could ever be. For Jeremy, she could keep from falling apart, falling to pieces, as was no doubt Tariq’s goal. For Jeremy, she could fight back. “You did not ask me what I wanted when you abandoned me and ruined my life five years ago. You did not ask me what I wanted when you reappeared in my life. Why pretend you have any interest in what I want now?” She shrugged, meeting his eyes with a brazen courage she did not feel. “If you want to dig around in my life, go right ahead. What could I do to stop you?”
His scowl deepened. “Do you think I am still playing games with you?” he demanded, his voice getting louder, his accent growing more pronounced as his temper grew. “You have no right to keep my child from me! The heir to my kingdom!”
Jessa reminded herself that he did not know. He only suspected. He did not know.
“You have no right to speak to me this way!” she retorted.
“Where is the child?” he thundered.
But she couldn’t back down, though her knees felt like jelly and her lungs constricted painfully. She wouldn’t tell him anything.
The truth was, she hardly knew where to start.
She shook her head, too many emotions fighting for space inside of her, and all of them too messy, too complicated, too heavy.
“Jessa.” This time the anger was gone, and something far more like desperation colored his voice. “You must tell me what happened. You must.”
But she could not speak another word, and she could not bring herself to look at him. She had the sense that she had finally stopped running a very long, very arduous race, and the wind was knocked out of her.
She didn’t have the slightest idea what to do now. She had never so much as considered the possibility that Tariq might discover that he had fathered a child. The time for telling him had long since passed, and she knew that she had tried then, to no avail. She had never anticipated that he might return. She had stopped dreaming such foolish dreams long ago.
And now he stared at her in anguish, which she would give anything to fix and couldn’t. It wasn’t simply that she couldn’t bring herself to tell him what he wanted to know. She physically could not seem to form the words. She could not even think them. She could only lie and avoid and deflect. She could only make it worse.
“I will stop at nothing to locate a child of my blood,” Tariq said softly. There was a chilling finality to his words then, as if he was making a vow. He took a step toward her, and it took everything she had to stand her ground before him. “I have believed I am the last of my blood, my family, for five years, Jessa. The very last. If that is not so…”
He didn’t finish. But then, he did not have to finish.
Jessa still could not speak. It was as if everything inside her had shut down, turned off.
“You can only remain silent for so long,” he said. His voice was like a whip, cracking through the room hard enough to leave welts against her skin. “But do not doubt that there is only one outcome to this situation. I will find out. The only question is how much of your life I will destroy in the process.”
“Do not bully me!” she cried, surprising herself as well as him, the words ripping from her as if she had torn them from her heart.
“You think I am bullying you?” He was incredulous, pronouncing bullying as if he had never heard the term before.
“Threats, intimidation.” Jessa pressed one hand against her temple. “Is there another word for it?”
“I am not threatening you, Jessa,” he said matter-of-factly, with that ruthlessness underneath. “I am telling you exactly what will happen to you if you continue this. You have no right to keep the truth from me. These are promises.”
“What kind of man are you?” she whispered. She wasn’t sure why she said it. She wanted to sob, to scream, to somehow release the tension that felt as if it swelled up from inside her.
Their eyes locked across the few feet that separated them. He looked as if he had never seen her before, as if she was a perfect stranger who had wounded him. She realized in that moment that she never wanted to be responsible for his pain. That it hurt her, too. But understanding only made the riot inside swirl faster, swell harder, cause more damage. Jessa made herself hold his gaze, though it cost her.
Tariq looked away from her then, as if he had to collect himself before he did something he would regret.
“I suggest you rethink your position,” he said quietly.
Suddenly her tongue was loose. And foolish. “I suggest you—”
“Silence!” He slashed a hand through the air, and said something in what she assumed was Arabic. “I am done listening to you.”
He did not look at her again, but strode toward the bedroom door. Jessa could not believe it. Relief flooded through her. He was leaving? That was it? Could she really be that lucky?
And what was the part of her that yearned, despite everything, for him to stay?
“Where are you going?” she asked, because she wanted to confirm it.
“Shocking as it might seem to you, I have matters of state to attend to,” he growled at her. “Or do you think my kingdom should grind to a halt while you spin your little lies? You can consider this conversation postponed.”
“I am not going to sit around and calmly wait for you to come back and be even more horrible to me,” she told him fiercely. “I am going home.”
He turned when he reached the door to the rest of the suite, his eyes narrow and his mouth hard.
“By all means,” he said, his voice as dark as his gaze, and his warning clear, “go wherever you like. See what happens when you do.” Then he turned his back on her, seemingly still unconcerned with his nudity, and strode from the room.
His sudden absence left a black hole in the room that Jessa feared might suck her in, for a dizzy, irrational beat or two of her heart. For long moments, Jessa could not move. She told herself she was waiting to see if Tariq would return. She told herself she was merely being cautious. But the truth was that she could not have moved so much as an inch if her life depended upon it.
Eventually, when he did not come back, Jessa moved to the edge of the bed and sat down gingerly, carefully, unable to process what had just occurred. Unable to track the course of the past two days. She remembered going to work in the letting agency that morning, having no idea that her whole world would be turned on its ear. That normal, everyday morning felt as far away to her now as if it belonged to someone else, as if it were a part of some other woman’s life. She felt as if she’d just been tipped from a roller coaster at its height and sent tumbling to the earth. She raised a hand to her mouth, surprised to find her hand shook.
She almost let out a sob, but choked it back. She could not break down. She was not safe from Tariq or his questions simply because he had left her alone for the moment. He would be back. She knew that as surely as she knew the earth still turned beneath her feet. He was an implacable force, and she did not know how she had failed to recognize that five years ago. Hadn’t she known this would happen? Wasn’t this why she’d set upon this course in the first place, to divert his attention?
That
