to blame.
The mess of mistakes would have remained a secret if King Atef hadn’t sought out his ex-lover and assumed the daughter she’d raised was his. But his ex-lover had adopted Farah only when remorse over giving up Aliyah had overwhelmed her. It had ended well for Farah. She was now the wife whom Shehab, the fool, worshipped.
But it hadn’t ended well for him. It had come full circle, throwing him together with Aliyah, now permanently. Aliyah, the half-blood princess whom everyone in formal society pretended didn’t exist, but whose debauched life in the States provided constant fodder for malicious gossip in the region’s royal social circles.
It enraged him that an accident of birth could make kingdoms steeped in tradition and conservative values consider such a woman queen material and an instrument of peace.
To heap insults on injuries, she was pretending outrage herself. She’d more or less told her father, her king, to go to hell, that she’d rather die than marry Kamal.
He was certain she’d known the declaration would hurl its way to him, a challenge designed to goad him to rise to it.
And he would. He was damned if he didn’t make her eat her words. But not for any personal reasons, he told himself.
This was for the throne of Judar.
He stepped out of the shower, every nerve stinging from the combined punishment of overexertion and physical and mental overheating. He tore a towel off the nearest rack and, without bothering to do more than tie it around his waist, he stalked out of his workout area and made his way to his offices.
The bodyguards who’d proliferated in number and intensified in vigilance since he’d risen to the rank of king-to-be faded into the background so as not to encroach on his privacy or purpose.
As if anything could. He’d lived with all kinds of infringement all his life, had learned early on to thoroughly tune them out. Right now, it would take an attacking army to distract him from his intentions.
He strode to his computer station in measured steps, came to a stop before the central screen, clicked the mouse, accessed his e-mail program. Two clicks brought up the e-mail address he’d acquired hours ago. He clicked open a new message.
He paused for a long moment, rivulets coursing down his chest and back from his still-soaked hair, his mind a blank.
What could he say to the woman he’d parted from on the worst terms a lifetime ago? The woman who would now become his enforced wife, his queen, the mother of his heirs?
Nothing, that was what. He’d say nothing to her. He’d give her an order. The first of many.
Inhaling a deep breath, his fingers flew over the keys. Two terse sentences flowed onto the screen.
He stared at them for minutes before his gaze gravitated to the name in the address bar. Aliyah…
How could it still wield such influence, strike such disturbance in a composure he’d thought unshakable?
It had to be echoes of the weakness he’d once had for her. Echoes of an illusion. As unreal as everything they’d ever shared.
He ground his teeth and hit Send.
The phone slipped from Aliyah’s fingers, hit her lap.
She leaned forward, fighting down a fresh wave of nausea.
She’d almost forgotten how that malignant turmoil used to seize her, contort her emotions and reactions. She’d fought too long, too hard for control, and feeling it ebbing away again…
She should cling to one thing. This time, her upheaval wasn’t being generated inside a chemically imbalanced mind. She had major-with-a-skyscraper-high-M reasons to thank for her current state. This was no overreaction brought on by drug residues, or worse, a resurrection of her old volatility, as had been implied.
Oh, no. This wasn’t a pathological reaction. She’d bet every cent she’d ever made—and she’d made heaps—that no one would react differently if, after twenty-seven years of a turbulent enough existence on this planet they discovered that everything they’d thought they knew about their life was one convoluted lie.
And what a lie. It had been perpetuated by the very people who’d been the pillars of her existence, who’d now brought it all down around her ears.
Could she accept it all one day? That Randall Morgan wasn’t her father but rather her adoptive one, that Bahiyah Aal Shalaan wasn’t her mother but her paternal aunt, that King Atef wasn’t her uncle but her biological father, and her biological mother was some American woman she’d never met in her life?
Yet everyone begrudged her her shock. They’d dropped the bomb on her and had expected her to gasp in surprise then shrug and carry on as if nothing had changed. They’d implied that her distress lasting for more than a couple of days indicated a return of her instability. They made her feel unreasonable for demanding time to grapple with the revelations, for resisting being shoved into this new persona and accepting her fate with a smile. That last call from her uncle/father/whoever-he-was had made her feel cruel for not rushing back to Zohayd to meet the woman who’d given her up for adoption, starting the chain reaction that had led to this point. This mess.
Well, she was entitled to her freak-out time. As she was entitled not to see said woman, or any of them. Not just yet.
And no, it wasn’t only because they’d managed to twist the course of her life, past and future. She would eventually come to terms with the rewriting of her history and her identity. What she couldn’t bear hearing or thinking about was the main disaster they were railroading her toward…
A sharp ping startled her. She set her teeth as she sat up. She had to change that irritating “new e-mail” alert. But to what? All available alerts were equally aggravating.
Sighing, she clicked the track pad and the laptop’s screen woke up. Her e-mail program window swam into view.
It took three beats for her heart to stop.
Just when she thought it wouldn’t restart, all the missed beats converged in a detonation that almost blasted the organ out of her ribs.
She choked as the name rippled across her vision, passed through the barrier of shock, sank into her brain, into the brand it had long seared there.
Kamal Aal Masood.
She collapsed back, lungs burning, stomach churning.
An e-mail. From him. The man she despised above all, the man who’d taken all the love and passion and dreams of her too-stupid-to-live twenty-year-old self and ripped them to shreds.
The man everyone was insane enough to say she had to marry.
Every muscle twitched with the enervation that followed the blow as her vision wavered over the screen again. There was nothing in the subject line. Just his name in the “from” area.
Figured. What could the subject line be, from the man who’d thrown her out of his life like so much garbage? To Clinging Idiot? Re: Sickening Slut? Parting Threat Renewal Notice?
There was nothing to say. He’d
