To Touch a Sheikh (13 page)

It was too late. She lurched as if he'd slashed her in two, disappointment and distrust welling like dark blood from a wound in the gaze that had adored and idolized him till an hour ago.

He was losing her.
He couldn't lose her.

He dragged her into his arms, buried his face in her hot neck, shuddered with dread. She struggled to get away, when before she had always tried to get closer, to give more.

And he begged. “Forget what I just said. Forget it all.”

“If only I can forget…
everything.
”

Her struggles intensified into violence, until it was either he let her go or hurt her to curb them. He let her go.

She flung herself against the wall, stood with her arms spread against it as if she'd melt into it to escape him, watched him with the wariness and hatred of a cornered cat.

He groaned his mounting heartache, “You think I dreamed it could go this far? I had this tidy plan where I'd get your fool of a father to stop the catastrophe he's set in motion without you being the wiser. But you overwhelmed my intentions and everything else inside me and I literally forgot how we got here. I want you so damn much now it's an agony with every breath
I draw.” Her eyes screamed
liar.
He winced at the shrillness of her mental accusation. “I never lied about what I feel for you.”

“No. That's the one thing you couldn't bring yourself to lie about. You felt nothing, so you said nothing.”

He'd been wondering if that would come back to bite him. Now it had. Right through the heart. He could put a thousand names to what he felt for her now and she'd think him an even bigger liar.

He had to take this away from declarations and denials that would only count against him, tackle the cause of this breach.

His breath left him in a shuddering exhalation. “I know this was a big shock, and I would have given anything to—”

She cut across him in that monotone that pushed his desperation higher. “To keep me cooperative in and out of bed until my father hands back the jewels. I realize how inconvenient it is to be exposed this late in the game.”

He opened his mouth to blurt out a protest, closed it.

Anything he said would only pour acid on her too-fresh wounds. He had to let her go now. Give her time to calm down.

Then she'd remember. Every word and laugh and touch they'd shared. She'd see the true extent of his transgression without the exaggeration of shock and hurt, come to rationalize it like she always did. Then she'd forgive him. She'd let him near again.

He couldn't contemplate any other possibility.

 

He'd let Maram go.

She'd passed him like an automaton, gone about her bedtime routines and headed to bed. He hadn't heard a sound inside since.

It was dawn and he'd gone past breaking point a hundred times. That was how many times he'd stormed to the bedroom only to stop short, almost breaking with the effort not to barge inside and beg her to be his Maram again. To shower him with the exultation and imperviousness of her exoneration and belief, what he realized he'd come to depend on, even more than the magic of her emotions and desire.

“Amjad.”

He jolted upright.
Maram.

She was standing at the corridor's opening, dressed for the first time since their first night together. Her face was deadpan.

“All through the night, I've been remembering,” she said.

Yes.
Please.
Remember,
he groaned inwardly.

“Every second we shared. Every word and look and touch.”

What he'd sat out here in hell hoping for. His heart slammed against its confines with expectation.

Then she went on and it almost burst. “And the more I remembered the more the truth spread its poison over everything that happened since I so willingly rushed into your trap.”

No.
She should be seeing the
real
truth. Beyond the damning circumstantial evidence. As she always did.

“Now I see everything in its macabre light, turning my joy to pathetic obliviousness, our passion to humiliation and my love to shame.”

He heaved up to his feet, horrified. “
Ya Ullah, la…Maram, matgooli hada…
don't say that. That
isn't
the truth.”

“The truth is that your abduction plans went wrong, but you adjusted them on the fly, settling for your second-best hostage. You kept me in the dark, not to spare me as an innocent pawn, but so I'd be easier to handle. When I proved only
too
easy, you decided to have fun, pretending to resist my advances, enjoying making me pant as I offered you everything I had if only you'd take it. I'm not blaming you for
that,
though. As you say in the region, ‘the law doesn't protect fools.'”

“You're not a fool, Maram. The only fool here is me. I should have told you what was going on.”

“And spoil your game? You know what I thought when you put me through the wringer? I believed you were struggling with your trust issues, coming to terms with your fear of intimacy, that I and only I could help you through them. I applaud your ability not to howl with laughter at my I-would-do-anything-to-heal-you stupidity.”

“This was not how—”

She spoke over his protest again, her voice losing its blankness,
claws of pain raking across it. “Then you kept prodding me to see how far I'd go. And like the lemming I am, I breathlessly rushed to my doom, handing you any power over me with the cherry of carte blanche exonerations on top. You must have found me hilarious when you kept telling me the truth—that you're not to be trusted—only for me to flap around in self-perpetuated blindness proclaiming my unconditional trust.”

“Maram, it wasn't like—”

“When your sandstorm cover story was about to end, and you needed another excuse to keep me here, you pretended to succumb to my ‘seduction.'” Her every feature began to quiver, as if with the advance tremors of an earthquake that would tear her psyche apart. “How you must have despised me as I writhed in ecstasy at your every touch, in agony at the thought of hurting you. How you must have reviled the hell out of me even more when I pretended the world has ceased to exist to prolong my time with you.”

Her ghastly interpretation paralyzed him. He could only shake his head and pant his denial in choking muteness.

And she cracked, like a compromised dam, tears pouring from her eyes under pressure, her face distorting under a force he felt might rip it apart as it did her weeping words.

“And I would…have done…
anything
to be with you. I would…have gladly…
died
for you. Oh,
God,
Amjad…how I
loved
you.
Kamm ashagtak.
You were everything to me…ev-
everything.
And it made me…even more worthless to you…didn't it? More worthy of…manipulation and abuse. I was b-begging for it, a-after all.”

He surged toward her, grabbed her by the shoulders, pulled her toward him as if he was snatching her from the precipice of an abyss. “Maram,
no!
You're just distraught now…”

She tore out of his hold with an explosiveness that sent him staggering. Her weeping escalated.

“
Now
I hate you with the same totality, Amjad…. I would do
anything…
to never see you again. I don't want to…ever see
my father either. I was…a
fool
to think power-hungry monsters like you would want me…for anything but to…use me.”

He stood stunned by the hatred that seemed to metamorphose her face, the color of her tears, heart long burst.

She hadn't finished. Her hacking sobs continued, even as she continued hacking at him. “But you made a…huge mistake, Amjad. You thought I was important to my father. Sure, I am of potential…use and some…sentimental value. But he proved—to you more than anyone else—that I am the ‘mare' he…puts forward in his petty maneuvers. You're a fool if you think…he won't sacrifice me…for something he values for real…like his shot at the throne of Zohayd.”

He reached out trembling hands to her. “I don't care what you are to your father, Maram. It's what you are to me—”

She swatted them away. “I am
nothing
to you. But seems…I am nothing—period. I was nothing…to my mother, I'm nothing…to my father. I'm…
less
than nothing…to you.”

“That is
not
true—”

“I
heard
what you left out as you…threatened my father. That you'll keep me captive until he ‘complies.' Maybe even hurt me to force his hand.”

“Maram,
la! No!
” He surged to her, wanting her to attack him, gouge his eyes out, relieve a measure of her anguish. “Don't even put these suspicions into words. Don't let them sully your mind.”

She thwarted him, went limp in his hold, her eyes going dead. “My mind is already irreversibly sullied. And you…”

Suddenly something worse than anything he'd seen on her face so far crumpled it. Horror.

“You've checkmated yourself with my improvised abduction, didn't you? Now only something drastic will extricate you.” Her voice felt like shrapnel. “Only you and your men know I was ever on Zohaydan soil and you can bury me here and nothing would implicate you in my disappearance…”

And he roared with the agony of her insupportable fear and suspicion. “Maram,
atawassal elaiki, kaffa,
I beg you…
stop!
You
can't
believe for a second I'd do that! To even my worst enemy. But you?
Hada kateer, kateer w'Ullah
—this is too much, Maram,
too much,
no matter how much you hate me now.”

His anguish seemed to douse her sudden paranoia. Her eyes lost their rabid gleam, her breathing slowed down.

She finally whispered, “But you did miscalculate. My father must have realized long ago why you kidnapped me. If his brain is really missing and he didn't, he now knows. If he cared whether I'm returned to him in one piece, he would have arranged my ransom with your brothers by now. He didn't. And he won't. I'm of no use to you.” The tears that had stopped under the surge of dread, then the descent of resignation, flowed again, their unnatural thickness turning his guts inside out imagining her eyes were disintegrating. “Just let me go.”

“I
can't,
Maram.”

“Your plan won't—”

He roared again, sanity long evaporated. “
Damn my plan.
It was actually the most peaceful resolution I could find. Harres did suggest something drastic. I stayed his hand. Now I know why. I didn't want to hurt
your
father. And the only reason I can't let you go now is because
I
can't.”

“I won't tell. I won't even contact my father again. I just want to get away from you, and him, and out of this godforsaken region, for good this time. You'll never hear from me again.”

“Maram…
b'Ellahi, esma'eeni
…listen to me, I beg—”

She slipped through his fingers, crumpled to the floor, sent his plea lodging in his chest with the force of an ax.

She ended up heaped against the settee, pain streaming from eyes filled with the end of all hope of her forgiveness or the return of her love and belief, her whisper hacked by defeat and despair. “All I ever did wrong was love you, Amjad. Don't punish me any more for it.
I
beg you. Let me go.”

 

He hadn't let Maram go.

But he was about to.

The hours it had taken to fly back to the capital, with her huddled away from him, had been a new brand of hell.

He'd taken her where she'd demanded. The airport.

She was now walking ahead of him, looking over her shoulder every few steps, as if she couldn't bear having him shadow her, hating him more for knowing she couldn't shake him.

Before she entered the main terminal, he caught her arm in as careful a grasp as he could manage.

“Come with me, Maram. My mansion is vast and you won't see me if you don't want to. I'll wait. For as long as it takes. Please, just stay near.”

“I was never near, Amjad. I will now stay as far away as I can until I forget you exist. Maybe I'll stop feeling so…defiled.”

He couldn't even flinch, feeling numb with too many blows. He could only do one thing. Curtail the damage, stop gaining more of her disillusion and hatred.

“At least take my jet.”

“Surveillance wrapped in a pompous gesture of fake chivalry?”

He still couldn't get his head around how she'd turned from total trust to distrust on every level. He reeled with it, felt unable to function anymore without the safety net of her belief.

He exhaled his dejection. “Now you think I'm stupid as well as an all-around monster? If I want to know where you're going I can no matter what transportation you take.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. I'm not without my resources.”

“Will you at least let me know that you're safe?”

“How touching.” She shook his hand off her arm, turned away. Before she went out of hearing range, she said, “As for safety, who cares. As you say in the region, ‘what does a sheep care if it's skinned after it's slaughtered.'”

 

Amjad sat in the back of a limo, shell-shocked, Maram's last words, her last look, the way she'd looked as she'd walked away, ravaged by misery, injured beyond healing, expanding inside him like seismic waves.

He couldn't even hope time would make her see things differently, and him like she used to. Time seemed only to escalate her agony at his deception.

Harres had called him, asking for an update. He'd told him to invade Ossaylan. Or tell their father that come Exhibition Day he'd be minus one throne.