To Touch a Sheikh (6 page)

“She never told me anything about him until my twelfth birthday. You can imagine what it was like to a fatherless girl to hear I not only had a father, but that he was a desert prince and he wanted me to live with him. At that time my mother wanted to marry ‘the' love of her life. His job entailed continuous traveling, which would have disrupted my life, so it was a perfect solution for me to go live with my father.”

He clutched a pillow, imagining it was that woman's neck. “So she dumped her only daughter in the country she so dreaded
and went off to live her life as if she'd never had you. Admirable. Women like her make child peddlers look humane.”

She shook her head, her expression understanding itself.

Was this real? Did she always search for the best in everyone, in every situation? Did she choose only to see the most favorable angle?

“She didn't dump me,” she said. “My father assured her that Ossaylan had come a long way since she'd visited, that he would see to it I didn't miss any of the freedoms I was used to. He'd been begging her for years to let him have me, so she knew he would be good to me. As for me, I was excited, especially since I didn't like my mother's fiancé much. I was scared, too, but that disappeared when I met my father and adored him on sight. It seemed like a fairy tale come true, the small-town girl becoming a princess of Ossaylan overnight.

“And there was no rude awakening for the next six years. I was entranced by the incredible differences between my former and current lives, did everything to learn the new culture, language, to blend in with my surroundings even when my father kept telling me not to try too hard, that my appeal, my strength lay in being the child of two worlds. But I wanted to please him so much, to make him glad that he took me in. And the more he deluged me with love and pride, the more I was willing to do anything for him.

“Then I learned why he was so focused on me, and it took the wind out of my sails. He'd married twice, too, but hadn't had more children. Turned out he'd developed leukemia after his fling with my mom and the treatments affected his fertility. It became clear to him that he'd never have more children.

“I confronted him with my disappointment, accused him of wanting me only because I was his only shot at having a child. In time he convinced me that it didn't matter why he'd valued me to start with, that he ended up loving me for me.”

“Aih.”
His lips twisted. “He loved you for the you he could use. And the moment you turned eighteen, he did.”

She sighed again, unfazed. “When he first proposed I marry
‘Uncle' Ziad, I was horrified. I didn't want to marry at all. I had plans, degrees, a career in mind. My father assured me it would be in name only so that he could succeed Uncle Ziad to the throne. Uncle Ziad wanted him to—he believed the first two men in line for the throne would destroy everything he'd strived to build in Ossaylan, and probably Ossaylan itself.”

He narrowed his eyes at her. “Ossaylan had it bad, didn't it? Othman, the first in line then, is a lowlife who would have auctioned the emirate and its people to the highest bidder and skipped to the Caribbean. The second in line, Labib, is a dangerous idiot with the emotional continence of a four-year-old. Those two do make your father look like a slightly better fate.”

Her eyes reproached him again, making him feel the moronic urge to qualify his insults.

“But Uncle Ziad could only bypass them if he married me, because the marriage would make his relationship to my father the closest. They told me we had to rush because Uncle Ziad was ill and wouldn't live longer than six months. I was apprehensive with a capital A. But I wanted to serve my new country and my father, wanted to be there for the uncle I loved in his last days.” She pushed away the plate she'd hardly touched. “But as
the
princess of Ossaylan, the freedoms I enjoyed as a minor princess went
poof.
And instead of six months, six years passed by, the last two with me tied to Uncle Ziad's bedside.”

The churning in his chest and gut intensified.

He could picture her then, this being of energy and enthusiasm, of vitality and vivaciousness, wilting day after day, oppressed by unforgiving custom, imprisoned by the machinations of power-peddling men.

Seemed Yusuf Aal Waaked had more to answer for than he'd thought. And even more, because Maram seemed to exonerate him of any wrongdoing. Worse, kept on loving him in spite of the damage he'd caused her, the exploitation he'd subjected her to.

If
any of what she was telling him was the truth.

But if it was, what else had he been misinformed about? What else had happened without her knowledge? Without her consent?

“Once he died, I…went a bit crazy. I felt I'd been…robbed. I wanted to make up for lost time, so I flew back home against my father's wishes. I backpacked across the States, gulping freedom and just…living. Then I met Brad, and he was everything the men in Ossaylan weren't. Outgoing and easy to talk to and caring nothing about the world or what it thought of him. After what I'd been through, boy, was
that
attractive. It didn't hurt that he was a ‘stud.' And he
wasn't
in diapers. He was two freaking years younger than me. And handsome and enthusiastic and adventurous.”

Every word fell on Amjad like a lash. He imagined himself knocking that “stud” out for every adjective praising his assets.

She went on. “But Brad was…too adventurous. He gambled with just about everything, the worst of it being his and others' safety. That was why I left him. And
that's
what got him disinherited, not me.”

He huffed a humorless laugh. “So the poor jerk tried his all to impress you and you left him for it.”

Again she gave him that soft, chastising look that twisted him inside out. “So when someone acts criminally stupid, you stick someone else with the responsibility for their actions?”

No, damn her. He didn't. He was trying not to let her drag him into the deep waters of untimely reassessments.

Those dainty lips pouted with self-deprecation. “Not that I'm innocent in this mess. I saw the signs from the start and disregarded them. I knew we were all wrong for each other and still married him. I would have married anyone, to flout the mourning laws, to get rid of that oppressive First Princess title sooner, because it didn't seem my father would marry again and take it off my back. I only hope Brad grows out of his compulsive thrill-seeking before he harms himself or others irreversibly.”

“Big of you.”

Her eyes said “Jerk,” in the most indulgent way possible, before she went on, “Afterward I concentrated on my post graduate
studies and set up my consultancy business. It might seem strange, but my relationship with my father got deeper and better. Yet it wasn't until four years ago that I decided to go back to live in Ossaylan. And though I don't agree that his brain is missing, I will take your comment as a compliment to my positive effect on his decisions and Ossaylan since I returned.”

He raised an eyebrow. She shrugged a shoulder. She was done.

He whistled, long and low. “That was some story. You should be renamed Shahrazad.”

“Lulling her Mad Prince with convoluted tales that only segue into more exciting and labyrinthine new ones? But in my case, the tale doesn't have any more shocking twists to keep the story going.”

“But it does, in the form of your convoluted self, in every word from your lips, scripted by your inscrutable mind and designed for compulsive listening.”

She looked around for a nonexistent audience. “Anyone see anyone being compelled around here?” She looked back at him, eyes singeing him with gold-hot teasing. “Not you, from the way you kept interrupting me.”

“But that was all poor Shahrayar could do as Shahrazad smothered him in her web of mental manipulation. Interrupt with comments and questions she led him into making. Like her, you know how to influence your listeners' thoughts and sympathies.”

She sat up. “Since
you
can't be influenced, if yours have been moved, does that mean you're considering sanctioning my version?”

He could feel the effect of her words—of
her
—seeping through his gray matter, altering the pathway of his beliefs. And he was damned if he'd let her change his mind that easily.

She might have been innocent once, but she wasn't now. She'd learned her father's lessons well, was adding her own genius and irresistibility to become unstoppable.

There was one way to stop her. Get out of her range.

He rose as if he didn't want to explode to his feet and storm away, until his muscles hurt with the tranquility he forced into them. He looked down at her, met a gaze tinged with hope, which he believed would have brought a weaker man to his knees proclaiming he'd believe anything she had to say.

“I'll have to get back to you on that,” he said, injecting his voice with the last dose of nonchalance he had in his arsenal.

He cleared their dinner, cleaned the kitchen, willing the mechanical actions to defuse his disquiet.

Before he went inside, he added, “Don't hold your breath, though. Estimated response time ranges from a lifetime to never.”

 

After an endless night during which he felt as if he were sleeping on red-hot thorns, imagining he heard her breathing over the storm's tumult, felt her body's undulations transmitted to his every nerve, the next day was worse.

She woke up minutes after he'd given up on sleep and risen, cheery and inviting to his aching and cranky. Not that she was intrusive. She engaged him when he let her, occupied herself in silence, at least in humming, when he didn't.

At the breakfast he prepared, he was back to full flaying mode. She met his game on the same level, her wit like lightning, blinding, electrifying, magnificent.

Morning passed as if it were a week. Not because it dragged, but for being so full of incident and interaction. At noon, she began to prepare lunch, and he somehow found himself in the kitchen, sharing the preparations, engrossed in the experimentations, eyeball-deep in banter.

He pulled back again while they ate, and she again let him take refuge in detachment, but wouldn't let his pointed disregard fill the atmosphere with tension, her acceptance making even the tumult-accompanied silence companionable, communicative.

Afterward he found himself about to slide back into a teasing match with her, used Dahabeyah's care to get away.

He returned from the stable to find her engrossed in a game
she'd unearthed on his computer, shrieking in delight as she surpassed a personal best. As she turned to share her excitement, a moronic notion insisted it was only around him that she was this spontaneous.

To compel hours to pass without Maram exposure, he headed inside for a nap. Big mistake.

The sheets smelled—
felt
—of her. His body throbbed like an inflamed wound for the four hours he forced himself to remain there.

Finally, a hairbreadth from blowing essential physical and mental fuses, he rose and joined her.

He found her sitting on the settee, knees drawn up against her chest, head resting on them. Her face was turned to him, eyes glowing as if waiting to strike him to his core with their lucid beauty and power.

He headed to the kitchen without slowing down. He thought that if he did, she'd drag him deeper into this…affinity he was finding more disturbing than anything he'd ever experienced.

“There is a part of the truth I didn't tell you.”

His hand spasmed over the coffeepot, almost smashed it.

Her voice, her words penetrated between his shoulder blades, reached inside his rib cage to clutch his heart.

He didn't turn, threw over his shoulder, “Of course you didn't, Shahrazad. Never telling the whole story is what you do.”

“It's just one part. There won't be more.”

He wouldn't. He shouldn't.

He turned to her.

This was ridiculous. He was behaving like Shahrayar for real, unable to bear the curiosity, the need to hear her next account, to hang on to her every word, eating through him to the marrow.

She unfolded her lushness, settling on the settee's edge. Then she spoke, her voice dark, rich, like a woman confessing her most intimate fantasies to her lover. “I had no intention of returning to Ossaylan. Then there was the Political Dimensions of the Region's Economic Expansion conference.”

He remembered that conference as if it were minutes ago.

His first exposure to her. He hadn't recovered since.

“I flew back from that conference bent on relocating my business, selling my house and moving back to Ossaylan to live.”

She fell silent. He stared at her.

When he could talk again, he rasped, “You're saying it was seeing me that made you decide to move back?”

“Yes,” she simply said. “You were—
are
the most incredible man I've ever met, and I wanted to be where I could get to know you.” She smiled this self-deprecating yet infectious smile, which she seemed to do with her whole body and being. “Not that you've made it easy, or sometimes, even possible.”

And rage ignited in his recesses. At the desire to stop resisting. Worse, his inability to remember
why
he'd been resisting, why he hadn't long succumbed.

He forced calmness into his steps as he walked back to her, looked down at her with what he hoped was his most annihilating contempt. “How disappointing. Can't you try a bit harder to be subtle about your mission?”

She blinked. “What mission?”

“The one your father sent you on. To go all out in a last bid to entrap me in marriage before giving up on me.”

Maram stared at him, her face a canvas of stupefaction.

Then she burst out laughing.