Jalal had no idea what it was.

Maybe it was the stiffness that took over her body, or the pulse going haywire in her throat, or the fear of discovery in her eyes.

Or it was all of that and a thousand other instantaneous, involuntary signs that coalesced and painted a picture worth a thousand confessions.

It all added up to one thing. One thing that lodged in his mind with the force of an ax. Something devastating.

The truth.

Lujayn’s child was his.

Dear Reader,

Jalal Aal Shalaan, the hero of The Sheikh’s Claim, was an enigma to me as I started writing his story. He’s already appeared in most of his brothers’ stories, but he’s been the one who wouldn’t show me more than what he showed the world—the devil-may-care façade of a prince with the world at his feet. Then, in The Sheikh’s Redemption, his twin Haidar’s book, we finally got hints that not all was as it seemed with this knight of the desert. He was the “wolf” to Haidar’s “lion,” and their radical differences had torn them apart. By the end of that book, it seemed their lifelong rivalry and conflict were resolved, and they were finding their way back to their childhood closeness.

But the twins are still competing for the throne of Azmahar. And Jalal wants it with a burning passion. He believes he has nothing else to look forward to. His siblings and father have found their soul mates and are happy with their families, and he feels left out, aimless and alone. He believes he’ll always be that way, for the only woman he could ever want is lost to him.

Is it any wonder, when she reappears in Azmahar, that his pursuit of Lujayn is relentless, even when her rejection is as single-minded? And that was before he discovers a secret that will make it even more unquestionable that he will claim her as his own, for life.

I loved writing Jalal and Lujayn’s story as they came from totally opposite life situations—a prince and a pauper in love-story format—and not only met halfway but became one. I hope you enjoy reading their story as much as I enjoyed writing it!

I love to hear from readers, so please email me at oliviagates@gmail.com and connect with me on Facebook at my fan page Olivia Gates Author, on Goodreads and on Twitter@OliviaGates.

Thanks for reading!

Olivia

About the Author

OLIVIA GATES has always pursued creative passions such as singing and handicrafts. She still does, but only one of her passions grew gratifying enough, consuming enough, to become an ongoing career—writing.

She is most fulfilled when she is creating worlds and conflicts for her characters, then exploring and untangling them bit by bit, sharing her protagonists’ every heart-wrenching heartache and hope, their every heart-pounding doubt and trial, until she leads them to an indisputably earned and gloriously satisfying happy ending.

When she’s not writing, she is a doctor, a wife to her own alpha male and a mother to one brilliant girl and one demanding Angora cat. Visit Olivia at www.oliviagates.com.

The Sheikh’s
Claim
Olivia Gates

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To my endlessly patient and supportive husband.

Thank you for being there for me always.

Love you, always.

One

Twenty-seven months ago

“So you managed to get away with murder this time.”

Jalal Aal Shalaan frowned at the words he’d spoken aloud.

He was standing at the door of an opulent sitting room in one of the most breathtaking manors in the Hamptons, where he’d been received for years as an esteemed guest. He’d thought he’d never set foot in here again because of the woman who stood with her back to him. The woman who was now lady of the manor.

Lujayn Morgan. His ex-lover.

She’d been picking up letters from an antique marble table when his words had hit her. After a start, she’d frozen midmotion.

His own body was tense all over, too. His fists and jaw were clenched, his every muscle bunched, buzzing.

B’haggej’ jaheem—by hell, why had he said that?

He hadn’t intended to show her any hostility. Or any emotions at all—he’d thought he’d had none left. He’d come here for one reason. To see her without the lust that had blinded him for the four-year duration of their affair. He was here for closure, something she’d robbed him of when she’d stormed out of his life, giving him no chance to defend himself, to negotiate, leaving him wrestling with shock then rage and groping for explanations.

But he’d thought the resolution he was seeking was strictly intellectual. He’d thought he’d properly recovered during the two years since she’d walked out on him, working through his feelings until nothing remained but cold curiosity and mental aversion.

So he’d been deluding himself. What he’d felt for her, though it had reversed in nature, had remained as fierce.

He’d always presented the world with a devil-may-care facade. It was partly his nature and partly defensive. Having Sondoss, the notorious queen of Zohayd for a mother, and Haidar, the enigma who’d tormented him since childhood for a twin, made defenses necessary. They were the only ones who had ever managed to crack his control. Then had come Lujayn.

He was still vulnerable to the mere sight of her. And she hadn’t even faced him yet.

Then she did.

Air deserted his lungs, heartbeats started to thunder.

Her beauty had always been mesmerizing. Her Middle Eastern and Irish genes conspired to create the personification of the best of both worlds. By the time she’d left him, brand names were starting to compete to have her willowy grace showcase their products, and makeup lines wanted that unforgettable face with those one-of-a-kind eyes to smolder at consumers out of their glossy ads.

But throughout their affair, she’d shed weight continuously. It had alarmed then angered him that her obsession with getting ahead in her career had blinded her to how she was harming herself to achieve a perfection she already possessed.

But the gaunt woman she’d been at the end of their affair had disappeared. In her place was the epitome of health and femininity with swells and dips that not even her severe black suit could tame, and had everything male in him roaring to life.

Marriage had been very good to her. Marriage to a man he’d once considered a good friend. A man who’d died less than two years after the wedding. A man whom he’d just more or less accused her of killing.

She inclined her head as she straightened, the movement emphasizing the elegance of her swan neck, the perfection of her raven chignon-wrapped head.

Her cool tranquility was a superb act, but her shock registered in something beyond her acting abilities. The pupils of uncanny irises, as silvery as the meaning of her name did that thing that had enthralled him when she was agitated or aroused, expanding and shrinking, giving the illusion that her eyes where emitting bursts of light.

The need to look closer into those eyes propelled him forward. Then words he hadn’t known he’d been thinking, taunts that segued from his opening salvo, spilled from his lips.

“Not that I’m surprised. You’ve managed to fool the most suspicious and shrewd people I know, including myself. It shouldn’t come as any surprise that not even New York’s Finest were a match for your cunning.”

“What are you doing here?”

Her voice jolted through him. Once a caress of crimson passion, it had filled with dark echoes, deepening its effect.

She shook her head as if exasperated with the inanity of her own question. “Scratch that. How did you get in here?”

He stopped two feet away, though every cell was screaming for him to keep going until he’d pressed his every inch to hers. Like when they’d been lovers. When she’d always met him more than halfway, impetuous, tempestuous …

Cursing inwardly, he shoved his hands in his pockets in feigned nonchalance. “Your housekeeper let me in.”

She shook her head again, as if finding his answer ridiculous. Then her eyes widened with harsh accusation. “You intimidated her!”

Something twisted in his gut. In the past, she’d made him believe she thought he walked on water. Now the first thing that occurred to her was that he’d done something reprehensible. Worse, criminal.

But why would that upset him? He’d long accepted that her early adoration had been an act. One she hadn’t been able to maintain once she’d suspected it wouldn’t fulfill her purpose. Though he should marvel that it had taken over two years before she’d begun to slip, for instances of discord to accumulate.

He’d still refused to see that for what it was, pure manipulation. Instead, had assigned it all to the stress of her competitive job and the provocation of the dominant personality he became with her. He’d thought friction had only fueled their already incendiary relationship, had reveled in it to the point of instigating it on occasion. He’d misguided himself so thoroughly, that final explosive confrontation had utterly shocked him.

But after two years of dissecting the past, he now saw it clearly. He’d dismissed all evidence of the truth to maintain the illusion because he couldn’t live without her passion. Or so he’d thought. He had. Hadn’t he?

She now pulled herself to her full statuesque height, six feet in her two-inch heels, her pose confrontational. “You might have scared Zahyah, but you must have forgotten all about me if you thought your arm-twisting tactics would work. You can walk out as you walked in, under your own power, or I’m calling security. Or better still, the police.”

He flicked away her threat, his blood heating with the challenge and ardor she’d always ignited in him with a glance, a word. “What would you tell them? That your housekeeper let me in without consulting you and left you alone with me in an empty mansion?” Any other time he would have recommended the housekeeper be sternly chastised for such a breach of protocol and security. For now he was only glad she’d acted as she had. “On questioning, she’d swear there’d been no intimidation of any sort. As one of your mother’s former colleagues, it was only natural for Zahyah to let me in.”

“You mean because as my mother’s former colleague, Zahyah was one of your mother’s servants, too?”

He stiffened at the mention of his mother. The knowledge of her conspiracy to depose his father, King Atef, and remove his half brothers from succession to the throne of Zohayd was a skewer constantly turning inside him.

But Lujayn knew nothing of the conspiracy. No one but he and his siblings and father did. They’d been keeping it a secret at all costs until they resolved it. And resolution would come only when they discovered where his mother had hidden the Pride of Zohayd jewels. It was a backward and infuriating situation, one dictated by legend and now enforced by law—possession of the jewels conferred the right to rule Zohayd. Instead of calling for whoever had stolen them to be punished, Zohayd’s people would decree that his father and his heirs, who had “lost” them, were unworthy of the throne. The belief that the jewels “sought” to be possessed by whoever deserved to rule the kingdom was unshakable.

But even when threatened with life imprisonment, his mother wouldn’t confess to their location. All she’d told him and Haidar was that she would continue to destroy their father and brothers from her prison, that when the throne became Haidar’s, with him as his crown prince, they would thank her.

He shook away the gnawing of ongoing frustration, leveling his gaze at the current cause of it. “I mean that Zahyah, as an Azmaharian who spent years in the royal palace of Zohayd—”

“As a virtual slave to your mother—as was mine.”

The knot in his gut grew tighter as yet another of his mother’s crimes sank its shame into him.

Ever since the exposure of Sondoss’s conspiracy, they’d been realizing the full extent of her transgressions. Slave might be an exaggeration, but from recent findings, it had become evident she’d mistreated her servants. Lujayn’s mother, as her “lady-in-waiting,” seemed to have borne the brunt of her ruthless caprice. But Badreyah had left his mother’s service as soon as Lujayn had left him. Seemed she could afford to when Lujayn had married Patrick McDermott.

That was probably one reason Lujayn had married him. Not that it made him any less bitter about it. She should have told him if she’d known Badreyah had been suffering at his mother’s hands. He should have been the one she’d gone to for help.

He answered her cold fury with his own. “Whatever views Zahyah holds of my mother, she evidently still considers me her prince. She welcomed me in accordingly.”

“Don’t tell me you think people really buy this Prince of Two Kingdoms crap.”

Her sneer had blood surging to his head. As half-Azmaharian half-Zohaydan princes, he and Haidar had been dubbed that. He couldn’t speak for Haidar, but he’d always felt like a prince of neither kingdom. In Zohayd he was cut off from succession for being of impure stock. In Azmahar … well, he could count the reasons that no one there should consider him their prince.

The grandiose slogan that had been plastered over them from birth had always felt—as she’d pithily put it—like crap.

But then their mother decided to make it a reality. She was out to mangle and reform the region in order to do so.

He exhaled. “Whatever I am or am not, Zahyah welcomed me, and so did your guards before her. I’ve been welcomed here enough times that they didn’t think twice of continuing the practice.”

“You conned them using a defunct relationship with Patrick—”

“Who’s no longer with us, thanks to you.” He cut her off, the bile of pent-up anger welling again. “But you didn’t prepare for developments as I thought you would. You didn’t make allowance for my reappearance, didn’t revoke my standing invitation.”

“Like I would a vampire’s, huh? Though one would be preferable to you since you’re a soul sucker. And you’re harder to banish. But I’ll rectify that oversight right now.”

He caught her arm as she strode past, felt awareness fork in his body. He gritted his teeth against the response, kept his breathing shallow so her scent—that of jasmine-scented twilights and pleasure-drenched nights—didn’t trigger full-blown arousal.

“Don’t bother. This delightful visit won’t be repeated.”

She jerked her arm free of his loose grasp. “It won’t even start. You have some nerve coming here, after what you’ve done.”

She was referring to his business clashes with Patrick, which had resulted in major losses to them both. More damage she’d caused.

He misunderstood her on purpose. “I’m not the one who dumped you and married one of your best friends, only to turn her against you.”

“You give Patrick too little credit if you think I influenced his decision to cut all business ties with you.”

“You’d influence the devil himself. And we both know Patrick had too much angel in him. He was the perfect prey for the black widow you turned out to be.”

Her eyes swept him from head to toe in disdain. “Listen, Jalal, cut the cloak-and-dagger melodrama. If you traveled across the world just to accuse me of overdosing my husband, you accomplished that with your opening statement. Don’t be redundant as well as unfeeling and overbearing. You can now go back to your sand-infested, backward region to wallow in your unearned power.”

Heat splashed in his chest. Not because her views insulted him, but because she had them at all. Disappointment only intensified his reaction to her, sent blood roaring to his loins.

His lips twisted with grim humor. “You were always a spitfire, yet you never spoke this brazenly to me.”

“You just never bothered to listen. Not that that was a privilege you reserved for me. Your Exalted Highness didn’t consider anyone worth listening to. But you’re partially right. I was once guilty of embellishing my attitude and opinion of you. I’m not the person I was anymore.”

“You’re exactly the person you always were. But now that you’re an heiress to an empire worth billions, you believe you have the luxury of showing me your true face and the clout to take me on.”

Her eyes grew ridiculing. “That’s not why I don’t have to suppress my abhorrence of you and all you stand for anymore. But since I’m not inclined to explain my reasons, thanks for coming.”

Thanks?

“I’ve been seething for two years that I didn’t let it all out when I last saw you. Thanks for giving me the chance to get it off my chest. Now, since you’ve done what you’ve come to do, and indulged your evidently long-repressed desire to call me names—”

“But that’s not what I’ve come to do.” Before she could lob back something caustic, and without willing himself to, he dragged her to him, slamming her against his now burning body. “And that’s certainly not the desire I’ve long repressed.”

A hot sound of protest escaped her. He bent, caught it in his lips. He snatched in air laden with her breath, let it storm through him, uprooting the restraints he’d long placed on his senses. He let the feel of her invade his control, tear it away. Her taste eddied in his system, hurtling him back to their nights of delirium.

“No matter what you hate about me, you always loved this.” He poured the words into her open-from-shock mouth, his lips gliding over her plump ones, pushing them farther apart, unable to wait to plunge inside her warmth and welcome. “You craved it. My touch, my hunger, my pleasures. Whatever else was pretense, this was real. Still is.”

“It isn’t …” Her words caught in her throat as soon as her lips moved against his. They trembled before they clung to his flesh.

It had always been like this. One touch had been all it took to ignite them, to start the chain reaction to the mindlessness and ecstasy of their overriding need for each other.

“Yes, Lujayn. It still is. This all-consuming need that ignites between us and only the other can satisfy.”

Her breath hitched as it mingled with his, tumbled from her on a ragged moan of arousal, as his tongue sought her concession. She gave it in a blatant seeking of her own, delighting him in her taste, her response. But at the first rub of slick flesh on flesh, a jolt of pleasure electrified both their bodies, made her start, try to escape the deepening intimacy. The move only had her teeth grazing his lips, tearing a groan from his depths, igniting her response again, her body involuntarily arching into his, their lips fusing again, sending his senses roaring for more.

He walked her back to the nearest wall, pressed against her lushness, imprinted her silent demand with his. “Tell me you have lain at night like I have, burning to have me again, take your fill of me. Tell me you have been going insane like I have. Tell me that you remembered all that we shared the moment I showed up, that even as your lips antagonized me, all you really wanted was for me to fill you, ride you, assuage the ache that maddens you.”

He raised his head, looked down at her to get her confirmation. He got it.

She still wanted him. She’d never stopped.

It showed in the burning desire and dismay in her eyes. Whatever she’d been telling herself since she’d left him, her explosive response to him had forced her to face facts.

Holding her eyes, still seeking her affirmation, he scooped her into his arms. She clung to him, gave him more proof of her consent.

His heart almost uprooted itself in his chest with relief and urgency as he almost ran with her filling his arms, her eagerness tugging him deeper into mindlessness. It was only when he lowered her onto a king-size bed that he realized that his feet had propelled him to the master suite.

He came down half on top of her, stopped her roaming hands, stretched her arms above her head, capturing her wrists in one hand. The other slid down her face, her neck, skimmed over her breasts. Then, holding her gaze clouded with feverish desire, he leaned in, capturing her lips at the same moment he snapped open her jacket.

She gasped and turned her head as if suddenly shy, making his kisses trail over the hot velvet of her cheek. At the first suckle of his lips on her earlobe, she arched up, bringing her luxurious breasts rubbing against his chest, shuddering hard at the electrifying contact, intensifying it.

He rose to let her expression guide him to his next action. She stared up at him, her eyes emitting those hypnotic bursts, her breath choppy, her nipples pushing through her bra and blouse.

Satisfaction spread at the explicitness of her response, heightened as a gasp of disappointment escaped her when he sat up. His smile placated her as he shrugged away his jacket. Then, analyzing every iota of expression in her eyes’ eloquent depths, he slowly, so slowly, unbuttoned his shirt.

His deliberateness gave her time and opportunity to take action if she didn’t want this to go further. Gave him the luxury of studying her as she watched him expose his body to her. The body she’d worshipped for four years, laid her indelible brand over every inch. He reveled in each of her nuances as hunger and memories flooded her eyes, igniting them, swelling her lips, staining her cheeks.

“Isn’t this what you’ve been burning for?” Her nod was drugged, her eyes glazing over as silent confession strummed her voluptuous body, shook her lips. He brought her hands pressing against his flesh, one over his thundering heart, the other over his abdomen, which quivered with need. When her volition took over, he invited her to go lower, groaned long and deep as she shaped him, cupped him, in trembling greed.

He hissed his torment, encouraging her, his mind unraveling with the sheer power and pleasure of her longed-for touch, and that of her desire. “Feel me, Lujayn. Take what you’ve always wanted. Enjoy me, revel in me. Devour me with your hunger like you used to, ya’yooni’l feddeyah.”

A jolt racked her at hearing him call her one of his favorite endearments for her, my silver eyes. Their intoxicated cast deepened until they were the color of twilight in Zohayd. Snatched breaths escaped her lips as she explored him with intensifying boldness, each ending on a fractured moan. His intention to draw this out until she begged for him dwindled with each siren sound. But it was when she squeezed her eyes shut and agonized enjoyment gripped her face as she roamed him, that it vanished.

On a growled oath, he removed her hands from his rock-hard flesh. Before he moved over her, she jerked, as if coming out of a trance and scrambled up. “Jalal, we have to stop…. ”

He went still. “Tell me why.”

She squeezed her eyes again. “Patrick …”

He caught her head in both hands, made her open her eyes. “Is dead. And you and I are not. But we’re not alive, either. Tell me you’ve been able to truly live … without this…. ” He took her lips again as he moved his hard length over her until her tension dissolved, into seeking surrender, her body straining against his. He tore away his lips from hers to rise above her on extended arms. “Tell me you have known any real pleasure or satisfaction since me. Say you don’t crave me as much as I crave you and I will go.”

The truth blared in her eyes, but she still said, “Craving is not everything…. ”

“It’s enough.” He dug his fingers into her prim chignon, setting her raven silk free, burying his face in its luxury. “It’s what we have, what we need, what we can’t fight.”

She pulled up his head by his hair. “It won’t change a thing.”

She held his focus. She was setting terms for this encounter. That it would only be physical? Or that it would be a one-off?

He refused to concede. “It will. It will stop this need from gnawing us hollow. Now admit it. You’ve been dying to have me again as I’ve been dying to have you. You’ll give me everything as you always did, let me give you everything you’ve always begged for, everything we’ve always had together.”

After a long moment, she nodded. Then with sooty lashes lowered to hide her expression, she dragged his mouth back to hers.

He growled his relief inside her as her tongue tangled with his, dueling, demanding, allowing him all the licenses he needed, taking her pleasure from him as she always did, her fervor and boldness intensifying his, her hunger and warmth and taste flowing in his lifeblood.

One hand harnessed her by her hair’s tether as one of hers did him by his as he undid her blouse and skirt, swept them off her velvet flesh. Her other hand trembled at his zipper as he snapped open her bra, spilling her breasts. He swallowed her cry of relief, of spiking arousal, as he settled his aching flesh on top of hers, rubbing against her until she begged.

“Do everything to me, Jalal. Fill me, ride me now, now.’’

He rose to tear her panties off her hips, probe her satiny folds. His fingers slid in her flowing need, until she undulated against him in a frenzy. When he couldn’t stand one more heartbeat outside her heat and yearning, she clamped her thighs around his back, writhing in the grips of the same fever to merge. Then he plunged inside her.

She screamed with the shock of his invasion. She was as impossibly tight as ever, their fit still almost unmanageable, their pleasure excruciating. She arched, smashing herself against him with the mindless need for his domination. Overwhelmed with feeling, his girth gripped inside the molten pleasure that was her essence, he groaned her name and withdrew, only to plunge again, then again, forging deeper with every penetration. His escalations rocked her beneath him, wringing sharper cries from her depths. She met his thrusts, strengthening them, her demands for him to give it all to her tearing away any restraint he’d still clung to.

Their coupling was primal, savage. They groped and bit and thrust in ever-roughening abandon, nothing existing but the need to soothe the pangs that had long maddened them, to burn in a conflagration of release.

The first clench of her orgasm hit him like a sledgehammer. Her core clamped around his shaft with such force, he tore his lips from hers to roar at the unendurable spike in pleasure. Then she heaved beneath him, her intimate flesh tightening around his erection, singeing him with the rush of her satisfaction, wrenching his own from the depth of his loins. His body felt as if it was detonating with the force of his own climax as he released inside her, feeling he was pouring his life force into her.

Ecstasy finally relinquished its merciless grip and her strangled cries died into whimpers as aftershocks sparked and lurched through both of them.

He sank on top of her, oblivious to anything but her body cushioning him, her chaotic heartbeats echoing his as their systems struggled to recover from the exertion of their explosive lovemaking.

He might have slept. Or passed out. For a minute. Or an hour. All he knew was that he was coming back with a start into a body that was leaden with an excess of fulfillment. Then a move beneath him had him jerking up. Lujayn. He must have crushed her.

He groaned, then louder with the ache of separation, as he uncoupled from her with great regret. He bent to kiss her, but she scooted away from his touch. His heart clenched as she swayed up and sat at the edge of the bed, long hair tumbled, her body still and stiff.

He was reaching a caressing hand to her again when she turned her face and the look in her eyes halted the gesture of tenderness in midmotion. And that was before she spoke.

“I hate you, Jalal. When I’ve never hated anyone. So consider this the validation or the goodbye or whatever sex you think I owed you. It’s never happening again.”

She got up like an automaton. In seconds she disappeared inside the bathroom.

He stared at the closed door, heart booming, mind churning.

One thing that had been erased had been resurrected. His confidence in his ownership of her body. If he went after her now, he’d have her begging for him again. But her antipathy seemed to be real. He had no idea what he had done to earn it. But whatever she thought he had done might change everything. It might explain why she’d left him.

It was almost an hour before she exited the bathroom glowing, remote and dressed. He’d also dressed. He knew their mindless interlude should not be repeated. Not until he knew what was going on.

He stood there as she stopped before him, eyes devoid of expression. “I’m sorry I said I hate you. It’s not true.”

His heart unfurled from the tight knot it had become, the broken pieces mending. Something warm fluttered inside it as he moved closer.

Her next words froze it solid, shot it down like a bullet would a bird in flight.

“It’s worse than that. I hate myself when I’m with you. I hate what I do, what I think, what I feel. What I am. Patrick taught me that I’m better than that—that I don’t have to ever feel this way again. I was certain I’d never do this. But you’re like an incurable disease. One exposure, and I relapse. There’s only one way I’ll stop being reinfected. I won’t let you come near me again. If you try, I’ll make you regret it.”

The lash of her antipathy sliced open the dam of his accumulated, if briefly forgotten, bitterness.

He moved away from her, as if to escape the searing disappointment, heard himself taunting, “You mean more than I already regret coming here and exposing myself to your virulence again? Not possible. So save your threats and theatrics, Lujayn. It will be a snowy day in my ‘backward region’ before I come near you again.”

He didn’t only regret coming after her—he despised his stupidity for being unable to hate her, even now, for succumbing to his weakness, taking her right in her marital bed, then not being the one who came to his senses first, or at all.

At the door he turned, and the look on her face had his heartache boiling over. It wasn’t just over, she didn’t only hate him now—she always had.

It had been an illusion, a sham.

More harshness spilled from his lips, the only shield he found so the icy shards of her rejection wouldn’t hack his heart to pieces all over again. “Thanks, by the way. You gave me exactly what I came for. The certainty that you’re not worth another thought. Now I can delete you from my memory.”

He walked away then, the relief that this retaliation had provided already evaporating, despondence seeping in its place, settling into his recesses. For it was another lie. No matter that he now knew nothing they’d shared had been real, he knew the memory of her would never relinquish its hold over him….

Two

The present

“…the memory of this day will burn bright for the rest of my days, with the blessing and wonder of your love and belief, your very existence. I, Haidar Aal Shalaan, pledge my life to you, Roxanne, owner of my heart …”

Jalal hit Pause, his chest tight as he watched the power of love radiating from the two faces frozen on the screen.

He’d never believed in miracles. But there was no denying he’d watched one unfold in real time. Had been replaying it on video over and over again. His twin’s wedding ceremony. He’d watched that specific part, when they’d made their unrehearsed vows, for the umpteenth time. Today.

Each time had only ratcheted up his reaction to the sight of Haidar staring with such profound adoration into the eyes of his weeping bride, of hearing him, then her, commit to a lifetime of unity and allegiance, body and soul.

He was fiercely happy for both of them. The twin who felt like an extension of his own life force, and the woman who felt of his own flesh and blood, too. But seeing them, feeling them, bound together in abiding love forever, inflicted something besides joy. It made him feel even more acutely that gaping emptiness in his core. One he knew would never be filled.

He’d once thought he’d had a chance of having something approaching what Haidar and Roxanne had. With Lujayn, the one woman he’d wanted with all he had. But even when they’d been lost to passion in each other’s arms, he’d felt something missing. Now he knew what it was. That. That connection. That alliance. That totality of acceptance, agreement and appreciation.

The extent of the deficiency had been driven home to him during the past years as his brothers had found their soul mates. But it had taken Haidar and Roxanne to solidify the realization. He’d now seen and felt what completeness was like.

He hadn’t had anything like it with Lujayn. But then how could he have? It took two to progress to that level of intimacy. She’d been unwilling to move beyond a certain threshold. She hadn’t wanted intimacy, she’d wanted wealth and status.

He saw that now. At the time he’d thought any issues had been due to the intermittent nature of their relationship, dictated by their hectic schedules and living on different sides of the world. But the truth had been that, beyond sex, she hadn’t really wanted him. She’d only wanted him to propose.

He’d bet she would have kept trying if another opportunity, almost as big a catch, hadn’t presented itself.

He hit Stop. The screen went black—as black as his thoughts.

He wouldn’t see it again. There was no point in replaying the living, breathing example of what he’d never have. He’d have a lifetime of experiencing it in real life.

He rose and threw down the remote. It took him seconds to get his bearings, to remember where this sitting room opened onto the veranda. He’d rented so many houses in the past two years that he regularly woke up not knowing immediately where he was, or even in which country.

Ever since his mother’s conspiracy had been exposed and the scandal had rocked the region, he’d been roaming the globe. His father and half brothers, Amjad, Harres and Shaheen, insisted that no one associated Haidar and him to her crimes. But he felt tainted by them anyway. He’d felt worse when he’d clashed with Haidar over that mess, and ended up placing the lion’s share of the blame on him. He’d driven Haidar to say he felt he no longer had a twin.

That breach had been resolved, thankfully, and he no longer felt sundered forever from his other half. But though he felt whole now that their relationship was regaining the closeness they’d once shared as children, that wholeness was still … hollow.

He walked across the marble-spread veranda and stopped at the cut-stone balustrade, looking out at the desert to a horizon that seemed farther away than ever.

What was he doing here?

Why was he trying to claim the throne of this land?

So it was up for grabs after the now former king of Azmahar, his maternal uncle, had abdicated after a public outcry and all his heirs had met with the same rejection. Just as his mother had almost destroyed Zohayd, her family had taken Azmahar to the edge of destruction, too. He’d thought he’d be lumped in with his maternal family as the last people Azmahar would want near the throne again. So he’d been shocked when those representing a third of the kingdom’s population had demanded he be their candidate. They’d insisted he wasn’t tainted by his family’s history and had the power and experience to save Azmahar. Even his Aal Munsoori blood was an asset, since people still considered the bloodline their rightful monarchs. But he had the potent advantage of mixing it with the Aal Shalaan blood, which would win them back their vital ally, Zohayd.

Still, why was he running for the throne? So he knew he was qualified for the position. But he also knew that he could swim among sharks, literally. He’d done it before. But that didn’t mean he should—and running for the position of king in such a chaotic land was worse than braving shark-infested waters. Not to mention the minefield of being pitted against his twin and his former-best-friend-turned-nemesis, Rashid.

He could find one real reason. Because if he didn’t do this, what else was there to do?

He’d exiled himself from Zohayd, had been performing from afar the royal duties his brothers hadn’t taken over in his absence. He’d installed such an efficient system to run his business empire, it took him only a few hours a day to orchestrate its almost self-perpetuating success. And he had no personal life. Apart from a few good-but-not-close friends, he had no one.

Sure, his family insisted he had them, and he supposed he did, in the big-picture sense, but on a daily basis? His family back in Zohayd he seldom saw. And he now had his twin back, but only in an emotional sense. As a newlywed and another candidate for the throne, Haidar had no real time for him.

No wonder he felt empty. As vacant as this desert, with as nonexistent a possibility for change.

An insistent noise broke the stillness of his surroundings. He frowned down at its origin. His cell phone.

It took him seconds to recognize the ring, one he’d assigned to a specific person. Fadi Aal Munsoori. A distant cousin, and the head of his security and his campaign for the throne.

Though Fadi came from the one branch of Jalal’s family on his mother’s side that he considered “family,” Fadi himself had never considered he had any relation to the former royal family of Azmahar. Fadi’s father had maintained marginal relations with them, but Fadi had renounced the relationship completely, not to mention publicly and viciously. The moment they’d been deposed, he’d pounced on the tribes he had influence over, had been the one who’d orchestrated their nomination of Jalal for king.

But even as the one he trusted with his life, his business, his campaign and even his secrets, Fadi had never accepted Jalal’s efforts to form a more personal relationship. Jalal insisted he was foremost a friend, but Fadi behaved like a knight of old with Jalal as his liege. He only ever called him when there was something urgent to convey or to discuss.

He almost wished Fadi would hit him with something huge to deal with, to get him out of this vacuum.

“Fadi, so good to hear from you.”

Not one to indulge in niceties, Fadi got to the point, his deep voice pouring its usual solemn gravity into Jalal’s ear.

“Considering you have not renewed my orders concerning this matter, or asked about any developments in the past two years, you may not be interested in what I have to tell you. But I decided to let you know in case you still are.”

Jalal’s gut tightened. This didn’t sound like something that concerned his business, his personal safety or his campaign. There was only one other thing Fadi had ever taken care of for him. One person he’d entrusted him with keeping tabs on. Lujayn.

It seemed he hadn’t groaned her name mentally but out loud, for Fadi said, “Yes, this is about Lujayn Morgan.”

The desert wind suddenly stirred, as if in response to the questions and temptations that stormed through him.

He’d been holding himself back with all he had so that he wouldn’t “renew Fadi’s orders” or “ask about any developments.” And he’d succeeded. At least he’d managed not to seek her out, or learn news of her, thereby renewing his exposure and losing any hard-won closure.

The sane thing to do now was to leave Fadi certain that his orders concerning her were at an end. That he was not to even report any information that came his way by accident.

At his prolonged silence, Fadi exhaled. “I apologize for presuming you would be interested.”

And he did the one insane thing. Heartbeat spiraling out of control, he growled, “B’haggej’ jaheem, ya rejjal, just tell me.”

His bark silenced Fadi instead. Fadi, like everyone else, believed Jalal was the epitome of sangfroid. While this was mostly true, control and Lujayn had always been mutually exclusive.

He could almost hear Fadi’s miss-nothing mind clicking on the new conclusion before he finally said, “She is back in Azmahar.”

“Did you think I wouldn’t find out you were in Azmahar?”

Lujayn pulled away the cell phone to groan at hearing a voice she’d come back here hoping to avoid.

Aliyah’s.

She and Aliyah had once thought they were cousins, with both their fathers belonging to the Irish-American Morgan clan. But Aliyah’s mother, Princess Bahiyah Aal Shalaan, had turned out to be her flesh and blood aunt, with Aliyah actually the daughter of now-ex-King Atef Aal Shalaan of Zohayd from his American lover, and now new wife, Anna Beaumont.

It had been years since Aliyah had been declared an Aal Shalaan and become the wife of King Kamal Aal Masood and the queen of Judar. Quite a change from the minor royalty she’d been when Lujayn had known her.

But while their false family relationship had introduced them to each other, they had become true friends when Lujayn had followed Aliyah’s footsteps in modeling. Aliyah had offered her unfailing guidance and priceless support, steered her from many a mess and hooked her up with the few people it was safe to know in that turbulent world.

Aliyah had also been the reason she’d met Jalal, back when they’d thought she was a cousin to them both. Now that they knew Aliyah was his half sister, there was an even bigger chance she might pull Lujayn into Jalal’s orbit once more. That was why she’d been avoiding her. That and the fathomless joy Aliyah radiated ever since she’d gotten married.

“So what is an appropriate punishment for you, now that I’ve caught you in Azmahar unannounced?” Aliyah’s vibrant voice teased.

Lujayn wasn’t about to confess to the woman who’d shown her unforgettable kindness when she’d most needed it that she’d been avoiding her because she inadvertently made her feel bad about her life and because she didn’t want to risk seeing Jalal.

So she told her what she felt, free of pettiness and anxieties. “I missed you, too, Aliyah.”

Aliyah let out a laugh as clear and tinkling as crystal. “And here she is. The woman who knows just how to thwart me and still leave me with a smile on my face. You’re more slippery than an eel, you know that? I hear it’s an Azmaharian trait.”

A smile pried Lujayn’s stiff lips apart. It had been an endless source of fun among them to compare notes on their “hybrid” nature. “Since I’m only half-Azmaharian, the trait must be diluted, so I can’t be that slippery.”

Aliyah hooted. “My dear, you’re talking to a bona fide halfling. Being half-and-half only augments any traits we inherit from each side. Just ask Kamal.”

And there it was. The woman was unable to form five consecutive sentences without leading back to her husband and love of her life.

She knew she was being pathetic, but it wasn’t just hearing the wealth of love in Aliyah’s voice. She’d seen them together, alone and with their two children. Seeing and feeling that lion of a man’s fierce love and devotion to Aliyah had been amazing, but it was also evidence that such passion existed—and that she would never have anything like it.

“So how long are you in Azmahar?” Aliyah interrupted her darkening thoughts. “Last time you were here was more than four years ago and you stayed less than four days.”

“I don’t know, Aliyah. It depends on my aunt’s health.”

“Suffeyah?” All levity left Aliyah’s voice, alarm replacing it. “What’s wrong with her?”

“She’s been diagnosed with breast cancer.”

“Oh, Lujayn, I’m so sorry. Bring her over to Judar. We have one of the best medical systems in the world, thanks to Kamal. I’ll see to it that she has the best health care the kingdom can offer.”

“I can’t thank you enough for the offer, Aliyah, but I have to decline it. I tried to make her come to the States, but she refuses to leave her daughters behind for the months the treatments might take. One is a senior in high school and the other just had twins.”

“I understand all too well putting your kids before yourself. But Azmahar isn’t in good shape and I understand one of the sectors suffering most is health care.”

Lujayn’s heart constricted at Aliyah’s words. “I know. But Aunt insists she’ll take her chances with the medical care here like any other Azmaharian would. All I could do was arrange for a consult with some of the best doctors in the States. I’m flying them over in a couple days. We’ll take it from there.”

“That’s great. And if what they recommend can’t be carried out in Azmahar, I’ll provide you with medicine, equipment and personnel. If she won’t come to us, we’ll bring the best of Judar to her.”

“Oh, Aliyah, that is beyond anything I could have hoped for.”

“But you didn’t hope for anything, did you? You have this infuriating thing against a helping hand from a friend.”

Lujayn exhaled. Aliyah was right. Being the daughter of a servant in the palace Aliyah had grown up in had been enough. She hadn’t wanted to tip the balance of their situations more by accepting favors she’d be unable to repay. She’d only accepted Aliyah’s help when Aliyah had insisted it was the fruit of her experience, nothing to do with her royal status.

Even now she had nothing of equal value to ever offer Aliyah. That made it impossible for her to be the recipient of favors that had everything to do with Aliyah’s status.

“I can hear your mind churning, Lu,” Aliyah said. “But since it’s not you on the receiving end this time, it should ameliorate your allergic reaction. Now promise you won’t say no, and you’ll let me do what I can when needed.”

She chuckled even as tears rushed to her eyes. “I forgot how well you know me, Aliyah. And about this pesky total recall of yours. And just how incredible you are.” She sighed, swallowing the lump of emotion. “Thank you, and I promise.”

“Good girl!” She could just see Aliyah’s unbridled smile. “Now when will I see you?”

Ugh. Now she had to make another promise.

But why not? She knew it would be beyond either of them to keep this one. She doubted the queen of Judar would find it feasible to continue a friendship with someone of her background.

She exhaled. “As soon as we know more about the plans for Aunt, I’ll call you to set up a girls’ day out.”

Aliyah whooped. “And I’m holding you to that.”

After more chatting, Lujayn started to regain the fluency they’d once shared, until Aliyah had to rush to extract her daughter from a literally sticky mess and laughingly bade her adieu.

Lujayn collapsed on the nearest seat. If she was already coming apart, what would the next weeks or months here be like?

It was just her terrible luck to come back to Azmahar now, with Jalal on Azmaharian soil for the first time in years. She hated being in the same airspace as him. And Aliyah’s call had made her feel as if his shadow was closer and darker than ever.

Which was moronic. Not only had he said he’d delete her from his memory, he had a throne to think of. Even if he hadn’t, she’d be the last thing to cross his mind. She’d been the last thing he’d thought about or considered when she’d been his sex partner. She’d been one of many, after all.

He’d arranged their rendezvouses when it had been convenient for him, sometimes weeks apart, and no way had he suppressed his overriding libido that long. She’d spent the times apart alternating between a hell of doubt, and telling herself it was only her insecurities talking. But she’d seen and heard too much proof that instead of “storing his hunger to be expended on her luscious self” as he’d once claimed, he’d had a different body in his bed every night.

To her shame, that hadn’t been what had finally made her walk away.

After all, he’d promised her nothing to justify her feeling bad, let alone betrayed.

Cursing herself for regurgitating those sordid memories, her eyes darted around the hotel suite. She’d reserved it for the coming weeks as it was within walking distance of the hospital so she’d be constantly available for her aunt.

She’d just come back from starting arrangements at the hospital. Just thinking of what lay ahead filled her with dread. No wonder Aliyah’s call had shaken her. She was already in turmoil. And it had nothing to do with any other Aal Shalaan.

She rose and headed to the kitchenette to make a cup of herbal tea. She needed to be calm for the drive back to her aunt’s at the outskirts of Durrat al Sahel. Traffic in the capital had gotten far worse than she remembered.

With the first sip from her hibiscus brew, a loud, melodious noise shattered the suite’s silence. She gulped the hot liquid, scalded her tongue and choked.

She was coughing her lungs out when the noise went off again. A doorbell. She hadn’t even realized the suite had one!

It must be housekeeping. And she hadn’t thought of hanging a Do Not Disturb sign—she’d planned to stay only an hour.

She stalked to the door, flung it open, intending to let them in and herself out … and froze. Her heart did, too.

Filling the door, dwarfing her and causing the world to shrink, stood Jalal. The reason behind every tumult in her life since she’d laid eyes on him.

But he wasn’t only that man. He was … more.

She’d once thought nothing could surpass him in beauty and magnificence. And nothing had. And during their affair, he’d proved only he could best his own standards. That six-foot-six broad-shouldered, divinely proportioned body she’d thought the epitome of manhood had kept maturing to godlike levels, as she’d had hands-on proof. Every day they’d had together had hewn his face further with the chisel of maturity and virility, manifesting his intelligence and sensuality and dominance in its every slash and angle and expression.

But something had happened to him since she’d last seen him two years ago. As if the darkness and danger she’d long suspected he’d hidden beneath the facade of graciousness and gorgeousness had manifested in his looks, emanated from his every nuance. It turned his beauty, his impact, from breathtaking to heartbreaking.

He was staring down at her as if he, too, was shocked to see her. When he was the one who’d almost given her a heart attack just by showing up.

After what felt like an hour of suspended thought and escalating distress, his whiskey-colored eyes narrowed, singeing her. Then his voice poured over her, feeling like a dip in lava.

“I said I’d delete you from my memory, but it appears there is no forgetting you without erasing it altogether. So I’ve decided to stop trying, to go all the way in the opposite direction. I now think my only cure is to revive every memory, to reenact every single intimacy we ever shared.”

Three

Lujayn stood paralyzed as Jalal pushed past her. The door clicked closed, sounded like a gun going off at close range.

She still couldn’t move. Speak. Breathe. Reactions deluged her as she watched him walk farther into the suite, memories and sensations and compulsions tangling, trapping her volition in their maze. It had always taken him just a look to neutralize her will, her sense of self-preservation.

And that he still retained the same influence over her, after all she’d suffered and lost and continued to struggle with because of him, made her spitting, foaming mad.

The moment he turned to face her, his eyes sweeping her in tranquil appreciation and intent, she seethed, “What the hell do you think you’re doing? Get out.”

“I will. At some point.” His shoulders moved in a languid shrug. “But since it won’t be now, how about saving your obligatory apoplectic tirade and getting on with discussing the particulars of my proposition?”

“How about I revive our first memory? Reenact the first ‘intimacy’ I shared with you?”

His wolf’s eyes flared with remembrance as he walked back to her. “When I first saw you hiding behind Aliyah and watching me like a wary, hungry kitten? Or is it when I walked up to you and took your hand in mine—” his hands clenched and unclenched, as if reliving the sensations “—and it shook from the power of your response, with the promise of what it would later do to me?”

A ragged scoff escaped her. “Way to go rewriting history. I was at a loss at how to react to a stranger’s forwardness.”

“I was never a stranger to you. You’ve known who I was probably since you were old enough to know anyone.”

“I knew of you. And what I knew accounted for the wary part of my reaction.”

“What about the hungry part?” His eyes turned goading. “And I never asked—didn’t Aliyah sing my praises? How … un-cousinly of her at the time, if she didn’t.”

“If she’d sung anything about you, I bet it wouldn’t have been praises. And since you went to great lengths to divert her from your intentions concerning me, she never did the cousinly thing for me, and warn me to keep you at world’s length.”

“I diverted her in the interest of preserving the eyes you said you adored.”

And those eyes, damn him, were as magnificent as ever, emitting the golden lust that put common sense on the fritz whenever he trained them on her.

“From the mother cat routine she had going with you, she would have scratched them out had she known my ‘intentions.’” A frown gathered the spectacular slashes of his eyebrows. “So which first intimacy were you talking about?” Suddenly his eyes blazed with sensual challenge. “You mean when you sucker punched me?”

“I did no such thing. I gave you plenty of warning.”

“Aih, to let you go or else. When I wasn’t holding you against your will. I wasn’t even touching you.”

“You were backing me into a corner.”

“I was walking toward you. You were the one who kept retreating, cornering yourself.”

“Because you had me alone in your hotel suite.”

“Where you came under your own power and of your own free will.”

“I came to attend a party, with Aliyah.”

“My party, in my suite. And I wasn’t the one who made Aliyah leave you there to bail out one of her other lost souls.”

“I was never a lost soul of hers. And I only stayed because she said she’d be back in thirty minutes.”

“You still didn’t leave when she was much later than that.”

“I was new in New York and I thought I was safer in your suite than I would be on the streets alone at night.”

“And you were.”

“It didn’t look like that when everyone left me alone with you. A man twice my size, twenty times as strong, not to mention a prince with diplomatic immunity and god-level entitlement.”

“And you thought I sent them away to have you to myself.”

“I was right.”

“Not about the sinister intentions that earned me that one-two combo.”

“Don’t exaggerate. That follow-up punch didn’t even connect.”

“Only because the first one almost felled me.” His hand wrapped around his throat as if feeling it again. “Not to mention the shock of the angel I couldn’t wait to have turning into a harpy. Ya Ullah, if I wanted you one karat before that, I wanted you twenty-four then.”

She’d been horrified at what she’d done, had tried to run out. He’d stopped her. Without touching her still. Just by calling to her. It had been the first time he’d called her his “silver eyes.”

And just like that, her fears of who he was, of the kind of power he wielded and the unbridgeable gap that existed between them, had disappeared. He’d stopped being the son of a woman she’d grown up hating and become something far more dangerous. The personification of every forbidden desire she’d never thought she harbored. He’d been warm and accessible, witty and eloquent in ways she’d never encountered, admiring her beauty, her spunk, then teasing her about her attack, leaving her in no doubt he knew what had fueled it. Frightening attraction, which he shared in full.

He hadn’t taken her to bed that night, but they both knew he could have. He’d waited two months, driving her out of her mind with wanting him in the interim. After that first time in his bed, serviced and pleasured, devoured and dominated, she’d become addicted, had wanted him with an intensity and an obsession that had sent her in a tailspin. For the next four years.

Their intimacies had been wild, greedy, explosive. But the escalating physical gratification had only plunged her deeper into emotional and psychological deprivation …

“Not that you ever need to punch me again,” he said. “You knock me out just by looking at me with those spellbinding eyes, by wanting me as much as I want you.” She opened her mouth to contradict him and a caressing hand below her chin closed it for her. “Don’t bother. This is the one incontrovertible fact we share. So are you sure this is the intimacy you want to reenact, with so many to choose from? Like the first time we made love…. ”

Her assertion that they’d never “made love” went un-scoffed as he again placed a finger on her lips and the heat of his flesh almost fused them shut.

She staggered back and he sighed, dropping his hand, his eyes growing hotter as minute details of that first time replayed in their depths. “I remember every glide of skin on skin, every press of flesh into flesh, every sensation as you opened yourself to me, surrendered your every response, begged for my possession and pleasuring, as if it were encoded in my every cell. I remember each and every time after that.”

She stared at him, shock and fury giving way to languor. It was as if his nearness produced chemicals inside her body that were more potent than any mind-altering drug.

No. She wasn’t ever going to fall under his influence again. He’d cost her too much. And not only her …

Anxiety started to bubble and seethe inside her. She had to make sure he walked away forever this time and would avoid thinking of her for the rest of his life. But she’d been going about this all wrong.

The best way to do that was to not give him a challenge. Wounding his massive pride might have driven him away, had kept him there for a while, but the need to satisfy it had driven him back. She had to learn from her mistakes, if only this once.

“Memories are nice, I’m sure,” she said. “But you’re focusing on inconsequential memories and forgetting relevant ones. Like why you intended to delete me from your memory in the first place.”

Ice suddenly extinguished the embers of sensual fire in his eyes. “I forget nothing. It’s a curse Aal Shalaans suffer from. It’s also why I failed to perform that deletion I intended. The moment I knew you were back here, I admitted that I never would.”

She’d known about Aliyah’s amazing eidetic memory but this was the first time he’d mentioned possessing something similar. But then, what had he ever told her? He’d talked, a lot, but it had all been about passion, both sexual and contentious. Besides that … nothing.

She shrugged. “This infallible memory must also mean you haven’t forgotten the bad parts. And those were ugly enough to douse anything you imagine was so wonderful.”

“You mean the parts where you got close to one of my best friends and conned him into marrying you, only to dispatch him in record time? Though maybe I shouldn’t call ‘almost two years’ record time. As always, I salute your tenacity. You must have wanted to get rid of him sooner.”

“So you assume.”

At the reigniting challenge and enjoyment in his eyes, she almost smacked herself. Focus. Just be a neutral bore and defuse his confrontational circuits.

“So why don’t you fix my assumptions?”

She wanted to tell him to go fix himself.

Instead, she decided to deflate the misapprehension that clearly fueled his perverse interest in her.

She released her breath in a resigned exhalation. “I wasn’t at liberty to disclose the matter when we … last met. I’m still not comfortable talking about it, but I guess there’s no reason to keep it a secret anymore, at least from you.”

“Is that your oblique way of warning me to keep this a secret? Because I’m known to be such a blabbermouth?”

“You mean you won’t run to the media with my disclosures, or rush to tweet about them?” She tamped down another wave of bitterness, lips twisting with it. “But you’re right. The way you keep secrets, I bet anything I tell you would be even safer than it would with a corpse. But I wasn’t thinking about your ironclad discretion when you showed up two months after Patrick’s death. With the turmoil I was in and the dangers I was facing, not to mention your added aggravation, sharing the truth with you was pretty low on my list of considerations.”

“Are you going to share said truth now? About how he ‘really’ died? If it’s what you told the police, don’t bother.”

“I don’t know how the police work in this region, O Prince of Two Kingdoms, but in New York they don’t care what you ‘tell’ them. They only listen to solid evidence. Especially when someone so rich and young dies of unnatural causes.”

“But they found no evidence of foul play, hence my accusation a couple of years ago.”

“About getting away with murder?” She cocked her head at him, hating the way her heart sputtered as his eyes followed the movement of her hair when he was more or less accusing her of being a murderess. “So you think I’m capable of it?”

“I know you’re capable of driving a man to take his own life.”

“Based on what? My infamous former career as a woman who used my body to make a living? Or as the woman who dared to end things with you?”

She stopped, cursing herself silently, viciously. She was sliding into inciting recriminations again.

“How about as the woman who ‘used her body’ to trap herself a billionaire when I didn’t make the bid you were after?”

It was no use. This man could goad a rock into hurtling itself at him. “You’re saying I was after a proposal? As in marriage? Did it seem to you like I thought fairy-tale movies were based on true stories? Last time I looked, those and rom-coms were the only realms where the prince married the servant’s daughter.”

“When you said you wanted a man who ‘wouldn’t hide you like a dirty secret,’ who’d ‘walk with you in the sun,’ you meant you wanted a proposal. You let me know I was useless to you if I didn’t cough up one only when you had a suitable substitute secured.”

“Suitable substitute secured? I bet you can’t say that five times in a row.” She coughed a furious laugh. “It never crossed my mind that our … liaison would be more than what it was—trivial, sporadic, not to mention base. And that’s why I decided to end it. Sex was no longer enough to put up with the degradation.”

“Degradation?” he hissed. “I went to every effort to make sure our … liaison, as you put it, remained only between us so you wouldn’t be exposed to anything of the sort.”

Bile rose again. “And I knew it couldn’t have been different between us. But that doesn’t mean it was okay or even sane. I was trapped in a vicious circle, wanting to end it then letting you walk back into my life anytime you pleased, to lure me back into that … toxic compulsion. That’s why I ended it. The inequality, the unbridgeable gap, the pointlessness, on every level, was corroding my self-esteem and psychological health.”

“And the only cure for both was a besotted billionaire husband.”

She snorted. “That’s your favorite assumption, isn’t it? You have to find a mercenary, borderline criminal rationalization to explain that a woman would choose to deprive herself of you, don’t you?”

“When I’m left with no explanation, apart from an ambiguous rant, I had to fill in the blanks, before and after the event.”

“And you couldn’t find a rationalization where you were in any way to blame, right?”

“If I were, you should have aired specific grievances and given me the chance to undo them. Instead, you chose to become hysterical before storming out. And you promptly ended any chance for me to approach you with reconciliation efforts. What could I do but adopt the harshest explanations?”

“Wow, your Cambridge English major is sure coming out to play, isn’t it?”

His smile turned lethal. “So you’re telling me that blowup wasn’t a pretext to get me out of the picture while you grabbed the opportunity to land a far more malleable man with almost as much money?”

“Patrick was far more of a man, period, and a human being than you can ever dream of being.” And she was pathetic, because knowing that had never extinguished the hunger that consumed her alive. Not that she’d let it steer her now that she had far more than herself to safeguard, to defend. “And I certainly didn’t marry him for his money and assets. In fact, he married me for them.”

After that first punch, Jalal had managed to anticipate Lujayn for the next two years. Her pattern had changed in the following two, but after some readjustment, he’d still charted it.

Then had come that day two years ago. Nothing had happened according to his expectations then or ever since. It was as if he’d lost his insight where she was concerned.

She kept throwing curves he remained unprepared for. She’d just insulted his manhood, his humanity. But that wasn’t what he’d taken issue with. It was that riddle she’d hurled at him.

Suddenly, every frustration of the past four years blew away his intention to play this cool and seductive. The suaveness he’d maintained till now became a seething mass of urgency.

“You prefaced all this with your intention to tell me the truth. So b’haggej’ jaheem, skip the cryptic teasers. What in hell do you mean he married you for his money and assets?”

Those unique eyes of hers echoed his ire and passion. “Nothing cryptic to it. He wanted to make sure his wealth and projects didn’t go to his so-called family after he died.”

He’d demanded she give it to him straight. But he hadn’t expected she would, or that much. It was so straight that his mind stalled with implications he’d never considered.

“If you were any kind of friend to Patrick, let alone one of his best friends as you like to claim, you must know his relationship with his family was … pathological, to say the least.”

He nodded slowly. After Patrick’s mother died, his father had married a woman who turned out to be a wicked stepmother straight out of a fairy tale. Her evil became even more evident when she had children. She did everything she could to destroy Patrick’s relationship with his father to make him cut Patrick off from his inheritance. To her fury, Owen McDermott did the opposite. Unlike a typical, oblivious fictional father, he was aware of his new wife’s flaws and that their children shared her hatred of Patrick. His will cut them off from the bulk of his fortune, leaving it to the honorable Patrick to give them what he saw fit.

And Patrick had given. But nothing had ever been enough.

She continued, “Patrick told me his life story the first night we met.”

How he remembered that night. It had been one of the handful of times he’d gone out with her, meeting in a secluded restaurant. They’d stumbled upon Patrick who’d been out drinking alone. Jalal had been called away to handle a business emergency, and Lujayn had driven the intoxicated Patrick home. He’d thought nothing of it in his certainty of their exclusive interest in each other.

His heart clenched at the expression that came over her, as if she were looking into the past with longing and regret.

“We became friends from that night. He started coming with me on my vacations to Ireland, the homeland he hadn’t returned to since his mother died. He found a new family there.”

“Yours.”

He didn’t need her nod of corroboration. All the time they’d been together, she’d been taking another man home.

“He and my father grew very close, and along the way, Dad gave him advice that multiplied his inheritance a dozen times. His so-called family came swarming back, demanding their ‘share.’”

“And he didn’t want to give them any more.” Her poignancy chafed him so badly he wanted to shake her out of this melancholy over another man. He clenched his fists on the urge. “So you’re saying he married you to give it to you instead.”

“Me and my family. We were the ones he trusted.”

“Why should he have wanted to trust anyone with his fortune?”

“It wasn’t simply money. He had many projects, companies and charities. He knew if his stepmother and half brother and half sisters got their hands on those, they would liquidate everything and go somewhere tropical and live like retired despots. He wanted to make sure they didn’t have legal claim to any of it.”

“Thanks for the elucidation, but that wasn’t what I asked. Why would he prepare alternative heirs when he was so young? It’s as if he knew he was going to die. Did he have psychiatric problems? Was he suicidal?”

“He certainly was not!”

Her denial barreled into him. It felt real. Too real. As if an emotional charge was building inside her as she talked about Patrick, remembered him. The mere mention of something she considered insulting to Patrick had her on the verge of another attack.

The blackness that had been roiling inside him ever since she’d left him and married Patrick spread. She’d once been passionate about her displeasure with him, but now she treated him with cold contempt. Patrick commanded her respect and allegiance, even in death. Had he been so wrong about what he’d thought they’d shared? About her relationship with Patrick?

Scowling at him as if she’d like to give him another one-two combo, she said, “Patrick was the most psychologically healthy person I’ve ever known. He was also the most benevolent. He would never have done anything to harm himself, not only because he was stable as a rock, but because so many people depended on him.”

That he knew to be true. He’d admired Patrick from the day they’d met, over fifteen years ago, for his boundless energy and enthusiasm, his progressive views, but mostly for his unswerving humanitarianism. It had been bitterness over Lujayn that had driven him to sever all ties with him, business and otherwise. That was what he’d regretted most when Patrick had died. That he had died with them at odds.

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