turned around and her heart overflowed with another gush of love. Mennah was out like a light on the high chair’s tray.
She always did fall asleep without warning. But she couldn’t have been hungry after all, if she could fall asleep among all those mouthwatering aromas.
Sighing, eyeing the meal that had to be served hot to be good, Carmen turned off the music, unbuckled Mennah from her seat then went to put her down in her crib.
The singing had stopped.
The crashing of Farooq’s heart hadn’t.
And it wasn’t only his heart that manifested his upheaval. Every muscle in his body was clenched, every nerve discharging.
He’d been standing there for what felt like a day, listening to the sounds coming from inside. Wistful love songs accompanied by the gleeful noises of an infant. And the overpowering melody of a siren.
He’d willed himself over and over to ring the bell. Better still, to break down the door.
He’d just stood there, his ear almost to the door to catch every decibel of a slice of life of the tiny family that lived inside, his hands caressing the door as if it were them.
He felt as if he’d disintegrate with an emotion so fierce he had no name for it, no experience and no way to deal with it.
It had to be rage. An unknown level that made what he’d felt when Carmen had told him she was leaving pale in comparison. It dwarfed what he’d felt when he’d pursued her, bent on erasing the ugliness, the madness of that confrontation, on bringing back his Carmen and the perfection they’d shared, only for more betrayal to tear at him when he’d seen her getting into his cousin Tareq’s car. It even eclipsed what he’d felt when he’d confronted Tareq and discovered why she’d really left.
His cousin and arch nemesis had confessed that he’d sent Carmen to seduce Farooq, to get pregnant and create a scandal large enough to stop Farooq’s rise to the succession. Tareq had snickered that their uncle’s latest decree had thrown a sabot in the cogs of his treachery, turning a pregnancy into an asset, not a liability, forcing him to order Carmen to leave, going back to the drawing board to think of something else to eliminate Farooq from the running.
It had all made sense to Farooq then. From the moment he’d seen her to the moment she’d walked out on him.
Or he’d thought it had.
It had been only hours ago that he’d learned the full truth.
Another tidal wave of emotion crashed over him.
Ya Ullah—he’d never struggled for control, had never even contemplated its loss. He’d been born in control, of himself before others. His urges and desires were his to command, never the other way around. Then there was Carmen.
He’d lost control with his first sight of her, had lost his discretion while drowning in her pleasures, had almost lost his restraint upon her desertion.
Now he was a hairsbreadth from losing his reason.
And it was her doing yet again.
He leaned his forehead on the door, forced inhalations into his spastic lungs, order into his frenzied thoughts, willing the blinding seizure to pass.
It took minutes and the nosiness of two neighbors to bring him down. He regained at least enough control to settle a semblance of composure over the chaos, smothering it. Enough to make him reach a resolution.
He’d never let her affect him that deeply again. Ever.
He’d go in, take what he wanted. As he always did.
He straightened, set his teeth with great precision and almost drove his finger through her doorbell.
Carmen jerked up from watching Mennah sleep. The bell!
Though it almost never rang, she’d been waiting for her super to come fix the short-circuit in the laundry room. He’d said within the next two days. Four days ago.
But it was the way the bell rang that had made her jump. It had almost … bellowed, for lack of a better description. Maybe it was about to give, too, and that sound was its dying throes?
Sighing, she checked Mennah’s monitor and the wireless receiver clipped to her jeans’ waist. On her way to the door, she smoothed her hands over her hair but gave up in midmotion with a huff. A disheveled greeter was what her super got for coming unannounced, catching a single mother with a dozen chores behind her and a shower still in her future.
Fixing a smile on her lips, intending her greeting to be thanks for his arrival if no thanks for his delay, she opened the door.
Her heart didn’t stop immediately.
It went on with its rhythm for a moment, the kind that simulated hours, before it lost the blood it needed to keep on pumping. The blood now shooting to her head, pooling in her legs. Then it stopped.
And everything else hurtled, screeched, into consciousness.
Denial, dread, desperation.
She’d changed her career to work from home, had relocated to the other side of the continent, had still remained scared that he’d find her. But he hadn’t, and eventually she’d believed he hadn’t tried, or hadn’t been able to.
But he had found her. Was on her doorstep. Farooq.
Filling her doorway. Blocking out existence.
She found herself slumped against the door, her fingers almost breaking off with the force with which they clutched it. Some instinct must have remained functioning, saving her from crashing to the ground. Some auxiliary power must be fueling her continued grip on consciousness.
“Save it.”
That was all he said as he pushed past her, walking into her apartment as if he owned it. And his voice …
This wasn’t the voice etched in her memory. The voice that echoed in every moment’s silence, haunting her, whispering seduction, rumbling arousal, roaring completion, always charged with emotion. This voice contained as much life as a voice simulation program.
God, what was he doing here?
No. She didn’t care what he was doing here. She didn’t care that her insides were crumbling under the avalanche of emotion the sight of him had triggered.
She had to get rid of him. Fast.
She had to regain control first, of her coherence, to think of something to say, of her volition, to be able to say it.
She leaned against the door she didn’t remember closing, feeling as if the least tremor would shatter the tension keeping her upright. She watched his powerful strides take him into the formal living room, felt him shrinking it, converging all light on him like a spotlight in the dark.
And even through her shock and panic, everything inside her devoured each line of his juggernaut’s body, even bigger and taller than she remembered, the sculpted suit worshipping it from the
