None of it came from his heart and because of that there was no hesitation. No pain.
But there was also no conviction. Not true conviction. Not like she felt when she’d made the decision to come here, knowing that, no matter the cost she couldn’t turn her back on her child.
As attractive as his brand of numbness seemed in some ways, she knew she would never really want it. There was no strength in it. Not true strength. It was better to hurt for lost love, and far better to have had it in the first place. Even in the lowest point of her grief she wouldn’t have traded away her years with her husband. Even facing the potential loss of Leena, she would never regret the bond.
“Well, then how am I supposed to find you in this massive palace if you don’t know where I am and I don’t know where you are?” Everything about Attar was massive. The desert stretched on forever, ending at a sea that continued until it met sky. The palace was no less impressive. Expansive rooms and ceilings that curved high overhead. It made her long for the small coziness of her home. For the buildings back in Portland that hemmed them in a bit, the mountains that surrounded those.
Here, everything just seemed laid bare and exposed. She didn’t like the feeling.
“I hardly thought you would want to find me,” he said.
She had thought so, as well, but the idea of not being able to find the only person she knew in this vast, cold stone building didn’t sit well with her at all.
“Better than getting lost forever in this fortress you call a home.”
He looked up, his focus on the domed ceiling. Sunbursts of gold, inlaid with jasper, jade and onyx. “A fortress? I would hardly call it that. I have spent time in fortresses. Prisons. Dungeons.”
