He shouldn’t have agreed to come. He should have told Aidan this wasn’t a farewell party to him, but a funeral pyre.
And here was his friend and partner, coming to add to his misery with a blithe smile splitting his face.
“Hey, Sheen!” Aidan exclaimed over the skull-splitting techno music. “I thought you’d decided to let me look like a fool. Again.”
Shaheen winced an attempt at a smile. He hated it when his friends abbreviated his name to Sheen. His western friends did so because it was a more familiar name to them, and those back home because that was the first letter of his name in Arabic. He didn’t know why he put up with it. But then again, what was a nickname he disliked compared to what he would be forced to endure from now on?
Shaheen peered down into his friend’s grinning face, his lips twisting on his barely leashed irritation. “If I’d known what kind of event you were planning, Aidan, I would have.”
“You know what they say about all work and no play.” Aidan hooked his arm high up around Shaheen’s shoulder.
Shaheen almost flinched. He liked the man, and he did come from a culture where physical demonstrations of affection were the norm, contradictorily between members of the same gender. Apart from immediate family, he didn’t appreciate being touched. Even in sexual situations, he didn’t like women to paw him, as they seemed to unanimously wish to. His liaisons were about taking off an edge, not about intimacy. He’d made that clear, on a take-it-or-leave-it basis, to all the women he’d had such liaisons with.
He could barely remember his last sexual encounter. Such carnal couplings, devoid of any deeper connection, had lost their appeal and begun to grate, to defile. To be expected, he guessed, when the women he liked and respected didn’t arouse any carnal inclinations in him.
He stepped away smoothly, severing his friend’s embrace without letting him feel the distaste behind the move. “If being dull is the opposite of this…frenzy, I assure you, I prefer it.”
A disconcerted expression seeped into Aidan’s eyes, replacing the teasing. After six years of business partnership, the man had no idea what Shaheen appreciated. Probably because he kept Aidan, like everyone else, at arm’s length. But Aidan had set this up with the best of intentions. And though those usually led to hell, it wasn’t fair to show him how wasted his efforts truly were.
He gathered the remnants of his decorum. “But it’s not every day I say goodbye to my freedom. So the…fanfare is…” he paused before he forced himself to add “…welcome.”
Aidan’s face cleared, and his words came out in the rush of the eager to please. “It’s not like you’ll really lose your freedom. I hear these royal arranged marriages are the epitome of…flexibility.” Aidan added that last word with a huge wink and slap on the back.
Shaheen almost snapped his oblivious friend’s head off. It was a good thing Aidan turned away from him, exclaiming at the top of his voice to the people who’d flocked over to shake Shaheen’s hand.
Shaheen set himself on auto, performing as Aidan wished him to. No point in setting Aidan straight anyway. He wasn’t really all there with a few drinks in him. Shaheen should let him wallow in his rare surrender to heedlessness without dragging him into the land of harsh reality where
he
now existed.
His whole existence was about to cave in.
Not on the professional level. There, he’d never stopped soaring from one success to another. But on the personal level, things had been unraveling for a long time. He could even pinpoint the day when it had all started to go downhill. His fight with Aram.
Before that point, he’d lived a carefree existence where he’d felt his future was limitless. But things had gone from bad to worse since then.
He’d long known that, as a prince, he was expected to make a marriage of state, but he’d always shoved that expectation to the back of his mind, hoping that one or both of his older brothers would make a terrific political match. Then Amjad, his oldest brother and crown prince,
had
made such a match. And it had ended in disaster.
Amjad’s wife had come to the marriage already pregnant, had schemed to murder Amjad and pass the child as his, to remain forever a princess and the mother of the heir to the throne.
After Amjad had divorced her in a scandal that still resounded in the region, he’d torn through the world acquiring power until he’d become almost as powerful as all of Zohayd put together. No one dared ask him to make another political match. He’d said that, when it was time for him to become king, his brother Harres would be his heir. Failing that, Shaheen. Period.
As for Harres, he would never make a political match, either. It had been agreed that his marriage into any tribe in the region would compromise his position. He’d become the best minister of interior and head of central intelligence and homeland security that Zohayd had ever had, and no one wanted to see the belief in his impartiality tainted. So, if he ever decided to marry—which seemed unlikely, since he hadn’t favored any particular woman of the reported hundreds he’d bedded in his thirty-six years—Harres would nevertheless be free to choose his own wife.
So it fell to Shaheen to make a blood-mixing marriage that would revitalize the wavering pacts between factions. He was the last of the king’s “pure-blood” sons, born to a purely Zohaydan queen. Haidar and Jalal, Shaheen’s half brothers from the current queen, Sondoss, who was Azmaharian, weren’t considered pure enough for the unification the marriage was required to achieve.
For years now, he’d known there was no escape from his fate, but instead of becoming resigned to the idea, he’d hated it more daily. It felt like a death sentence hanging over his head.
Only days ago—the day following his thirty-fourth birthday, to be exact—he’d decided to get the suffocating suspense over with, turn himself in to the marriage pact. He’d announced his capitulation to his father, told him to start lining up the bridal candidates. The next day, the news that he was seeking a bride had been all over the media. As one of the most eligible royals in the world, his intention to marry—with the identity of the bride still undecided—was the stuff of the most sensational news.
And here he was, enduring the party his associate was throwing for him to celebrate his impending imprisonment.
He flicked a look at his watch, did a double take. It had been only
minutes.
And he’d shaken a hundred hands and grimaced at double that many artificially elated or intoxicated faces.
Enough. He’d make his excuses to Aidan and bolt from this nightmare. Aidan was probably too far gone to miss him, anyway.
Deciding to do just that, he turned around…and all air left his lungs. Across the room, he saw…
her.
The jolt of recognition seemed to bring the world to a staggering halt. Everything held its breath as he met her incredible dark eyes across the vast, crowded space.
He stood there for a stretch that couldn’t be calculated on a temporal scale, staring at her. Hooks of awareness snapped across the distance and sank into him, flesh and senses, causing animation to screech through him for the first time in over twelve years.
There was no conscious decision to what he did next. A compulsion far beyond his control propelled him in her direction, as if he were hypnotized, remote-controlled.
The crowd parted as if pushed away by the power of his urge. Even the music seemed to observe the significance of the moment as it came to an abrupt stop.
He finally stopped, too, just feet away. He kept that much distance between them so his gaze could sweep her from head to foot.
He devoured his first impressions of her. Gold and bronze locks that gleamed over creamy shoulders and lush breasts encased in deepest chocolate off-the-shoulder taffeta the color of her eyes, the dress nipping in at an impossibly small waist then flaring over softly curved hips into a layered skirt. A face sculpted from exquisiteness, eyes from intelligence and sensitivity, cheeks from inborn class, a nose from daintiness, and lips from passion.
And those were the broad brushstrokes. Then came the endless details. He’d need an hour, a day, to marvel at each.
“Say something.” He heard the hunger in his rasp, saw its effect on her.
She shuddered, confusion rising to rival the searing heat in her eyes.
“I…”
Elation bubbled through him. “Yes. You. Say something so that I can believe you’re really here.”
“I’m… I don’t…” She paused, consternation knotting her brow. It only enhanced her beauty.
But he’d heard enough of her rich, velvet voice to know it matched her uniqueness, echoed her perfection.
“You don’t know what to say to me? Or you don’t know where to start?”
“Shaheen, I…”
She stopped again, and his heart did, too. For at least three heartbeats. He felt almost dizzy, hearing her utter his name.
A finger below her chin tilted her face up to him, to pore into those eyes he felt he’d fallen into whole.
Then he whispered, “You know me?”
She should have known that he wouldn’t.
Why should he? He’d probably forgotten she existed.
Even if he hadn’t, she looked nothing like the fourteen-year-old he’d known.
That was due in part to her own late blooming and in part to her mother’s influence. In Zohayd, Jacqueline Nazaryan had always downplayed Johara’s looks. Her mother had later told her she’d known that Johara, having inherited her height and luminescent coloring and her father’s bone structure and eyes, would become a tall, curvaceous blonde who possessed a paradoxical brand of beauty. And in the brunette, petite-woman–dominated Zohayd, a woman like Johara would be both a prized jewel and a source of endless trouble. If she’d learned to emphasize her looks, she would have become the target of dangerous desires and illicit offers, heaping trouble on her and her father’s head. Her mother had left her in Zohayd secure that Johara had no desire and no means of achieving her potential and would continue looking nondescript.
Once she’d joined her mother in France, Jacqueline had encouraged her to showcase her beauty and had done everything she and her fashion-industry colleagues could to help Johara blossom into a woman who knew how to wield what she was told were considerable assets.
As Johara became a successful designer and business-woman herself, she learned her mother had been right. Most men saw little beyond the face and body they coveted. Several rich and influential men had tried to acquire her as another trophy to bolster their image, another check on their status report. She’d been fully capable of turning them down, without incident so far. Without the repercussions her mother had feared would have accompanied the same rejections in Zohyad.
So yes. She’d been crazy to think Shaheen would recognize her when the lanky, reed-thin duckling he’d known had become a confident, elegant swan.
And here he was. Looking at her without the slightest flicker of recognition. That instant awareness, that flare of delight at the sight of her hadn’t been that. It had been…
What had it been? What was that she saw playing on his lips, blazing in his eyes as he inclined his awesome head at her? What was it she felt electrocuting her from his fingers, still caressing her chin? Was it possible he…?
“Of course you know who I am.” Shaheen cut through her feverish contemplations, shook his head in self-deprecation. The flashes from the mirror balls and revolving disco lights shot sparks of copper off the luxury of his mane and into the fathomless translucence of his eyes, zapping her into ever-deepening paralysis. “You’re attending my farewell party, after all.”
She remained mute. He thought she recognized him only because he was a celebrity in whose name he thought she was here having free drinks and an unrepeatable networking opportunity.
He relinquished her chin only to let the back of his fingers travel in a gossamer up-down stroke over her almost combusting cheek. “So to whom should I offer my unending thanks for inviting you here?”
Her heart constricted as the reality of the situation crystallized.
She hadn’t even factored in that he might not know her on sight. But she’d conceded she shouldn’t have expected it. But that there was nothing about her that jogged any sense of familiarity in him—that she couldn’t rationalize. Or accept.
Her insides compacted in a tight tangle of disappointment.
His words and actions so far had had nothing to do with happiness at seeing her after all these years. There was only one reason he could have approached her, was talking to her, looking at her this way. It seemed absurd, unthinkable. But she could find no other explanation.
Shaheen was coming on to her.
As if he’d heard her thoughts, he seemed to tighten all of his virility and influence around her, dropping his voice an octave, sinking it right through to her core. “This will sound like the oldest line in the book, but even though you haven’t said one complete sentence to me yet and we met just minutes ago, I feel like I’ve known you forever.”
The music chose that second to blare again, as if accentuating his announcement, cutting off any possibility of her blurting out that he felt that way because he had.
At the deafening intrusion, he dropped his hand from her cheek, raised his head, his eyes releasing hers from their snare as he cast an annoyed look at the whole scene. He caught her again with the full force of his focus a moment later. “This place is incompatible with human sanity.” His eyes forged another path of fire down her body to where her purse was hanging limply from her hand. “I see you’ve got your bag with you. Shall we go?”
She gasped as currents forked through her from where his hand curved around her upper arm in courteous yet compelling invitation. “B-but it’s your party.”
His eyes crinkled at her as his lips spread, revealing the even power of his teeth. “
Aih,
and I’ll leave if I want to.” His thumb swept the naked flesh of her arm, causing a firestorm to ripple through her as though through a wheat field in a storm. “And how I want to.”
Her free fist came up, pressing against a heart that seemed to be trying to ram out of her chest cavity.
The world had always transformed into a wonderland when he smiled. But this was…ridiculous. There should be a law against his indulging in the practice in inhabited areas!
She blinked, her sluggish gaze drifting from his at the pull of something vague. And she blinked again. In disbelief.
She was no longer in the middle of the party. She was in a spacious marble hall, walking on jellified legs toward what she judged to be McCormick’s private elevator.
Had she really walked here? Or had he teleported them?
Suddenly it was all too much. His every move and glance stripping her of basic coherence, his very nearness inching her to the verge of collapse as she and the situation spiraled out of control. He didn’t have the slightest memory of her, was enacting this aggressive seduction based on her anonymity, confident of her availability.
Still, only when they stopped in front of the elevator did she manage to attempt to extract herself smoothly from his loose yet incapacitating grip. Her spinning senses made her stumble back instead, wrenching her arm away.
She could see astonishment reverberate through him as the spectacular wings of his eyebrows snapped together and his lips lost the fullness of intimacy, chiseling into harsher lines that accentuated their perfection. And showed her yet another side of him that she’d never been exposed to—the ruthless royal he could become when provoked or displeased.
So he couldn’t comprehend that a female would have the temerity to not fall all over herself to obey his decrees? Maybe this encounter would end in closure, after all. Just in a different way than she’d imagined.
She glared her disillusion up into his eyes. “You’re so certain I want to leave with you, aren’t you?”
Bitterness hardened her voice. She knew he heard it loud and clear, too.
The last of the heat in his gaze drained as stillness descended. “Yes, I am. As certain of my desire to leave with you.”
She huffed her fury. “You’re right. You
are
spouting the oldest lines in the book.”
His pupils expanded, almost engulfed his vivid irises. “I realize they sound like that, but they happen to be true.”
Her lips twisted, mimicking a fiercer contortion of her heart. “Sure they are.”
“You think I’m so lacking in imagination or finesse that I’d use something so hackneyed to express myself if it wasn’t the simple truth, and no other words would do?”
“Maybe you’re just too lazy, too jaded to think of something new. Or you can’t even fathom the possibility that you might need a new line. Or maybe you didn’t think I warranted the effort of coming up with something a tad more original, since you thought I’d fall flat on my back at the idea of your interest.”
He seemed more taken aback at every word firing from her lips, his scowl dissolving into a flabbergasted look.
She was as shocked as he was. Where had all that come from? It was as if pressure had been building up inside her, and disappointment was a blade that had slashed across the thin membrane holding it in, her feelings bursting out of containment.
She’d just loved him for so long!
She’d fantasized about how it would be if they met again, and reality had demolished every comforting scenario. His indiscriminating carnal purpose made a mockery of the soul-deep connection she’d been convinced they’d resurrect on sight. A connection, it seemed, that existed only inside her lovesick mind.
The insupportable deduction squeezed more resentment from her depths. “And didn’t it occur to you that the person you felt you owed unending thanks to for bringing me here might be my boyfriend, or even my fiancé or husband?”
All expression evaporated, leaving his face a hard mask. “No. It didn’t.”
“It didn’t, or the possibility of my being committed to another man didn’t seem relevant to you?”
“You
can’t
be. I would have felt something, from you, a connection with someone else, a disconnection from me. But—”
He stopped abruptly. That limitless energy that had radiated from him from the moment he’d caught her eye flickered, wavered. Then it blinked out. The gloom she’d thought she’d seen tainting his aura before he’d noticed her descended on him again like a roiling thundercloud, seeming to slump his formidable shoulders under its weight.
He closed his eyes, swept a palm over his eyes and forehead. His other hand joined in, raking up through his hair before rubbing down his face.
Then he let his hands drop to his sides, leveled his eyes at hers. The bleakness there shriveled her insides.
“I don’t know what came over me. I saw you across the room and I thought… No, I didn’t think. I
knew.
I was certain you looked at me with the same…recognition. That sense I’ve heard people experience when they meet someone who’s…right. It must have been a trick of the lights. Your recognition was of the literal variety, and I saw what I subconsciously wanted to see. I must be in worse shape than even I thought, imagining I’d found an undeniable connection at such a party. Or at all. I apologize. To you, and to your man. I should have known you’d be taken.”
His fists clenched and unclenched as he spoke, as if they itched with the same sick electricity discharging inside her limbs. Then with a shake of his head and an indecipherable imprecation, he turned away.
She stood feeling as if she’d been struck by lightning, watching his long strides take him away from her. All she could think was that he didn’t seem callous or indiscriminating, only hurt, and that the last thing she’d ever see of him was that look of despondency on his face.
“It was a hypothetical question.”
At her squeaking statement, he stopped. But didn’t turn. He only inclined his face so that she saw his profile, eyes cast downward, tension emanating from him in shockwaves.
She forced the explanation he was waiting for between barely working lips. “When I mentioned a boyfriend or fiancé or husband, it was only in a ‘what if’ scenario. I don’t have anyone.”
“You’re not taken.” His hoarse whisper shuddered through her as he turned toward her, animation creeping back into his face. She shook her head, had locks snaring in her trembling mouth. “You objected to me sweeping you away because—” he accentuated every other word with a leisurely step back to her side, each hitting her like a seismic wave “—you mistook me for a lazy, jaded oaf who doesn’t possess an original bone in his body to express his inability to wait to be alone with you, or a poetic cell with which to do justice to the wonder of our meeting.”
She was panting as he fell silent. “Okay, I hereby revise my opinion. You have nothing but original bones and poetic cells.”
The elation reclaiming his expression spiked on a guffaw. Her knees almost buckled. And that was before a hunger-laden step obliterated the last of the distance between them. Every hair on her body stood on end as if with a giant static charge.
Then he whispered, “Tell me you feel it, too. Tell me the almost tangible entity I sense between us exists, that I’m not having a breakdown and imagining things.”
This was the second time he’d alluded to his condition. The idea of his suffering spread thorns in her chest. She bit her lip on the pain. “The…entity exists.”
“I am going to touch you now. Will you shake me off again, or do you want me to?” She shook her head, nodded, groaned. Her teeth would start clattering any moment now with needing his touch.
He took both her arms in the warm gentleness of his hands. Then he pulled her to him. She stumbled forward, ended up with her head where she’d dreamed of having it since she’d been old enough to form memories. Where it had rested once before, during that moment that had changed her destiny. On the endlessness of his chest. He pressed it there with a hand that smoothed her hair, his rumbling purr of enjoyment echoing her own.
He finally sighed. “This is unprecedented. We’ve had our first fight and reconciliation before you’ve even told me your name.”
“It wasn’t really a fight,” she whispered as she pulled back a bit, so she could breathe, so her heart wouldn’t stop.
He smiled down at her, his eyes telling her she delighted him. “Not on my end, but you were about to claw my eyes out. And I would have gladly let you. But I’m not putting it off any longer. Your name,
ya ajaml makhloogah fel kone.
Bless me with its gift.”